Matthew 26:17-30 - The Lord provides deliverance through the blood of the Lamb

So what? What does this mean for me? So what? How can I use this information? So what? How is Jesus relevant to my life? What difference does Christianity make on every other day except Sunday? What difference does salvation make to the work that I do, the decision I have to make every day about reports and taxes and interoffice relations. About insurance forms and W2’s. So what? I mean, it’s great to hear that Jesus saved the world, and that we’re going to go to heaven some day if we believe in Jesus as our Lord and Savior. But what about now? It’s nice to know that Jesus loves us, and that does mean so much to us. Our Father’s love carries us through dark, grief-filled times.

But is God’s love the only thing we can bring into real life? We know God is wonderful, He is great, He is powerful, He is majestic? Can we bring His wonder, His greatness, His power, His majesty into our lives. And if we do, will that make our lives wonderful, great, power-filled, majestic lives?

That’s the whole idea. Bringing the life of God, the life of Jesus, into our lives. Having our lives enter into His life. Mixing eternity with the physical, combining the wonders of heaven with the commonness of the health form.

And we bring the life of God, we bring the life of Jesus into our lives, into our bodies, into our minds, into our jobs, our families, our vacations, our everything, in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. We’ve been looking at the sacraments the last few weeks. We’ve seen baptism, how we are buried through baptism with Christ, and how we are raised to life with His heart beating in us and His mind thinking in us. Last week, we found the strength we need, the energy we have to have in order to move from the familiar, comfortable sin, to the new, sometimes difficult holiness.

And this week, we come back to the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. And we have to come back, again and again, because we need to be nourished again and again. Living as Christians in this world is hard. It was hard for Jesus, it is certainly hard for us. So regularly, intentionally, expectantly, every 8 weeks, we come back to the table. And regularly, intentionally, expectantly, every hour, we come back to Jesus. We take Him into us. We remember God’s miraculous act of deliverance, just like they did in the Passover feast.

This is what Jesus and His disciples are doing here in Matthew 26. Verse 17:

It’s the week of the Feast of Unleavened Bread. The whole week, the people of Israel would remember when they made bread way back there in Egypt, bread that wouldn’t rot or mold as they traveled to the promised land. This is not the first Passover Jesus has celebrated. He’s thirty three years old, and all of His life He, along with family and friends, have celebrated the Passover feast.

But this one is different. Instead of remembering the sacrifice of a lamb back in Egypt, this year Jesus will be the Lamb. And while the disciples make preparations for the Passover supper, finding the room, making the food, Jesus is making preparations to die. Verse 18:

My time is near, Jesus said. Can you hear the control in Jesus’ words? Do you see His determination?

There was a time in human history when God and man coexisted in peace, where God and humanity walked together and talked together, where the divinity of God saturated every part of human life and gave it wonder and holiness and power and majesty. We use the word paradise to describe this kind of life. Adam and Eve never got bored caring for the garden. There was no mundane existence, chores that had to get done. Everything, every moment of life was permeated with the light of the Lord.

That existence was lost when humanity went its own way, away from God. God created us to be with Him, His divine person involved with every level of our lives, His goodness, making every part of our life good. But we didn’t want that. We created a separation between humanity and God, between the physical and the spiritual. And we took all the goodness out of life. We talk regularly about our capacity to sin, our total depravity, how there is something sinful in everything we do. We do not live good lives, in the sense that we sin.

But the goodness of our lives disappeared in other ways as well. We lost our purpose. Our lives used to be meant for the service of God, to care for His world. We had been given the authority of God. We even looked like God, we carried His image, as we worked and lived. It was a good life.

Now, our work is for a paycheck. We live for the weekend. Our boss is our employer. Our purpose is for ourselves. And the meaning of life, the thrill of living, the significance of existence is gone. We want it back. If we don’t want it back, then we’ve become callused, we forgot what life could be like. We’ve settled for dim copy of the life we once had, the life we could have.

The problem is, we can’t just choose to have that different life. We can’t just think our way in. Most of the world thinks we can. They will try science. They will try medicine. They will try money. They will try just about anything, except the one way, the only way we have to get back.

