1. Grace, mercy, and peace to you from
God our Heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The message from God’s Word on this Good
Friday is taken from Exodus 12:21-32, and is entitled, “Christ, the Firstborn, Is Sacrificed,” dear brothers and sisters
in Christ.
2. When darkness came after Adam’s
first day in this world, he cried all through the night over the death of the
sun. So legend has it anyway. The sun drops and tears fall, caused by the
darkness that covers our eyes. Since Adam, or at least since Abel, has a single
night passed when someone hasn’t wept over the death of someone else? “Weeping may tarry for the night,” the
psalmist tells us, “but joy comes with
the morning” (30:5). Would that it
were always so. Would that the sunlight always dried our tears, instead of only
revealing the full extent of them.
3. Can you hear the Egyptians weep and
wail? Do you see their tears? Last night had been no friend to them, only an
ally of the Almighty. At the stroke of midnight the angel of destruction
marched through the highways and byways of Egypt. His targets were specific.
His focus was on the firstborn sons of Egypt. They would die in this 10th
and final plague. No more, no less. And die they did, in great number. Great
was the cry in Egypt that night, for there wasn’t a house where there wasn’t
someone dead. Dead were all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the
firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave
girl who labored at the millstones. Even the firstborn of the cattle weren’t
spared. God executed them all. Never had Egyptians shed more tears, and never
in years to come would their tears equal those that streamed from their eyes
that awful night.
4. You knew that it would come to
this, for already from the burning bush, the Son of God tells Moses that
strong-hearted Pharaoh won’t let his people go. So, Moses is to tell this
tyrant that since he won’t let God’s son, his firstborn, go, then God will let
his anger go upon Pharaoh’s son, his firstborn (Ex 4:22–23). An eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth, a son for a son. And the Lord wasn’t bluffing. Just look. Watch
as the Israelites leave the morning after their Passover, as they pass by
heartbroken mothers and fathers laying to rest their firstborn sons, struck
down by the heavenly Father of Israel (Num 33:3–4).
5. Forever after that night, God
claimed every Israelite firstborn as his own special child. They belonged to
him in a way different from all others. The Levites, as a group, represented
these firstborn (Numbers 3). These sons who labored in and around the
tabernacle, who cared for the holy things of their Father, who daily watched as
doves and pigeons, goats and sheep, bulls and cows shed their blood and were
burned on the altar—these Levites were the firstborn of Israel, the special
sons of God.
6. But where were they on this day of
days, this Friday we call Good? Where were these Levites on the day their own job
and responsibility in the temple was being fulfilled? Where were they who
represented the firstborn of Israel, when the firstborn of earth and heaven,
the only-begotten Son of God, shed his blood upon the altar of the cross? Tell
me, where were they? O you blind Levites, unseeing sons of the God of Israel,
have you no eyes to see that it is finished, that he has come who brings all
things to their fulfillment in himself? Go on, go on, toil at the temple, watch
as birds bleed, sheep die, and cattle go up in smoke, but know that you are
missing the real thing. Not there at the temple, not there in those sacrifices,
not there upon that altar, but here, in this unveiled temple atop Golgotha, in
this sacrifice of human flesh and blood, upon this cruel altar of wood and
nails, here’s the real thing, the real firstborn, the real Savior of us all.
7. With 10 plagues the Lord had
attacked Egypt in the time of the exodus. Water to blood, a blitzkrieg of bugs,
disease, thunder, hail. And in the 9th attack, when Moses stretched
out his hands toward the heavens, a sea of darkness flooded Egypt. A darkness
so thick and black you could feel it. Not for one, nor two, but for three days
God kept the sun at bay. Then, after those 3 days, came the greatest of the
plagues, the execution of Egypt’s firstborn sons.
8. But that darkness and that death
was a shadow of what was to come. Because for you, to ransom you, O captive
Israel, one greater than Moses stretched out his hands toward heaven, to have
them nailed to the wood of earth. There he hangs, his hands and feet attached
to the tree of death, that he might bear for you the fruit of life. Yes, there
he hangs, suspended between God and man, making peace between him and you by
the blood of his cross. And there comes the darkness, from the 6th
hour to the 9th hour, a darkness that fell over the whole land not
for one, nor two, but for three hours. The Father, who lifts up his face to
enlighten us, hid his face from his firstborn Son. My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken him? “Because my Son who
knew no sin has become sin for you. Because my Son who was not of Egypt has
become the Egypt you are. Because my Son has become all the firstborn of men:
firstborn men like Cain the murderer, firstborn men like Reuben the incestuous
one, firstborn men like Aaron the idolater, and firstborn men and women and
children such as you.” Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done, he has become
it. Jesus has taken your place, as did the Levites, to offer a better sacrifice
than they, his own body and blood, a sacrifice that closes the book on the
temple, the altar, all of it. The firstborn is dead, killed by the judgment of
God. The plagues are over and you are free.
9. You are free to go, O Israelites!
In fact, you too, O Egyptians, are free to go. And you as well, O Canaanites
and Perizzites, Greeks and Romans. And all of you, Americans, Africans, and
Russians, all of you are free to leave the slavery of sin that gripped you so
long. For the Lord has sent his firstborn Son into this world, not to kill but
to be killed. God let his anger go upon him. All this so that you might go free—free
from sin and death, free from every evil chain wound around your neck.
10. But you aren’t the only one free.
God forbid. Think not that the firstborn of the Father can remain dead. How can
the grave hold him who is the author of life? It cannot and it will not. Jesus
lives. And when God raised Christ, he killed death. For Christ is the head of
his body, the Church, the beginning, the firstborn of all creation and the
firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might have first place. But Jesus
is the firstborn, not the only-born, for in him you, too, call God “our Father.” For you St. Paul says in
Romans 8, “whom [the Father] foreknew he
also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he
might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom 8:29).
11. When Mary gave birth to her
firstborn Son, she wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. And
this Son, all grown-up, now wraps you, his adopted siblings, in the swaddling
clothes of his flesh and blood, joining you to his own crucifixion and
resurrection, making you a partaker of all that is his. In the exodus that he
has accomplished in Jerusalem, you are the recipients of His inheritance. And
now he leads you to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, to the
heavenly Jerusalem, to innumerable angels in festal gathering, to the assembly
of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, to God, the judge of all, and to
the spirits of righteous men made perfect. Jesus leads you to himself, the
mediator of the new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better
word than the blood of Abel. God Killed the Firstborn to Free the Firstborn. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment