At this table, we remember Christ and Him crucified. In the death of Jesus, it was not sufficient for Him simply to die—He could not have died in His sleep for our sins. It was necessary for Him to be betrayed by the chief priests, and to be run through a kangaroo trial. It was necessary for His enemies to hate Him without a cause.
The kind of death Jesus died is crucial, and this relates to why He was dying. He was dying for our sins; particularly He was dying for those sins that we had become convinced were virtues. This is one thing we commemorate in this meal—among many other things, we commemorate the death of the worldview of all persecutors. When Jesus died, so did the commonly received idea of the scapegoat.
Before the execution of Jesus, unruly crowds could demand the death of any assigned victim, and they could demand that the victim’s name would go down in infamy. This is because the accuser, the persecutor, always has a serene confidence in his own “rightness.” The guilt of the victim is always “self-evident.” And the crowd shouting at Pilate was no different with regard to the first part of this. They could demand, and get, the death of the victim.
But what was different in this account was the preaching of the gospel afterwards. In the proclamation of the death of Jesus, the scandal of the cross as central to our faith, we Christians wrested control of the persecutors’ vision from them. We threw it to the ground and have trampled on it.
The central story in the history of the world is now a story of a miscarriage of justice, of an innocent victim, of a man hated for no reason, of lying witnesses, of corrupt officials. And this will always be the center of the story.
The persecutors have attempted comebacks—from Torquemada to Stalin, they have been loathe to give it up. But Christ was slain and Christ is risen, and there is nothing that they can do about this meal.