GOOD FRIDAY

[cappie]

 From noon on Good Friday through Easter Sunday morning is the Christian Passover. In these three days, Jesus passed over from death into life and opened the way for us to follow. 

On the night before he died, Jesus said that he was making a New Covenant.  In his death and resurrection, Jesus sealed that new covenant with his own blood. As the blood of the Passover lamb marked the Israelites as God’s own people and protected them from the Angel of Death, Jesus’ blood overcomes death and seals the new covenant that marks us as children of God. We too can pass over from death to life as we by faith make Jesus’ death our own in baptism.

Jesus expands on the role of the Passover lamb. Jesus’ death would accomplish once and for all what the blood of thousands of lambs could never do. Jesus was the perfect Passover lamb who ended the need for sacrifices and changed the meaning of the Passover itself.

  When God became human in Jesus, the Holy Trinity would not give up on divine love for us, no matter what the cost. If being God in first-century Palestine meant that Rome would unjustly put Jesus to death on a cross, then the Messiah would pay that price. It was so beyond what anyone expected to happen to the Anointed One that Isaiah wrote hundreds of years earlier, “Who could have imagined his future?”

After his resurrection, Jesus explained the prophets of old to his disciples. This is shown in stories like Jesus encountering two followers fleeing Jerusalem on Easter Sunday, only to meet Jesus on the road to Emmaus. He explained the scripture to them to reinterpret Isaiah’s Suffering Servant passages and other texts in the light of Easter.

Why did Jesus have to die? Jesus said he was going to give his life as a ransom for many. Of course, the idea that the sacrifice of a life could be for the forgiveness of sins was not a new one with Jesus. Judaism had centuries of practice in sacrificial culture. Goats, bulls, lambs, and even doves were among the many animals offered as a sin offering. The life of the animal was given as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of the people.

Judaism   did not abolish animal sacrifices. Moses’ law prescribed when and how animal sacrifices were to be offered, and it was in this culture of sacrifice that Jesus ministered . And so it was within this culture that lifted up animal sacrifices as how one could get right with God after committing sin that Jesus came to do away with the whole sacrificial system. God ended the system in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Jesus’ death revealed to humanity both the depth of our estrangement from God and the path back to reconciliation—which is faith in God as revealed in Jesus, the Christ. Jesus was the one whom Isaiah had called the righteous one, who will make many righteous and bear their sins.

There is yet another connection to the Passover lamb. The Passover lamb was first and foremost a meal. The way one sealed a connection with the covenant was to eat the meal. Jesus changed the significance of the Passover meal making his body the bread and his blood the wine.

Jesus called on his disciples to continue to observe that ritual meal with its significance for the New Covenant, and we do in each Eucharist. Every time we take the bread and wine, we celebrate our Passover anew. In doing so, we remember Christ our Passover who is sacrificed for us. In doing so, we are invited to partake of the meal that binds us to the new covenant. In doing so, we renew our commitment to Jesus, the one who died that all might have life and have it abundantly.

For this is the Passover of the Lord. It is on this day that Jesus died to destroy the power of death. And it is on this day that Jesus invites you once more to take part in his passing over from death to life through faith in him.