Sunday before Easter
March 28, 1858
“For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”—I Corinthians v. 7, 8.
The passage: Christ our passover is sacrificed for us; therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
This is one of the texts for Easter Day, and may seem an odd choice to open Passion Week with. But Passion Week is the preparation for Easter. To say these words rightly on Resurrection Day we must have pondered them during the week that tells of His Agony and Cross. The plainer we take the words the better; the wonder in them lies not in our interpreting, nor even in the words themselves, but in the fact and the Person they speak of.
1. It is the Person to whom St. Paul, first and always, points his disciples’ minds. He does not say that Christ’s death corresponds to the sacrifice of the lamb, or that one is the type of the other. He says plainly, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” That difference may look small, but I believe there is a whole Heaven’s distance between the two ways of speaking. There is endless room for ingenuity in finding resemblances between the Old Testament and the New, but great danger that such ingenuity may dissolve the reality of both. The plain, practical history of the old Fathers may turn into a mere picture or shadow of what we think matters for ourselves; we may stop believing the Israelites actually left Egypt, actually killed a lamb, actually ate unleavened bread because they were driven out in haste with no time to prepare food. This homely narrative offends our refined taste, which craves something we call “spiritual” but which is really unsubstantial. And by a just retribution, the deeper truth we destroyed the earlier truth to reach becomes equally vague. The plain histories of the Passion we read this week cannot simply stand as they are either; they too get “spiritualized” into mist — into mere feelings, often morbid ones, of our own minds. Or, avoiding that fanciful path, we take the opposite, harder one that is just as unsatisfying: we turn the history into a set of dogmas, considering not what our Lord did or said but the effects of His doing and saying according to some scheme of divinity. We contemplate not Him, but a theory about Him.
But it is Him the Apostle wants us to contemplate. His Gospel to the Romans concerned Jesus Christ, made of David’s seed according to the flesh, declared Son of God by the resurrection — a Gospel about a Person, not about notions. Christ, he tells the same church, is the end of the Law for righteousness to believers: they gain that righteousness not by achievement but by trusting a Person in whom it livingly dwells. To the Corinthians he preaches Jesus Christ crucified, not some fine system distinguishing him from Cephas or Apollos; Christ, not any teacher or doctrine, is their foundation. To the Galatians, Christ was revealed in him so he might preach Him — not a new or higher religion, but who it was that had revealed Himself as Lord of his spirit and theirs. To the Ephesians he blesses the Father who has blessed us in Christ, chosen in Him before the world’s foundation to be holy and blameless in love — a Person, not a notion, is the ground of this eternal order and the bond between Jews and Gentiles, made real only when Christ appeared in the flesh. The mind he prays may be in the Philippians is the mind that actually dwelt in Jesus, who humbled Himself and took a servant’s form — not some ideal or imagined excellence never embodied. In Christ, he tells the Colossians, dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily; in Him they are complete; in Him they were circumcised without hands, buried with Him in baptism and raised with Him through faith in God’s power. The relation was as real as any earthly relationship they could claim; baptism’s simple sign showed how living and eternal it was. His preaching turned the Thessalonians from idols to the living and true God, and to waiting for His Son from heaven, who delivers from the coming wrath — they received news of a living Being, their Father, who saved them, and waited for a Person to be revealed; nothing else could have comforted their sorrows or satisfied their hearts’ deepest need.
I give these examples to show that St. Paul is not departing from his usual manner but exactly following it when he says “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,” rather than something like “the antitype of the Paschal Lamb has appeared,” or “what the Jewish dispensation dimly foretold is now perfectly fulfilled in the Christian scheme.” The name Christ, the Anointed One, replaces in Paul’s letters all such vague, cumbersome language.
