Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. (Luke 22:7, NIV)
If you understand nothing else about God’s kingdom, know this: nothing happens by accident.
I know, as golfers one of our great joys is happy accidents, the so-called “member’s bounce” or a misread and misstroked putt that equalizes itself and goes in. On the other side of luck—and understandably, some believers would never dare to call it luck—is the “rub of the green,” where a bad break forces you to exercise the nth degree of your creativity to salvage the hole.
But that’s just not the way God puts things together, not when you read your Bible carefully.
Consider the opening line of Luke’s description of the Last Supper. The day had come, he wrote, when the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed.
If we dig back into the foundations of this ritual, we recognize a specificity to God’s instructions. The Passover was no run-of-the-mill commemoration. It was a God-defined practice that reminded the people of the night in Egypt when the angel of death passed over the houses of the Hebrew people, sparing their sons because of the blood of the lamb smeared on the doorframes. Meanwhile, the Egyptian families, right up to Pharaoh’s own, lost their firstborn sons in the night. Death ruled in the land, but life went on in the houses of God’s people.
Soon after, the people went free from Egypt, fleeing in haste. And thus, God also commanded that his people eat only unleavened bread—a symbol of minimal preparation—for the week that contained the Passover meal.
Moreover, as God laid down the design of the commemoration, he specifically commanded that Passover sacrifices be made only in Jerusalem and eaten only after sundown.
So here they came, Jesus’ and his Twelve, to the upper room, in Jerusalem, after dark, ready to eat the symbols of the hour, the meat so recently sacrificed in the Temple courts. What the others did not recognize in this hour, however, was that the symbols of the meal now filled the table of the very one who would eat of them in harshest reality. The Jews in Egypt had been provided an earthly salvation through those first Passover lambs. The Jews in Jerusalem—and soon, they would learn, all people—were about to be provided the opportunity for eternal salvation. The hour had come when the Passover lamb, the one who would take away the sins of the world, had to die.
As a narrative, it breaks your heart. As an intentional act of God, it is the one way your heart is put back together.
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Jeff Hopper
April 2, 2012
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