Dear Family at Christ Community,

            In preparation for His trial and crucifixion, Jesus shares His final Passover meal with the disciples in Mark 14:12-25. The meal serves as the fulfillment of God’s redemptive promises displayed in the Old Testament feasts and festivals. It also inaugurates a new means of grace to declare to God’s people His sacrificial love: the Lord’s Supper. The elements of the sacrament, broken bread and overflowing cup, remind those who partake of the revolutionary overthrow of all the principalities and earthly powers, including the most powerful force of all, death (cf. Colossians 2:8-15). This transformative socio-political-religious act occurs not by any of the earthly means that we might expect (or too often desire). Jesus accomplishes this eternal act by His holiness and sacrificial love—He lays down His sinless life in humiliation for the joy set before Him in the eternal deliverance of God’s people from sin, separation, and death (cf. Hebrews 12:1-4)! Charles H. Spurgeon captures this reality in commenting on Psalm 98 in The Treasury of David, Volume 2: Psalms 58-110:

The victories of Jesus among (humanity) are all the more wonderful because they are accomplished by means to all appearances most inadequate; they are due not to physical but to moral power—the energy of goodness, justice, truth; in a word, to the power of his holy arm. His holy influence has been the sole cause of success. Jesus never stoops to use policy or brute force; his unsullied perfections secure to him a real and lasting victory over all the powers of evil….

            In preparation to receive the elements, please take time to give thanks for Jesus’s sacrificial love delivering you from the passing Kingdom of Death to the eternal Kingdom of God! Please consider how this gift affords you the ability to navigate the shifting socio-political-religious sands with meekness and hope.

In Christ,
Cameron