2. And yet he says everything that a multitude of words could say, for he adds, Christ “our Passover.” In that single word he gathers all the meanings of that Festival — the whole course of divine history from Abraham’s call to the Voice that said, “This is He in whom I am well pleased.” The Passover expressed the deliverance and consecration of Israel’s firstborn, the distinction between Israelites and Egyptians, the destruction of oppressors and redemption of slaves, the leaving of Egypt’s comforts for the wilderness and the hope of the Promised Land, humiliation and sorrow, thankfulness and victory, life under a divine government rather than a visible tyrant. Looking at the later history, its loss coincided with every relapse into idolatry and the slavery that followed; its restoration, with every reformation, the destruction of idol-shrines, and the memory of God’s everlasting Covenant with the land. All these aspects gathered around the Lamb: its blood sprinkled on the doorposts when the Destroying Angel passed by symbolized the whole deliverance; eating the lamb was the Feast’s central act, reminding them they were both distinct families and one nation, drawing people to Jerusalem from wherever they were scattered.
3. “Christ our Passover,” says Paul — ours who are Abraham’s seed by flesh, and ours who are grafted into that same stock. He fulfills all the Passover ever meant, but for the whole human family, not one portion of it. He was firstborn among many brethren, consecrated to God as representative of the whole race. He showed the true distinction between the flesh in each man, doomed to death, and the spirit, redeemed and united to God with new life. He claimed for man, in His own Person, deliverance from the oppressor and subjection to the unseen, gracious Ruler. He showed that man’s fleshly inclinations are the prison he must leave, and that the way to liberty runs through darkness and death’s shadow. He showed Himself the uniting bond of all creatures, the source of their life, apart from whom they are divided and dead. In all these ways He was their Passover. But every other aspect of His character was gathered up and concentrated in His character as Sacrifice. The act of giving Himself up revealed what He was: the great witness of His sonship to God and delight in the Father’s will, and equally the witness of His full identification with His human brethren, His refusal to be separate from them in their worst condition, His refusal to have any life He would not share with them. Above all it witnessed that everything He had was His Father’s, that He did only what He saw the Father do, that His love merely reflected the Father’s love, and that the Father Himself was the source even of that highest sacrifice which alone could satisfy Him and through which alone all other sacrifices could be accepted.
4. Christ our Passover, therefore, he says, is sacrificed for us. The complete offering has been made — the ground of all other sacrifices, presented and accepted. Nothing more remains to be done. The atonement of God and man, earth and heaven, is accomplished. God has claimed man as servant and child; man, in Christ, has recognized God as ruler and father. The sin of the world — self-will, distrust, disobedience — has been taken away; the Lamb of God bore it to the Cross and put it to death there. Nothing now separates children from their Father, since He is the perfect mediator between them, through whom they see the Father and the Father sees them, through whom they receive the Spirit to guide their work, bind them as a family on earth to the larger family beyond, and enable them to offer sacrifices holy and acceptable to God — their reasonable service.
5. St. Paul therefore boldly says, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” No one supposes he meant only the Apostles, the Corinthians, or the men of his own age. He did mean them particularly and definitely — if his hearers lost the sense of their own share in a general notion of benefit to the world, his whole purpose in writing would fail. Yet equally, they would have had no grasp of the benefit conferred on them if they had not stood on their common human title — confessing that Christ’s incarnation was His taking man’s nature, His death a death for man. Had they in any way narrowed these redeeming acts, they would have lost the very ground on which to say, “He has been sacrificed for us.”
6. “Therefore let us keep the Feast,” Paul continues. Notice the order — perhaps not what you’d expect, since we usually call the Passover itself the Feast, and Paul does not contradict that usage. But he wants them to remember the feast marked a deliverance already accomplished — the Destroying Angel passed, the tyrant overthrown — while still witnessing to a present Deliverer and King reigning over each new generation, and to the fact that losing faith in Him brings bondage again. If the Jews imagined, as many probably did at the time of the Incarnation, that eating the Passover was itself meritorious apart from the deliverance it commemorated — a mere ordinance carrying its own rewards — then its true grandeur, its witness to God’s living acts and relation to His people, disappeared; it became mere submission to a rule rather than fulfillment of a Covenant. If instead, like the Sadducees, they judged the outward service morally worthless, a formality to be dropped, they reached the same result by the opposite road — putting God at a distance, denying any living communication from Him, making morality a matter of precept-keeping or self-achieved qualities that might earn God’s favor or make a man into a god.
