Easter
Isa
25:6-9
4/5/15
So what are you having for Easter
dinner today? Like the other major
holidays Christmas and Thanksgiving, Easter is associated with a large family
meal. If I had to guess, I would say
that the most common main dish will be ham. There may be some out there who
will have lamb – one of my favorites. Ham and lamb are the two meats that I
most associate with Easter dinner. I
poked around on the internet a little and what I found there seemed to confirm
that this is the way that others see it as well.
You know what people don’t say when
I ask this question? They don’t say,
“Well, pastor, this year we are going to have tofu.” Now I am sure that
somewhere there are vegetarians and vegans who eat tofu at Easter. But the vast majority of people – even those
who like tofu – are not going to eat coagulated soy milk curds that have been
pressed into blocks for Easter dinner.
They are going to eat meat. We
eat meat at almost every meal. We assume that it is going to be there. And we certainly
assume that a holiday meal we will have meat as the main course.
The ancient Mediterranean world also
assumed that a holiday meal – a feast – would include meat. But they did so for a very different
reason. For them, a holiday meal was the
exception to their normal diet.
The normal diet of ordinary people was grain based. They received much of the fat their body
needed from olives. The diet was
supplemented with fish. But meat from
animals like cows and goats was far too expensive to eat on a regular basis. It
was only on special occasions – like a feast – when they would get to eat it.
This background helps us to
understand the first verse of the Old Testament lesson for Easter in which
Isaiah writes: “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a
feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of
aged wine well refined.” What is translated here as a “feast of rich food” is
literally the phrase “a feast of fat.” In
a world where people weren’t worried about cholesterol, fatty meat was the
richest and best – do we really feel any different? Great meat and great wine – that is the feast
described by the prophet.
And why the feast? It is because Isaiah is describing God’s
final salvation. In the previous chapter
the prophet has summarized the judgment that God is going to bring. He writes, “The earth lies defiled under its
inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken
the everlasting covenant.”
Though our culture does not want to
recognize it, God has ordered his creation to work in certain ways. The creature doesn’t get to rewrite the rules
that have been established by the Creator.
When people choose to do so, the Scriptures a very simple word for it:
sin. And those who sin, those who
transgress his laws will receive God’s judgment.
Now as we saw during the last two
weeks in the national reaction to Indiana’s religious freedom law, this is
clearly not a popular way to talk about things with many people. And you know
what? God doesn’t care. He is the Creator. He is the King. He is the Judge. And he gets the last word.
That’s what Isaiah has just described before our text when he writes: “ On that day the LORD will punish the host
of heaven, in heaven, and the kings of the earth, on the earth. They will be
gathered together as prisoners in a pit; they will be shut up in a prison, and
after many days they will be punished. Then the moon will be confounded and the
sun ashamed, for the LORD of hosts reigns on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, and
his glory will be before his elders.”
This is the result for the
unfaithful - for those who have disobeyed God’s law and acted like they are
god. But the outcome is very different for God’s people. Isaiah begins our chapter by saying, “O LORD,
you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done
wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure.” God’s people rejoice that those who oppressed
them – those who promoted evil – have been overcome and destroyed.
And so in celebration of God’s
victory there is a feast that God himself provides. We hear in our text, “On this mountain the
LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of
well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined.”
Yet in order for this victory to be complete
- in order for this joy to be without end – there is one other enemy that must
be done away with: death. The prophet
writes, “And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over
all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death
forever; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach
of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.”
Isaiah speaks of the final victory
of God when death will be have been swallowed up and destroyed. And in fact, that is why we have gathered
this morning. We have come to church in
the morning on the first day of the week to celebrate that fact that on that
first Easter the tomb was empty.
Oh, Jesus’ body had been placed in
the tomb because he was dead. Of that
there was no doubt. The Romans didn’t
invent crucifixion, but they were certainly the masters of it. A person who went up on a Roman cross was
going to come down only one way – as a lifeless corpse.
Jesus died on the cross because even
people like you who do know that God’s law orders his creation, are not
able live that way all the time. There
are many times you do things that God forbids.
There are many times you fail to do things God commands. And even when
you do keep the law, sometimes you do the right action for sinful reasons. You do the right thing so that others will
see you do it, and you will get the credit.
You do the right thing so that you can feel superior to someone else.
The difference between God’s people
and the unbeliever is often not a matter of what we do. We are all plagued by sin since the
Fall. Instead, it is a matter of how we
choose to view that sin. The unbeliever
embraces sin as his or her own. There is
no real regret, apart from the fact that sin often has consequences they wish
they had not experienced. There
certainly is no admission that it was wrong.
How very different are things with
the Christian. We know that sin is
always committed against God. We know that sin violates God’s will – it
transgresses his divine law and ordering.
And we are sorry. We confess this
sin. We repent. We do not want to continue in sin.
In our epistle lesson the apostle
Paul says, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received:
that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.” Jesus Christ
died on the cross in order to win forgiveness for all sins. Because he did this, forgiveness is available
to all who repent and believe in him.
Christ died. He was buried. And on the third day in his resurrection he
swallowed up death. He destroyed it by
beginning the resurrection of the Last Day.
What Isaiah describes in our text has begun. It began in the risen Lord, Jesus Christ.
It has begun, but it is also not yet
fully arrived. In our text Isaiah says,
“and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his
people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.” This past week there were many tears on the
faces of God’s people as Christians were killed on a university campus in
Kenya. There were tears as Christians were killed in Nigeria, Syria, Iraq and
Pakistan. There were tears as Christians were imprisoned in China.
And in this country Christians bore
reproach from our culture because of what God’s word says about homosexuality.
This past week our culture said that anyone who rejects homosexuality because
of what Scriptures says is on the same moral level as racist segregationists.
It said that you and I are hateful bigots who deserve only scorn. For now they
want to limit your belief to the walls of this building. But don’t think they
will be satisfied to stop there….
This angers and frustrates us. And so we also need to listen to the last verse of our text where Isaiah writes, “It will be said on that day, ’Behold,
this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the
LORD; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.’”
Right now we do wait. We wait for the return of our Lord and the
final vindication of his people. We wait for the tears to be wiped away for
good and the reproach to be removed forever.
But because Jesus rose from the dead, we wait with confidence. Because Jesus rose from the dead, his Spirit
gives us strength to believe and trust in him.
Because Jesus rose from the dead we have the living hope that will
continue to sustain us.
We wait for our Lord’s return in
glory when he will raise us up and give us resurrected bodies like his
own. We wait, but that doesn’t mean the
risen Lord has left us alone. We have
not yet arrived at the feast described by Isaiah, but that doesn’t mean we have
no food. For the Lord who rose from the
dead on Easter continues to come to us in the Sacrament of the Altar. He gives us a foretaste of the feast to come in
the Sacrament of his true body and blood.
It is this food that nourishes the new man in us so that we can trust,
and believe, and persevere in the face of world’s reproach. It is this food
that assures us that the tears will be wiped away for good and that God will give
victory and vindication to his people.
And so now let us come to this altar
where the risen Lord Jesus meets us. Let
us draw near, for this is the feast of victory for our God. Indeed, the Lamb who was slain has begun his
reign. He has defeated sin. He has
defeated death. He has defeated the
devil. And because he has risen from the dead, you know that on the Last Day he
will wipe away tears from all faces and will remove the reproach of his people
forever.
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