The Visible Gospel (Luke 22:14-23)

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The Holy Gospel, according to Luke, chapter 22.

Luke 22 · chapter mention

Beginning in verse 14.

And when the hour came, Jesus reclined at table, and the apostles with him.

And he said to them, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.

For I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves, for I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.

And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me, and likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant of in my blood.

But behold, the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table.

For the Son of Man goes as as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed.

And then they began to question one another, which of them it could be who was going to do this.

This is the gospel of Christ.

Praise you, Lord Christ.

Let's just uh bow our heads in prayer.

Uh Father, we gather together on this evening, on this night, um, to give you worship, to give you thanks and praise for Jesus' sacrifice on the cross, for his betrayal of his friends.

Um, Father, I just pray that the gospel story would grip our hearts deeply, grip our minds deeply, that we couldn't help but give you thanks and praise.

Father, just um pour your Holy Spirit upon us in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Please be seated.

So I enjoy watching movies.

I've enjoyed watching movies um pretty much my whole life.

I've always enjoyed watching movies.

I come from a family, uh, my dad, my brother, we'd always watch movies together when we were young.

And one of the movies that I remember watching was uh the Indiana Jones uh trilogy back then.

And um the as I was sermon prepping this week, I couldn't help remember the Indiana Jones movie The Last Crusade.

Uh there's a climax scene in it where Indy is in, um, I can't remember, it's probably a cave or a temple, um, somewhere deep in some foreign place.

And what's going on is that this whole point of the movie is that people are looking for the holy grail.

The holy grail is something that you see in many myths, you see it in many, um, it's in many movies, many stories.

It's constantly in our media.

There's always a new thing about the holy grail.

But in this scene, he gets to a room that's full of cups, full of grails, the ones that you'll see on this, the one you'll see on this table later.

And then this there's multiple, like different levels of grails, and you have to pick one.

The one that you can pick, the one that everyone is searching for in this movie, the bad guys, the good guys, they're trying to get to this one grail.

And what's said about this grail is that in this grail it has Jesus' blood, and whoever drinks it will have immortal life, but only if they stay within the temple.

But all the other grails have poison in them, and you'll instantly die if you drink it.

Now, when people start talking about the Lord's Supper, it can sometimes feel like in other denominations or even other churches of the same denomination that there is only one true way that you can do the Lord's Supper.

All the other ways are wrong.

All these other cups are wrong, but they're or they're poisonous if you want to keep it in line with Indiana Jones.

But that's not the case, and we're gonna look at what the Bible says right now.

So please turn with me to Luke chapter 22, verses 14 to 23, if you haven't already.

Luke 22:14–23

It's in your bulletin.

It'll be on the screen, I'm assuming.

So let's look at it.

Let's see what's happened.

And we have to set the scene, and the first two verses do this.

So let's see what verse 14 and 15 say.

And when the hour had come, Jesus reclined at table and the apostles with him.

And he said to them, I've earnestly desired to eat the Passover with you before I suffer.

Now, what's going on here is you have to understand what the Passover is.

It's a very, it's a rich thing in Jewish history.

Suzanne or Susan just read from Exodus, which is a key, the key text for understanding the Passover.

See what's going on, if you want the for the context of this, is that Israel in Exodus has been enslaved by Egypt for 400 years.

And they've been crying out to God to free them from their cat from their enslavers.

So in Exodus chapters 7 to 12, this is the account of it, where God comes into the scene, brings Moses up, and then Moses is talking with Pharaoh about letting the people go.

Exodus 7 · chapter mention

And then Pharaoh doesn't do it, so these plagues happen.

And then the final plague is one where God sends an angel of, in the sense, angel of death, to come and kill all the firstborns of the land.

He threatens Pharaoh with it.

And what happens here is that God commands the people of Israel to kill a lamb, to kill a firstborn lamb, as is I was just read, and to put it on their doorpost.

And then as the angel passes over, that they would be saved, they would not die, and God would liberate them out of from their captors.

And that's what's happen, what happens when you keep reading in Exodus.

Now, the key point of the Passover meal that the Jewish people are commanded to keep every year, which they still keep now, is that there's three key elements within it.