Paul, distinguishing the Christian Feast from the Christian Sacrifice while binding them closely together, meets both dangers. Our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the Feast: do not forget the sacrifice was offered once for all, or the feast means nothing — it would not truly be a Eucharist, for we would have nothing to give thanks for, unless we are fully redeemed creatures, claimed and adopted by God, reconciled to Him and each other. But equally, if we forget that He lives as continual Priest presenting His sacrifice before the Father — if we think one act of faith in His Redemption excuses us from continually devoting ourselves to Him, or that such devotion can be some solitary act performed our own way rather than received as God’s gift to which we merely submit — we mistake our position as creatures and forfeit the blessings meant for us.
And surely he meant us, no less than the men of his own age, to feel ourselves heirs of these blessings. He did not think of God’s relation to man as belonging to one time or place only; he did not think Christ could be their Passover without being ours, or that the feast — eaten in full assurance that Redemption was finished and its liberty already possessed — could mean less for us, passing through the world’s wilderness eighteen centuries later.
If Christ has really died — if Passion Week tells no cunningly devised fable — we have the right to keep this great feast of His Sacrifice as a Eucharist: the fixed, eternal pledge of our redemption from the deepest curse and our admission to the highest blessedness. That curse is separation from God and our brethren, selfishness and solitude; that blessedness is fellowship with God and our brethren, the power to cast off whatever holds us at a distance from either, to rise above self-will and self-glorification, to become witnesses and channels of God’s free love to our race. Of such redemption, the highest gift any archangel could receive, this Feast is our assurance. Eating it, we do no meritorious act but renounce all claim to merit, submitting simply to receive God’s grace. We come confessing our pride in claiming merit for ourselves and all the selfishness and godlessness that flows from it. We eat not because we are better than those who won’t, but because we dare not claim any better standing than the lowest of them, since none of us live except by the common grace in Christ’s death and life.
Passion Week is the most solemn protest against the natural notion that sacrifice means bringing something to God, rather than giving up everything to Him as the source of all right thought and act. It is a protest against our habit of distinguishing ourselves from others. He who hung on the Cross identified Himself with the soldier who pierced His side and the priests who mocked Him; He carried their sins and bore their burdens. And we imagine we can come to the Cross claiming to be holier than others, or that our sect is the way to God!
7. This is the unceasing force of the last words: “Let us keep the Feast, not with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” The Passover commemorated a deliverance already accomplished for a whole people, lasting generation after generation; eating the Lamb marked the fullness of that Redemption. Did eating unleavened bread signify something more the man must do to complete God’s work? Surely not — it signified that he was to abstain from mixing anything of his own into God’s ordinance, simply receiving and giving thanks. Paul teaches us, Passion Week teaches us, this terrible lesson: God’s Sacraments do not depend on the clearness of our thoughts about them or our correct judgments of their nature — they rise above all our thinking. They express His will; they speak of a sacrifice offered once for all, a complete atonement between heaven and earth. Yet we bring to these Sacraments the foul leaven of our own scheming and calculation — debating who may come, arguing over the quality of what is freely given, bringing the week’s quarrels, meanness, and pride to God’s altar not to confess and kill them there but as preparation for receiving the pledge of universal love. This is the leaven of malice and wickedness, which makes the Sacraments useless for renewing the Church, and even turns them into weapons for its bitterest divisions and hatreds.
This malice and wickedness God desires to purge from His Church and from His children’s hearts. Here lies our hope. The Sacrifice of Christ is God’s, not ours; the Sacrament testifying to it is God’s, not ours. Christ’s Sacrifice is mightier than the world’s sin; the Sacrament will prove mightier than the malice and wickedness among the Church’s members. We may come to the Feast confessing the malice and wickedness in us — God will not send us away empty. He who in tender love gave up His Son for us all will surely also freely give us, with Him, the purity and love we do not have and never will have in ourselves.