https://app.dropwave.io/episode/4b818140-d1a1-4d1e-9fa1-d20abdde7769/the-resurrection-of-our-lord-easter-day-ad-2025.mp3

++ JESU JUVA ++

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In our Epistle from 1 Corinthians, Saint Paul describes Jesus as our Passover lamb who has been sacrificed. In this way, he connects the sacrifice of Jesus to the story of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, which you know well. The Angel of Death would go throughout the land, killing the first-born. But God provided a way for Angel to “pass over” the congregation of Israel. Each family painted the blood of a lamb, which they sacrificed, on the doorposts of the house where they eat it. When the Angel saw the blood — that is, when He saw that they believed His promise and acted according to His institution — He passed over them. Their sons did not die.

This was the tenth and final plague against the Egyptian slave-masters. The Pharaoh finally releases them. But he pursued the people of Israel as they crossed the Red Sea on dry ground. So God drowned hard-hearted Pharaoh and all his host in the Red Sea. God had rescued His people. The entire congregation of Israel was now free. Their slavery was over.

As God instructed them in how to depart from Egypt, He instituted a perpetual feast of unleavened bread. Whenever they eat this bread as they celebrate Passover, they eat it in remembrance of God rescuing them from slavery. They remember God’s faithfulness to His promise.

No one is to eat leavened bread in this feast. For anyone who does is to be cut off from his people. This isn’t because leaven is somehow evil (and leaven could be eaten at other times). But eating leaven during the Old Testament Passover was a public rejection of God’s institution. It was a confession rejecting God’s rescue. It was saying that being a slave in Egypt was better than being delivered into the Promised Land. So anyone who disregarded God’s command to purge the leaven from his house was himself to be purged from God’s people and cut off. The one who rejects God’s salvation does not belong to the people of God. He is to be removed.

Yet as great as the Old Testament rescue of God’s people was, they remained under the bonds of a greater slavery. They had the Old Testament sacrifices. But those offerings weren’t sufficient, because they didn’t give a clean conscience. Not just for 430 years, but about ten times as long —. Not just the congregation of Israel, but the whole world has been subject to bondage and sold under sin.

Ever since our father Adam failed in the Garden, we are born into a fallen world. We are all conceived and born sinful and are under the power of the devil until Christ claims us as His own. The works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. We deserve grief and shame and everlasting torment in hell.

Our God, in His mercy, has instituted a rescue. He has sacrificed His only-begotten Son to atone for our sins and to reconcile us to His Father. Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed! The debt of sin is paid. His Sacrifice is accepted by the Father. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. Christ is risen!

Yes! This is the Easter proclamation. You are rescued from the slavery of sin. You are FREE! So we are Baptized into His name. We are cleansed and renewed by the washing and renewal of the Holy Spirit, which we remembered last evening. In this washing, His Blood has been painted on the portal of your heart. The Angel of Death has passed over you. Now, in Christ, everything is bright and clean and new.

Jesus makes it clear that His rescue from sin is connected to the Old Testament Exodus and the Passover God had instituted. For it was on the night in which He was betrayed that He ate the Passover with His disciples. Jesus kept the Old Testament command to observe the Passover as an eternal memorial. He observed it according to God’s command. As Jesus dies, the old covenant of the Passover is both fulfilled and ended. Jesus accomplished the greater rescue of which the Exodus was a mere shadow.

So as He prepares to be given into death, at table with His disciples, He does something new. As an everlasting memorial to this great salvation, Jesus institutes a Feast in His remembrance. Yet this is no mere symbol or empty ceremony. For in this Feast, He gives us His own Flesh and Blood which gained our salvation. What He offered on the cross — what God accepted as the Sacrifice for sin — this is given into your mouth at the altar. He gives His Blood of the New Testament.

Just as God had done in the old Passover, Jesus institutes the Feast before He accomplishes the reality. In this Sacrament, Jesus brings us the benefit of His salvation. He gives us forgiveness and freedom from sin. He puts His own eternal and undying life into us. So we approach this Feast soberly, with due preparation. We come with faith in His Words and with a repentant heart — sorrowing over our sins, trusting in Christ alone for our forgiveness. We believe His promise. We do according to His institution.

Since Jesus is our True Passover Lamb, St. Paul in our Epistle brings together Christ’s sacrifice with the instructions about the Old Testament Passover. He presents a situation where the Passover lamb is slain and about to be eaten, but the leaven is not yet cast out! The Christians at First Lutheran Church of Corinth are about to eat of the True Passover Lamb — they are about to eat the Sacrament of the Altar — but while holding onto their sin! This is a public rejection of Christ’s institution.

The Sacrament of the Altar teaches us that only the sacrifice of Christ Himself could make satisfaction for our sin. To reject this sacrifice by persisting in the old leaven is to claim one’s own ability to endure the wrath of God for his sins. It is the height of arrogance.

A member of their congregation is sleeping with his father’s wife! The Christian congregation boasts about public fornication! They celebrate public sin. So Paul calls theological ‘time-out.’ Before they can eat of the Passover Feast, they must resolve the situation at hand. Paul warns them that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. He instructs them to remove the leaven, lest it infect and subvert the entire congregation.

They are to do it in this way. They are to assemble for the Divine Service in the name of the Lord Jesus. And since Pastor Paul has already publicly declared judgment according to God’s Word, the congregation is to cast out the fornicator. They are to excommunicate him and deliver him to Satan, in hope that he repents.

First Paul preaches Easter: Christ, our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. It is time to celebrate. For God has spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all. So let us keep the feast with sincerity and truth. Let our whole life be a rejoicing in this reality. Then Paul also preaches sanctification, which comes by the Holy Spirit. The Easter celebration cannot be held when they are holding onto the slavery of sin.