It's the remembrance of the past, the remembrance looking at the present, and then it's the future hope, the future that's what's gonna happen, God, the promise that God has given to them.

So this is what's going on here is that they're at the Passover and they're going through it.

When I was in um Cambridge last summer, I have a friend who is Jewish, and we did Shabbat.

And there's a lot of with um, I've never done Shabbat before.

And what this this is a meal where you do remembrance, you pray to God.

And it's similar to that, where that you remember what God has done, you remember what God is doing, and you remember what God is going to be doing.

Now, Jesus says that he's gonna suffer.

So they would have been thinking, what kind of dinner party is this?

Aren't we supposed to be doing what we've done every year?

What is going on?

Well, in the next verses we see what's going on.

Look at verse 16 to 18.

For I tell you, this is Jesus talking, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he said, Take this and divide it among yourselves.

For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.

Now, what the what the heck is Jesus talking about?

What is he talking to his disciples about?

See, Jesus is pointing forward to future two future events in history, one that's going to happen within 24 hours and one that is yet to happen.

He's pointing to two in this.

So the Jewish people expected a king to come triumphantly into Jerusalem to free them from their current oppressors, which would have been the Romans.

They have been praying for God to do this for many, many years.

You read it all through the prophets, and in their minds, they're probably thinking, the Jewish, the disciples right now, they're probably thinking, well, we've been we've been in Jerusalem for nearly a week.

We we've been here for nearly a week, and nothing has happened yet.

Why hasn't he torn down the oppressors?

And why haven't we been liberated and we've become the new people in power?

We can handle the whole thing of him riding in on a cult.

That's fun.

It would have been nice if it was a white horse or something like that, something more impactful, but we can handle that.

But now he's talking about suffering.

We've been waiting so long.

We've been in so much pain.

We've been oppressed, we've been enslaved, we've been treated with uh poor justice, we've been taken advantage of.

And now he's talking about suffering.

This is the weirdest dinner party I've ever been at.

What is going on?

That's what they're probably thinking.

Like, what is going on?

And Jesus, what he's gonna do, is that he's about to flip their way of thinking.

He's gonna flip their entire worldview upside down in the next verses that we're gonna read.

So, this is what's going on.

Let's look at verse 19 to 20.

And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, This cup that is poured out for you is the is in the new covenant in my blood.

Jesus has taken the whole Passover model to explain this profound truth to them.

See, what he's talking about here is that he's referring to the Passover from the past, and he's pointing to the new Passover that he's instituting right now, as we just read.

See, the old law, the old covenant, was a law built completely on works.

And in this law, that the Jewish people had to keep this law, and it became an idol in their lives, and they thought they'd always have to keep it, they'd get good with God.

But God just wanted their hearts.

And in the law, there was this every year they would have to do this thing called the sin offering, where they would get a perfect perfect lamb, and they would sacrifice this lamb for the whole Jewish nation.

But Jesus is pointing now to that he will be the new lamb, the lamb of God, as we just as we heard the choir sing earlier.

And the new covenant is a covenant of grace.

It's a covenant that's freely given by God.

That God comes, sends his son to die the death that we deserve.

That he will break his body will be broken, will be whipped, and his blood will be shed.

See, he flips it.

This is the gospel.

See, the gospel points to the past, it points to the present, and it points to the future.

The past is that we are all lost.

The present is that those who put their faith in Jesus are redeemed.

And the future is that there would be a future hope that Jesus will return.

The past is that we were enslaved to our sins, but the present is we've been liberated through Jesus' blood and broken body, and that the future hope he will return.

That is the gospel.

And Jesus commands the people to his, commands his apostles, commands his disciples, and commands us to do this in remembrance of him.

Not us, of him.

As it says on the table here, this do in remembrance of me.

Jesus commands that to his people.

Before I became, um got involved in ministry, I was a photojournalist.

And um, in photojournalism, you hear it a lot.

I'm sure everyone's familiar with this saying, is that a photo says a thousand words.

You can think about in the media, if you think about it presently, in the papers or online, you think about the photos coming out of Ukraine, you think about the photos coming out of Baltimore this week, or the photos of wildfires.

Those photos say a thousand words in one in one image.

