We do not come here to grovel, but rather to glory. We are instructed as Christians, when we glory, to glory in another, to glory in the Lord, but we do in fact glory. This is done on the basis of the Lord’s free gift of justification. Without that gift, we can do nothing. With it, we are liberated, turned loose to glory.
“In the Lord shall all the seed of Israel be justified, and shall glory” (Is. 45:25).
What do we glory in? We could spend the rest of our lives investigating the Scriptures in order to answer that question, so let us arbitrarily limit ourselves to three things today. We glory in God’s holiness, we glory in His humility, and we glory in His help.
This is a memorial of a blood sacrifice. A blood sacrifice was necessary because a holy God cannot look on sin, cannot fellowship with it, and cannot acquit the guilty by simple fiat. No, God is absolutely holy, and because holiness requires death for sin, there must be death for sin. But God in His grace provided a faultless sacrifice in Jesus Christ, such that His holiness could be displayed in His wrath against sin, but at the same time that holiness was not violated through selection of an irrelevant victim. He was an innocent victim, but not a by-standing one—He was a true member of the race that deserved to die. So in this meal we are confirmed in our understanding of God’s holiness.
In Christ, God was reconciling the world to Himself. The apostle sets the Incarnation before us as a grand demonstration of the true humility of Christ. He then enjoins us to imitate that humility in our own lives. Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.
But we are not called to imitate Him from a distance. We have been brought near, meaning that in this meal we partake of Him, which means partaking of His humility. In that partaking, He helps us. We are not left to strive on our own, or yearn from afar. No, God is a present help.
And all of this is sealed to us in the Supper. As Jonathan Edwards once put it, “Christ sealing the covenant with His blood is the greatest seal that ever was.”
So come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.