Friday, December 10
Isaiah 7:10-25
Psalms 31 and 35
2 Thessalonians 2:13-3:5
Luke 22:14-30
Luke 22:14-30
The children of Israel were slaves. They wept and they worked and they were tortured and they died. They cried out to God, who had made a promise to their ancestor Abraham years before. They cried out to be liberated, and God answered. They cried out, God answered. They were in bondage and God set them free. They were slaves and God made them human again. For Jesus and his fellow sons of Abraham, the festival of Passover was a national remembrance of this event, a national day when everyone reminded themselves that all those years before, in Egypt, they cried out and God listened, and then God liberated. The festival of Passover is a celebration of the Exodus, of the triumphant leaving of Egypt, of the marriage of Israel with her promised land, the cloud and the pillar of fire and the manna and the Egyptian chariot wheels floating in the red sea – the festival of Passover was about all of that defining, hopeful stuff, and the point was that the God of Israel is the kind of God who listens, and who acts, and who liberates when his people cry out to him.
“Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.’” The Church has been so distracted about these words, because we forget that Jesus is talking about Passover, and Exodus – a new Passover and a new Exodus, bought with the blood of Jesus himself. The point isn’t what the wine and bread become, but what Jesus does on the cross, when he takes our slavery upon himself, and puts it to death in his own body and blood, so that we can be liberated. Drink his blood. Eat his body. Eat and drink Jesus until you are full. Eat and drink Jesus, and be free.
Fr. Patrick Hall