And that's what the Lord's Supper is.

That the Lord's Supper says a thousand words in the simplest things.

The bread points to Jesus' beaten, whipped, nailed body.

The wine points to Jesus' poured out blood for our sins.

The Lord's Supper says a thousand words in the simplest things, in the bread and wine.

These are things that everybody can get, but they have such profound meaning.

It's a visual gospel.

And we get to see that every Sunday, week in and week out.

We get to see it laid out.

We get to see the bread broken.

We get to see the wine poured into the cup, that it symbolizes the gospel.

It's a constant remembrance of what Jesus did for us.

And that's what Jesus is doing here as he breaks the bread in front of his disciples.

That I am going to be breaking my body for you.

It will be pierced for you, for the sins of the whole world.

And then he pours the wine.

You read it here, and he's talking about that I will be betrayed, I will be whipped, I will be bloodied as I go to the cross for you.

That is what the Lord's Supper is, and that is why we do it always in remembrance of him.

It's the constant gospel proclaimed through visual elements.

JC Ryle says, as the bread is broken, we remember Jesus' broken body.

As the wine is poured, we remember Jesus' once perfect sacrifice for your sins, for my sins, for all those who come to Him, who come to Him through faith.

He died for their sins.

And there's another thing about the Lord's Supper, which is this there's this great blessing that happens within it when we come to it.

When those who have faith in Jesus come to the table, there's a blessing attached to it.

See, when you come to the table, your faith increases when you interact with Jesus there.

He's not in the bread or the element, but he is the Spirit is within us, and it's constantly interacting with Jesus, with God, because the Spirit dwells within us.

See, there is no greater blessing that's been freely given, which gives eternal life from God.

And that's what happens in the supper, is that it increases our faith through God's working, not our working.

Jesus says something also in the next in the next verses, which is very, very sobering.

Let's take a look.

Verses 21 to 23.

He says, But behold, the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table.

For the Son of Man says, Go, as it has been determined.

For the Son of Man goes as it has been determined.

But woe to that man by whom he is betrayed.

And they began to question one another, which of them it could be who was going to do this.

Jesus predicts his betrayal.

That's another thing that's which is so profound about this text.

Is that Jesus is predicting the death he's about to partake in.

That's what happened to him.

And it's not a planned thing, it's not planned, this death.

It is something that's been prophesied about all through the prophets.

And it's something that happens through Roman hands.

There's no way that this could have been planned.

It happened only through God's working, through not through human working.

And as he predicts this, which is something that's most sobering, is that he also allows his betrayer to partake in the supper with him.

See, the Lord's Supper doesn't save you.

If you only come out of tradition to the table, but lack faith, the free gift given it through Jesus, empty you will come, and empty you will go.

See, there's a profound mystery in the supper that those who have put their faith in Jesus get to partake in.

But if you don't believe in Jesus, if he is not your Lord and Savior, call out to him, call out to God.

Don't let this be the last time you hear the gospel proclaimed to you.

Come to Jesus, come to Christ.

See, only faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior saves you.

But if you have been given the free gift of faith, come to the table.

Don't think about things you've done during this week that you don't think you deserve to come to the table.

You deserve to come to the table.

It's been finished.

It is done through Jesus' shed blood.

See, there's gonna be no Anglicans in heaven.

There's gonna be no Presbyterians in heaven, there's gonna be no Baptists in heaven, there's gonna be no denominations in heaven.

There's only gonna be those who have been redeemed by the precious blood of the Lamb that was slain for you and that was slain for me.

That is it.

Those are the people who will be in heaven.

See, the supper points to the cross and to the resurrection.

It points to the future hope that Jesus will return and bring us into glory.

It reminds us of Jesus' great sacrifice.

See, it reminds us of when we were lost, when we have been redeemed, and it reminds us of the future hope of the marriage feast when Jesus returns and brings us into Himself.

And on that, let us pray.

Heavenly Father, we come before you as sinners.

We come before you as those who need bread, who need the free gift of your gospel made more and more clear to our hearts and our minds.

Father, we just come before you.

Please pour your Holy Spirit more and more upon us.

I pray for the gospel to grip our hearts, Lord.

And I pray us in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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