Maundy Thursday

Sitting in the pew listening to the sermon last night, I had an "aha" moment. My husband was preaching about how the old covenant was replaced with the new.....the blood of the bull replaced with the blood of Christ. He described what it must have been like to have Moses walk through the masses for the first time, having the blood flung across the masses, people feeling it hit their faces - soak into their clothes......and then he went on about how Moses went up to Mount Sinai, and the Children of Israel almost immediately made a new god...a calf. How they chose to worship the life that came from the bull itself, rather than the God that gave life.....

......at that moment, my 3 year old insisted she needed to go to the bathroom (don't they always have great timing?) So I could only ponder what I last heard. All of a sudden, it occurred to me WHY the golden calf was ground up and given to the people of Israel to drink.

When I go up to commune, I am partaking of the very Body and Blood of Christ. Making the Children of Israel partake of the powdery "flesh" of the golden calf says "If you are going to choose a different god, partake of it. It will not help you, it will not nourish you, it will only bring destruction." As Christians, we partake of the true Body and Blood of Christ. We become one in His body. We receive the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins. The Children of Israel only received more condemnation and death after they drank the water that contained the "body" of the calf.

This realization of this was powerful. Praise be to Christ who died on the cross for our sins and rose so that we also may rise.....and who feeds us with his own Body and Blood so that we may find peace and continue to grow in Him.