MAUNDY THURSDAY

The scriptures are God’s gift to us. These intimate looks at God’s relationship with mankind put on display His character so that we can know Him and respond with worship. Take, for example, the dinner we have been observing for the last two days. Here in the upper room, it’s as if we’re there at the table with Jesus. If you close your eyes, you can picture what it must have been like as the disciples laughed with each other, poked at one another, and then grew quiet as Jesus began to celebrate the Passover with them.

In the Jewish tradition, the Passover represents a moment to celebrate God’s mercy and salvation from their enslavement in Egypt. As a result of the Pharaoh’s refusal to set God’s people free, even after nine incredible signs displaying His power, God sent the tenth plague, the most terrible of them all. He warned his people that that very night, He would make his way through Egypt and claim the firstborn son of every household, and He instructed his faithful followers to sacrifice a spotless lamb and to mark their doorways with its blood so that when God saw the covering, He would pass over their home, and spare their son. And so He did.

It was during this commemoration of God’s mercy brought about by the covering of blood from a blemishless Lamb that Jesus, whom Isaiah prophesied would be led to slaughter, told his disciples to worry not. He looked into their eyes and told them that he would have to leave them in order to prepare a place for them in Heaven. Can you imagine the tension in the room, the way the dust must have hung silently suspended in the candlelight, the creak of the floorboards if anyone dared shift their weight?

Here, across the table from us, is a man whose feet scuffed the earth, who laughed and who cried, who felt the joy of love and brotherhood and the breathtaking pain of betrayal, and here, across the table from us, is the lamb of God willingly heading towards His own death. Each beat of his heart, every breath drawn to form a few last words of instruction, moved him one moment closer to that brutal ending, and yet, with a smile, he whispered, “You believe in God, believe in me.”

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Would you if you were there? Do you now?

And when I think that God, His Son not sparing

Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in

That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing

He bled and died to take away my sin