Keep the Festival!
Good Friday Message 2014
Luke 22:14-20         4-18-2014
Summary: Passover was the oldest and greatest Jewish feast, established by God. Jesus assigned new meaning to it – making it represent His body and blood and implied that it is to be celebrated with varying levels of frequency. Then Paul called us to celebrate it continuously. Now that the shadows are gone and the reality is here; form gives way to freedom. 
Introduction
Passover
Fulfillment in the Kingdom
The Cup of Blessing
Lack of Form
Communion

Luke 22:14 When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. 15 And he said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. 16 For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.” 17 After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, “Take this and divide it among you. 18 For I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” 19 And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 20 In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. 
Matthew 26:26 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” 27 Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. 28 This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. 29 I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father’s kingdom.” 30 When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

Mark 14:16–28 16 The disciples left, went into the city and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover. 
22 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.” 23 Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. 24 “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” he said to them. 25 “I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God.” 
Introduction
Normally a Good Friday message would focus on the crucifixion, but tonight I would like to speak about the night before the crucifixion when Jesus celebrated the Passover with His disciples. Jesus had sent a couple of His disciples to make preparations for the Passover meal…
Luke 22:14 When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table. 15 And he said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. 
There was something very special about this particular Passover that made it crucially important for Jesus to be there.
Passover
The Passover was the greatest celebration of the year for the Jews. It was like Christmas in our culture. It was also the oldest. They had been celebrating it for 1500 years. No celebration was more engrained in the Jewish culture than Passover. And that was by God’s design. It was the greatest of all the feasts because the purpose of Passover was to be a reminder to the people, and an occasion for teaching their children, about the greatest work of salvation God had ever done. In Moses’ time Israel had been slaves in Egypt ever since they existed as a nation. The nation of Israel at that time was 430 years old, and that entire time they had been enslaved in Egypt. Slavery was the only thing any of them or any of their grandparents or great grandparents had ever known.
And they cried out to God to save them, and He did. God bared His arm and let loose with the most overwhelming display of miraculous power since the great flood. God could have just taken out Pharaoh and been done with it. But instead He sent a series of plagues – each one targeting a particular Egyptian god. They worshipped the sun, and so God made it go dark. They worshipped the Nile, so God turned that to blood. They worshipped the frogs, so God smothered them in frogs. One by one Yahweh picked off all their gods and rendered them utterly powerless, and then, just for good measure, made the Egyptians load the Hebrews up with all their gold and riches, and then this enslaved people just walked away. Pharaoh changed his mind and sent his army after them, and so God snuffed out Pharaoh’s entire army in one shot.
At that point God stayed with His people as He led them through the wilderness and protected them and provided for them, and guided them to the Promised Land – to this day the most fertile and beautiful section of land in that whole part of the world. A land flowing with milk and honey. God referred to entering that land as being like entering into His rest.
That act of saving His people is the perfect illustration of how God saves an individual soul. We are all born enslaved to sin. We are all born in Egypt. Then when we come to Christ He delivers us from that bondage and sets us free. But we do not immediately enter into paradise at that point. First we have a period of testing. That is this life – your Christian life. And for those who remain faithful until the end, they enter into God’s rest, which is heaven. And that analogy of God rescuing the nation of Israel physically illustrating the way God saves an individual spiritually – that is not something I just dreamed up. The Bible draws that analogy (1 Cor.10:1-12, Heb.3:7-4:11, Jude 5).
So all that to say the rescue from Egypt was the greatest act of salvation ever, and God wanted the people to always remember it and to teach it to their children. He wanted them to live a life of trusting Him, and nothing will help more with that than continually being reminded of what God did in saving the Jews from slavery in Egypt. And so God instituted a feast known as Passover. It was modeled after the last and the greatest of the plagues. When Pharaoh kept hardening his heart and refusing to let the people go, God finally put His foot down. He said, “Tonight, I am going to kill every firstborn in Egypt – including Pharaoh’s firstborn son” (who was also considered a god). But God’s people would be protected. It is important to understand, though, that they were not automatically protected. There was something they had to do. And if they didn’t do it, their firstborn children will be killed along with the rest. God told them to take a lamb, bring it into their home as a pet, and then, when it was at the prime of its life, slaughter it, and smear the blood on the doorposts of their house. Then they were to cook that lamb and eat it with their running shoes on – so they would be ready to take off as soon as Pharaoh finally buckled. Making that little lamb a pet and getting attached to it let the people feel the force of the fact that this lamb was dying in place of them. So when the angel of death came to each house to kill all the firstborn in that house, whenever the angel saw that blood on the doorposts, he would just pass right over the top of that house and move on to the next one. That is how it got the name Pass-over.
So from then on, every year, for 1500 years, every Jewish family, on the 14th of Nisan (which is March 29 on our calendar), between 3:00 and 5:00pm, each household would slaughter a lamb and cook it and follow all the procedures on how God instructed them to have this meal. And the Jews also added some aspects to it designed to help them remember all that God said. For example, in Exodus 6:6-7 God made four promises connected to the deliverance from Egypt.
1)	I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. 
2)	I will free you from being slaves to them
3)	I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment 
4)	I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God
In order to make sure they remembered those great, precious promises and put their hope in them, the Jews developed a practice of drinking four cups of wine during the meal – one for each of those promises. They would drink each cup at a specific, prescribed point in the meal. One at the beginning, one during the meal, one right after the meal, and one at the very end of the whole event. For each cup there was a prayer of blessing – not to bless the food, but to bless God. But that third cup involved a longer blessing, and so it was called “the cup of blessing.” They gave a long blessing on that one because that is the one that represented that third promise – “I will redeem you.”
They also used unleavened bread in this meal. Leaven refers to the starter that was used to make bread rise. They would take a little piece of dough from one lump and mix that in with a new lump, and the yeast from that little piece of starter would work all through the new lump. Then they would take a little piece of that one for the next one, etc. But prior to the Passover, they were required to remove absolutely every trace of leaven from the house. Leaven represents influence. When the people left Egypt, God did not want any lingering influence of Egyptian culture contaminating Jewish culture, and so all the leaven was to be left behind.
There is a lot more to it, but that gives you a general idea of what Passover was all about. Jesus had done this 30-some times (however many years He had been alive), but this one was especially important to Him. Why?
16 For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.
Fulfillment in the Kingdom
Now there is a fascinating statement. Jesus would not eat the Passover again until it (the Passover) is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. Think of how that would have sounded to the disciples at that time. Since when does the Passover need a fulfillment? Passover not only pointed backward to the Exodus, and forward to the cross, but it also points forward to the great, Messianic Banquet at the end of the age.
The Cup of Blessing
17 After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, “Take this and divide it among you. 18 For I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” 19 And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it
So far so good. Jesus is following the exact protocol for the meal that had been practiced by the Jews for hundreds of years. But then, at this point, Jesus does something very shocking. He takes this sacred meal that had been instituted by God Himself as a permanent thing, and that had been observed the same way for 1500 years, and He does not just add a new feature – that would have been radical enough; but Jesus takes a portion of this sacred meal and gives it a completely new meaning.
, and gave it to them, saying, “This is … 
The bread of the Passover? The matzo to be hidden as in the normal Passover meal? 
…This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 
What?
“This meal that for 1500 years has been a remembrance of being rescued from Egypt, starting right now, that’s over. I’m canceling that and assigning a new meaning. Don’t do this in remembrance of Exodus anymore. From now on do it in remembrance of Me.”
“But I thought the rescue from Egypt was the greatest work of salvation God ever did?”
Jesus: “It is, but it won’t be after tomorrow. After tomorrow it will be the second greatest act of salvation God ever did.”
Jesus just reassigns meaning of one of the most established, fundamental markers of what Jewishness is.
20 In the same way, after the supper he took the cup
This is either the third or fourth cup, most likely the third – the one that represents the promise of redemption. For 1500 years that cup represented redemption from Egypt.
20 …This cup is…
And everyone is thinking, “Yeah, yeah – this cup is the redemption from Egypt when we were enslaved. I know – I’ve heard this a thousand times…” But Jesus doesn’t say that.
20 … This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. 
That statement is radical at several different levels. First, Jeremiah promised a New Covenant in the end times. The announcement that the great New Covenant has arrived is big news, to say the least.
Second, in Matthew and Mark’s accounts Jesus said, “This is my blood.” The wine in the Passover Seder did not represent blood. Few things could be more repulsive to Jewish sensibilities at that time than drinking any kind of blood. Even pretending to drink blood would have been a horrific thought to them. God had given them strict rules about always draining all the blood from an animal before cooking it, and never ingesting any blood. Drinking a cup of blood would be a repulsive and outrageous image to them. But Jesus does not just call it blood – He says it is His blood. Take the revulsion of the idea of drinking a cup of lamb’s blood and multiply it times a million and you have the impact of the concept of drinking human blood. An incredibly offensive image.
