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 can’t and it won’t. 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.
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