Maundy Thursday

John13:1-15 - Maundy Thursday - March 24, 2016
Jesus Serves His Honored Guests

“God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son …” (Hebrews 1:1-2a)

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The Lord had promised Abraham a son.  The Seed that was once promised to Adam and Eve – that is, the Seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head – God more specifically promised to Abraham, saying that this Seed would be one of his own descendants.  In him all families of the earth would be blessed.  Abraham believed God, and God counted his faith as righteousness in his sight (Romans 4:9).  What Abraham believed was substantially the same as what Adam and Eve believed.  And though we see it fulfilled and hear it all the more clearly preached today in the New Testament Church, yet it is also substantially the same faith that we believe and by which we also are saved.  We believe in one Church that spans all ages.  Christ is and has always been the object of saving faith.  He “is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).  The one true faith has always been faith that trusted in God to be merciful for the sake of his own suffering and death – because by doing so he would remove all hostility between himself and sinful men (Ephesians 2:14, Hebrews 12:3).  The message of the gospel has always been at least this specific. 

Maundy Thursday

John13:1-15 - Maundy Thursday - April 2, 2015
Who Receives Christ Worthily?

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Let us pray:

Lamb of God, pure and holy, who on the cross didst suffer,
Ever patient and lowly, Thyself to scorn didst offer.
All sins Thou borest for us, else had despair reigned o’er us:
Have mercy on us, O Jesus!  Amen. 

These words were written by Nikolaus Decius in 1531 at the height of the Lutheran Reformation.  It was a hymnic version of the Agnus Dei, which for generations had been sung exclusively in Latin.  Agnus Dei simply means Lamb of God, as in, O Thou Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy upon us.  Decius wrote this hymn in order to bring this prayer into the language of the people.  But even as much as the people needed these words in their own language, they needed to understand what these words really meant – what the words actually teach us.  And this hymn kind of spells it out for us.  That’s the purpose of a hymn – to preach a sermon of sorts:

Maundy Thursday

John 13:1-15 - Maundy Thursday - April 17, 2014
May I Give Thee Love for Love

Today is Maundy Thursday.  The word Maundy comes from the Latin word for command or mandate.  Jesus commands his disciples to do for each other what he did for them.  He says, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13:34).  This commandment to love is what Maundy Thursday is named after.  We are to pattern our love for each other on Jesus’ love for us.  And how does Jesus love us?  It is as he says, “Greater love has no man than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15:13). 

But on the night when he was betrayed, before these events took place, Jesus gave a picture of this love by washing his disciples’ feet. 

Maundy Thursday

Exodus 12:1-14/Matthew 26:17-30 - Maundy Thursday - March 28, 2013 

For You

The Passover was to be celebrated as a statute forever.  Even before God commanded Moses what to do, He made it very clear how important its celebration would be for years to come and even forevermore.  “This month shall be for you the beginning of months.”  Their whole calendar would be reoriented around the events that God would soon accomplish.  “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord, throughout your generations, as a statute forever.” 

But, of course, we don’t celebrate it anymore, do we?  The reason is simple.  Christ fulfilled it.  The Passover pointed to what Jesus would do to save sinners from eternal punishment.  The reason God was so adamant about its continual celebration wasn’t because of the ritual itself.  No, it was because God requires faith in Christ.  Consider these words from Psalm 51:

O Lord, open my lips,
And my mouth shall show forth Your praise.

For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it;
You do not delight in burnt offering.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,
A broken and a contrite heart—these, O God, You will not despise.

Maundy Thursday

John 13:1-15 - Maundy Thursday - April 5, 2012 

Here Is Where We Learn of Love

Jesus loved His disciples.  He spent three years teaching them what He had come to teach us.  He taught them that the Son of Man must be betrayed and suffer many things, and that He must be lifted up and draw all men to Himself.  He taught them what it meant to love by teaching them what it meant to be loved by God.  Jesus is loved by His Father.  This love extends before time and into eternity.  But it is grounded in time in the hour that Jesus had waited for.  “Therefore My Father loves Me,” Jesus said, “because I lay down My life that I may take it again.”  Think of what this means!  This means that the love that the Father and the Son had shared from eternity was from before all time wrapped and bound in that singular act that Jesus had been born to do.  God’s boundless love that knows neither beginning nor end cannot be known at all apart from what happened once and for all on the cross.  HERE ALONE IS WHERE WE LEARN OF LOVE.