And third, Jesus says His blood will be poured out for them. No matter how many times Jesus told them He was going to die, they were extremely resistant to the idea. And when you refuse to consider something as a possibility, any statement about that thing will become extremely confusing. That’s why very often people come up with huge, complicated explanations of simple statements in the Bible. They don’t want to accept the plain meaning, so they have to construct some ingenious, complex system to explain why it doesn’t mean what it says. That’s how the disciples were with Jesus’ death.
“I’m going to be killed”
“Wow, what could that possibly mean? Obviously it can’t mean He’s literally going to die, so what is the true meaning? I wish Jesus wouldn’t use such cryptic figures of speech and just communicate plainly.”
The next day they would see with their own eyes that Jesus was speaking plainly.
Those are three reasons why this was a shock, and a fourth is the same as we saw with the bread - Jesus is again reassigning the meaning of Passover. Passover was not about a covenant; it was a celebration of the Exodus. Even in His humiliation and weakness, Jesus majestic authority is awesome. With a word He changes the course of Jewish history and redirects a divinely established ritual. That bread and that cup always meant one thing; now it means something different – just like that.
We don’t have anything to compare this to. Nothing in our culture is 1500 years old. Our country is 238 years old. We are like half-way through the amount of time the Jews were slaves in Egypt. Not only that, but our customs are not divinely mandated. If some guy with no political office, no official authority of any kind just sits at a meal one day and announces, “As of right now I’m re-writing the Constitution. I’m abolishing the Congress and the presidency and we’re going to have a king” – people would laugh. It wouldn’t change anything. But the Constitution of the United States is nothing compared to the laws God Almighty gave to Moses in establishing the nation of Israel. The meaning of the Passover was not tradition – it was divinely dictated. And Jesus changes it all by speaking a sentence.
So here they are – middle of a Passover meal, and Jesus just drops multiple bombs on them. And that’s not all. In 1 Corinthians 11:24, Paul tells us of another massive change Jesus made. The gospels tell us the part about doing it as a remembrance not of the Exodus anymore, but of Jesus – do this in remembrance of me. But Paul gives us the full statement that Jesus made.
1 Corinthians 11:25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
The phrase as often as you drink it implies that this is no longer just a once a year thing. Jesus is making this meal a routine celebration in the church. In 1 Corinthians 5 Paul is rebuking the Corinthian church for their tolerance of an unrepentant sinner who claims to be a Christian. This guy is living in open immorality, but the church was not obedient to Matthew 18 and failed to put this man out of the church. In fact, they were proud of the fact that they were so tolerant and accepting. So in verse 4 Paul tells them, “The next time you are assembled together as a body, put this man out. Hand him over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.”
1 Corinthians 5:6 Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? 
Sin works just like yeast – you have a little tiny bit of it and it just spreads and pervades the whole batch.
7 Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 
At Passover, you were to eliminate all yeast from the house prior to sacrificing the lamb. So Paul says, “You’re way behind! The Passover Lamb has already been sacrificed, and you still have yeast in the house!” (The yeast of unrepentant sin in the church.)
8 Therefore let us keep the Festival
What festival? The one he just mentioned – Passover. Let us keep Passover.
8 … not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.
Paul is calling us here to keep Passover continuously in the Church. It used to be once a year, then Jesus said, “As often as you drink the cup” (of communion), which makes it a routine thing in the church, and then here we get the sense that it is not just every time we do communion, but it is continuous. We need to keep this festival constantly. When it says our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed – that means we are right in the middle of the Passover celebration. And how often is that true in the church age? On what day of the week can you say our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed? Every day of every week all year long every year. Passover is continuous now.
Lack of Form
Now, to many people that is troubling. People ask, “Wait a minute – what about the form? What kind  of procedure should we follow? And when should we do it? What day? How often?” Jesus just said, “However often you do it, do it in remembrance of Me.” Some churches do the new Passover (which we call communion) once a quarter, others once a month. We do it twice a month. Some do it every week. Who’s right? Some churches have everyone drink from the same cup. Others have you dip the bread in a cup, so you don’t actually drink anything. We pass the elements to everyone. Sometimes we all partake together, other times we invite each person to do it when they are ready. We are all over the map procedurally – why? Because all Jesus said was use bread and the fruit of the vine and do it in remembrance of Him. Everything else is up to us.