Jesus is that only way, and the appointed time had come for Him to bring God and man back together again. He came to rebels, He came to traitors, to bring them back to God and to bring God back to them. He came, and He sat down with traitors. Verse 21:

We know all about Judas. Judas is the ultimate bad guy in the Bible. There’s a reason we name our babies Peter and James and John and Thomas, but we never name a baby Judas. He is the one who betrayed our Savior. He is the one who sold our Jesus over to be killed.

Except He’s not the only one to have betrayed Jesus, is he? He wasn’t the only one to betray Jesus sitting there at the table. There was a table full of betrayers there in Matthew 26. There is a roomful of betrayers here this morning. It would be nice to think that Judas is THE betrayer. That gets us off the hook. We would say, right along with Judas, in verse 25:

And Jesus looked at him and He answered, Yes, it is you. And He looks at us and He answered, Yes it is you.

But it’s exactly for traitors that Jesus came. It’s for rebels that Jesus was born. He came to bring men and women and children back into the presence of divine splendor, and by doing this, bring us back to a splendid life.

Judas refused to come back. He felt sorry for what He did, but feeling sorry wasn’t enough. Regret doesn’t bring us back to life. Jesus does. Jesus in our bodies. Jesus in our hands. Jesus in our brains. Jesus in our imaginations. Jesus in our calculations. Jesus in what we produce. Jesus…in…us.

Which is why, verse 26:

He took ordinary, everyday, common crusty bread made from flour and water and He called it His body, His divine, wondrous, majestic body. In this verse, with this statement, Jesus brings the ordinary into the heavenly. He mixes the divine with the earthly, and He brings us back to the splendid, awe-filled life we were meant to have.

We are a sacramental church. We hold the preaching of the word of God as the highest priority, but we also cherish the sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The sacraments are the holy and the ordinary all mixed up. We take regular tap water, and we read in Romans 6 that, when that water is used in baptism, that we are buried with Christ, through faith. We take ordinary bread that we buy at the grocery store, we take Welch’s grape juice, and we eat and drink it as the body and blood of Jesus.

We do this because Jesus told us to. Verse 27:

We do this, because Jesus wants to be part of the ordinary. It is offensive to Him that there is a secular part of our life and a religious part of our life. He wants to be our whole life, whatever we are doing. God’s desire, His whole purpose in sending His Son to die and to rise again, is to bring us back to Paradise, back to Eden, back to a life where what we do and how we live is filled every moment with His goodness, His joy, His wonder, His holiness.

He’s bringing us back to that, back from our rebellion, back from separating Him out from the rest of our lives. Jesus shed His blood, the blood of the covenant, verse 28:

Which was poured out to remove the obstacle, the barrier between humans and God. Which was poured out to allow humans back into the presence of our Father.

We who know this, we who believe this, we now can live every moment with the divine presence of God shimmering around us. And that constant presence does something to us. Of course, we sin less. We have the life of Jesus in us, so of course we live like Him, more and more looking like Him.

And, besides being more holy, life becomes more wondrous. Vacuuming with the presence of God inside you and around you makes housecleaning a sacred activity. Living in God, having God inside, can actually make doing taxes a wondrous time. Having ingested the body and blood of Jesus, any moment can be a sacred moment. Any act can be an act of worship. Any thought is a holy thought. Any word is a righteous word. Like 2 Corinthians 5:16 says:

This probably seems impossible, to try to do a good job, while always remembering that Jesus is beside us. But with the Holy Spirit reminding us, drawing our attention back again and again, our lives will grow more saturated with the presence of Jesus in everything. More and more we will see Him until we do see Him. Jesus gives us a promise of hope, in verse 29:

As we get closer to heaven, we come closer to Jesus. As we come closer to eternity, eternity becomes more a part of life. In heaven, everything we do and say and think will surrounded by the light of God.

That starts right now. Take Jesus into the office. Take Jesus into the car. Take Jesus into the kitchen. Take Jesus into yourself. Let Him break the separation between the holy and the secular. Let Him break down the wall between the divine and the ordinary and make our everyday, common lives extraordinary, in Him.