Rev. Michael Phillips’ Sermon – Maundy Thursday (April 8, 2004)

This is my blood of a new covenant.

Blood, that mysterious substance that races through our veins, keeping us alive, but is it alive itself? How could the ancients have known? Without sophisticated instruments to break blood down into its various component parts, platelets, antigens, corpuscles, red cells. The ancients had no way to understand blood scientifically. They only knew that it kept humans and other animals alive, and without it, we died. When the blood poured out, unabated, life poured out with it.

Abram sits on top of a hill not far from Jerusalem, four thousand years ago, and butchers half a dozen animals with his knife. Their blood pours out onto the ground as he slices them neatly into right half and left half. He lays the pieces out, like mirrored opposites, creating a pathway between the carcasses. As the sun sets, as the Jewish day draws to a close, and a new day is about to begin, God comes and seals a covenant with Abram and his descendents forever. “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”

Later, that same God will deliver a set of laws for ethical living, laws for the practice of extreme neighborliness. His people become a people of right conduct, seeking to live considerate and thoughtful lives, seeking ultimately to live as God lives, without sin.

His covenantal people find however that they live with constant sin, and so to gain God’s favor, or better, to regain God’s favor, they turn again to blood. They offer animals, breeding stock and food, protein rich food, to God at the Temple in the City of Jerusalem. Animals are slaughtered by the priests for sacrifice, in order to express thanksgiving or to express repentance. The great smoking firepots blaze continually during festival times, devouring the animals being offered, and their blood, and the covenant is preserved.

At last Jesus bursts onto the scene, accepting that human beings will sin, will fall short, will miss the target. God’s hope for an ethically perfect community will never be fulfilled. Instead, says Jesus, the covenant must be preserved through honesty, through self examination, and the courage to work through sin and find forgiveness. An animal such as a bull or a goat cannot do the job for you. The New Covenant requires that we put our old self behind us, and become new, be recreated, and live new lives.

This message is hard, hard, hard to hear by those who are perfectly satisfied with the lives they now have. Those who profit from the way things are. Those who know comforts by keeping things the way they are, cannot hear Jesus’ call for a death to the old, that makes possible a new life arising. The powerful High Priest, the wealthy monopolist Levites, the militarily dominant Roman, liked the lives, no – cherished the lives they were living. To preserve their profits and their comforts they must silence Jesus’ call to a new life.

So on the night before he died, at supper with his followers, he took the cup, said the blessing, and gave it to them to drink. This is my blood of a new covenant, a new way of being God’s people. Not perfect, but forgiven. Not flawless, but renewed. Not focused on keeping law, but focused on keeping one’s neighbors. The next day, to make his point, the blood poured out again, and his own body was butchered, on a hill not far from Jerusalem. God comes, sealing a new covenant, and a new day dawns.

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