And Passover is not the only thing that went from being highly regulated to not being regulated at all with regard to external procedure. That same thing happened to all forms of worship. In the Old Testament, formal worship was to take place at the Temple, and the Temple was to be located in Jerusalem. The Samaritans argued with that. They said Mt. Gerizim was the right place. They were wrong – the Jews were right. But when a Samaritan woman asked Jesus who was right:
John 4:21 Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. … 23 a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  
The place and the form and the procedure used to be supremely important; but Jesus introduced a new era where those things are not an issue. Why?
Colossians 2:16 Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day. 17 These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.
The forms and structures and procedures and protocols in the Old Testament were very specific because God was setting up illustrations that had to reflect the realities properly. The lamb had to be a one-year-old lamb – why?  Because it illustrated Jesus dying at the prime of His life. They couldn’t be strangled – it had to be a bloody death – why? To illustrate the severe consequences of sin. Each detail had a particular purpose, and so the procedure was crucial.
But once the realities arrive, the illustrations are no longer needed. And the realities are matters of the heart, not matters of proscribed protocol. Why didn’t God give us some specific instruction on how to do our worship? With all the detailed procedures in the Old Testament, why do we have no specifics in the New Testament for our corporate worship? For the same reason you shouldn’t go to your wife and hand her a calendar and say, “Ok, mark down on there each date and time that you want me to say, ‘I love you’.” She would say, “No, I don’t want to do that. If you say those words I want them to be expressions of what you feel at that moment.” Which would make your wife feel most loved – if you say, “Just tell me what birthday card you want for your birthday and I’ll go pick it up,” or if you are creative and put some thought into some new expression of love? Instead of just spelling out a proscribed liturgy for our corporate worship, I think God is honored by the fact that Sam and Scott and a group of people around them put thought and creativity every week into a new, unique expression of praise for the congregation that week.
For some of you, it might feel out of whack for me to be preaching about the events of Maundy Thursday at our Good Friday service. Is that a problem? No. Jesus just said, “Keep the festival,” and “as often as you do it, do it in remembrance of Me.” Beyond that we have freedom. Did you know that if we wanted to, we could sing “Angels We Have Heard on High” tonight and celebrate the incarnation? That would not bother God any more than it would bother your wife if you gave her some flowers even though your anniversary is six months away.
That’s why I don’t have any problem with any celebration of the glorious truths of God’s Word. People ask me all the time about whether we should celebrate Christmas or Easter or Halloween. They say, “Those holidays have pagan origins, so shouldn’t we avoid them?” My answer is, “I’m fine with rejecting the paganism, but not the day.” December 25, October 31, April 20 – those are days the Lord has made. They belong to Him. If the pagans want those days, what should we say? Keep in mind – you are the Church – the highest human authority in the universe. You are the body of Christ – co-heirs with Christ. You are the most important and significant and powerful organization in existence. So let me ask you, Church, if the pagans want these days – what’s your answer? Yes or no? I am asking you – the enemy wants one of our days.  Can he have it? No! In the days prior to Moses the pagans had all kinds of pagan harvest celebrations at harvest time. So did Moses say, “Well, we can’t have any kind of celebration at harvest time because that has pagan origins”? No. By God’s command he instituted the Feast of First fruits and the Feast of Tabernacles – both celebrations of the harvest. Was he mimicking the pagans? Not at all – he was taking back what they stole from God. If the pagans ruin a day, I am not prepared to cede that ground to the devil. I want to take it back and redeem it. If someone attaches false ideas and doctrines to a particular day that the Lord has made, our mandate is to take those thoughts captive and force them into obedience to Christ (2 Cor.10:5). That is what the church did with Christmas and Easter. In our culture, does the average person associate Easter with pagan fertility rites? No, churches everywhere are jammed full of more people than they can hold who show up to hear a sermon on the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Do people associate Christmas in our culture mainly with pagan worship? No, you can walk into a mall and hear songs about Jesus being King of kings and Lord of lords. It is associated with Christ – that is why so many schools are trying to ban any mention of the holiday. There is still work to be done for sure, but we have made great strides in seizing those days back from the pagans, and I think we should do the same thing with Halloween or any other day the world wants to take for its own. I think the best division of days would be 365 for Jesus, zero for the devil. 
“But isn’t the day tainted by the fact that it used to be a pagan celebration?”
No. We are not superstitious. The pagans do not have the power to taint a day on God’s calendar. Their gods are nothing, their worship is empty, their rituals are a mist – they have no power. Certainly not enough power to commandeer one of God’s days.
We serve a King who can transform Passover into something completely different from what it was with a couple sentences. So to honor Him, let us keep the feast, not with the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.