Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
Tonight we continue with the kings of Judah, and we consider King Hezekiah. Second Kings chapter 18 says this about Hezekiah: he was the son of King Ahaz. “He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, according to all that David his father had done.” Ahaz was one of the most evil kings in all of Judah’s history. It seemed like there was a competition to see who could be the worst, and he was right there in the top three or four at least, if not higher. His son Hezekiah was exactly the opposite of everything that his father had done. He did what all other good kings did when they came to power: he had to remove the idols of Baal from the land of Judah and destroy various images, idols, and altars that had been constructed in the temple of Jerusalem. At the time of Hezekiah, the bronze serpent — you know, that serpent that Moses had made in the wilderness for the people to look at when they got bit by snakes, that they might live — well, that artifact, that relic, was still in existence and in the temple at the time of Hezekiah. But people had turned that image, that bronze serpent on that pole, into an object of worship. That is, they worshiped the created thing, not the Creator who gave it and attached a promise to it. It had become an idol for them. So King Hezekiah had it crushed, destroyed, broken into pieces, never to be reassembled again. Second Kings 18 also says, “He trusted in the Lord, the God of Israel, so that there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those who were before him. For he held fast to the Lord. He did not depart from following him, but kept the commandments that the Lord commanded Moses.”
Tonight is Maundy Thursday, and Maundy Thursday begins our three-day journey which traces the exodus by which Jesus leads his people out of death into life through his very own suffering, death, and resurrection — all that to give us a new life. This three-day journey begins on the night in which Jesus was betrayed. And as Passover will soon be upon them, in the next few hours after Jesus institutes the Lord’s Supper, he will be on the cross, crucified. So the three days — Maundy Thursday in the evening, Good Friday the whole day, Holy Saturday into Sunday morning, three days — it’s like saying “a couple of days from now” in the biblical language. It’s three days because they count days differently than we do. A day for them starts at sundown. So by the time the sun’s up, the day is halfway over. Thus you end up with three days. After the Israelites had been set free from Egypt in the Old Testament, the Passover was a commanded memorial of God for them to celebrate the Passover once a year, and to remember the sacrificial lamb that was slain for their freedom — the exodus out of Egypt, the freedom from slavery, and ultimately their entrance into the promised land. In the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the people remembered the mighty deeds, from the plagues all the way into their victories over the enemies in the promised land, that the Lord God had done. It was also to remind them that they were a unique people: the chosen people, a separated people, an adopted people by God the heavenly Father. But they often turned away from their deliverer and their father, as we’ve seen time and time again. A good king is followed by a couple of bad ones, and then a good king, and then another couple of bad ones. And so it would go on and on. It was a tug of war between the gods of Baal and the God that had delivered them out of Egypt. Israel in the north and Judah in the south — Israel in the north ruled almost exclusively by evil kings, and in the south, in Judah, the people did not do what was right in the sight of God for a great number of decades and even centuries.
Ahaz was one of those evil kings. Hezekiah’s father. He led the people back into the worship of Baal. At the same time, Ahaz suffered one military defeat after another, one humiliation after another, on all sides. Second Chronicles 28:22 says, “In the time of his distress he became yet more faithless to the Lord.” The worse things got with God, the less faith and confidence he had. As things went from bad to worse, Ahaz plundered the temple of its wealth and shuttered its doors. No more worship in the temple at all. Enter King Hezekiah, the one who was exactly the opposite of the father. When his reign began, he immediately set out to open the doors and cleanse the temple and restore proper church services to the temple once again. He also intended to reinstitute the Passover feast and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. It would take almost a decade into his reign to finally do that, but he set out from the very beginning to get it done. But political, cultural, and religious issues were getting in the way. In an effort to celebrate the Passover and bring the two kingdoms together, Israel and Judah, King Hezekiah sent out an invitation to all the people in the northern kingdom, Israel, and then subsequently to all the people in the southern kingdom, to come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover meal and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. But there were political and religious difficulties with the plan that delayed his celebration and prevented the full participation of all 12 tribes of Israel. The northern kingdom, which historically consisted of 10 out of the 12 tribes, had been separated from Judah for centuries, and most of the time during those centuries it was a country constantly at war — if not with Judah, with all the other surrounding kingdoms. It was simply a culture of war. It didn’t really have much interest, as a political entity, in reuniting with the kingdom of Judah. They’d set up their own high places and altars and temples throughout their land, and they didn’t see any reason, for the most part, why they should travel to Jerusalem to worship. Remember the woman at the well: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” Well, that was where all that started. So when Hezekiah sent messengers with an invitation to the north, the messengers and the message were initially rejected by the overwhelming majority of the people in the north. They laughed at them and mocked them. That’s what most people did. But not all people. A few from the north actually, the text says, humbled themselves and went to Jerusalem for the Passover. It wouldn’t be exactly the grand kingdom reuniting that Hezekiah had hoped for, but still, between the people of Judah, strangers and sojourners surrounding Judah and Israel, and the people who dared leave Israel to come to Jerusalem, it turned out to be a very big feast — a large Passover, one of the largest in the history of the country.
But even as the invitation was about to go out, another problem arose, and the Passover was delayed again. Delaying the Passover was, to say the least, a rather unusual thing. That is, to put it off from the first month, which was ordained in the biblical text and the scrolls given to Moses. The Passover took place in the first month of the year. But if you listen to the reading, it didn’t actually take place until the second month. The reason is they didn’t have the manpower. They didn’t have the priests. They didn’t have people who were consecrated and who actually knew what to do and how to go about doing it in the temple. They couldn’t host such a big and grand event as the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. To be consecrated meant that they needed to be clean. They had ritual washings themselves, performed various religious services, in order to be rightly trained. That’s why mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic and Orthodox institutions require seminary training. Hezekiah moved the Passover one month back. It’d be like moving Christmas into January. You might actually have snow then, but still, it’s not the same. Or moving the Fourth of July to August — just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? Hezekiah’s father, King Ahaz, had closed the temple. The Judeans hadn’t celebrated Passover for years. The Torah had instructed the Hebrews to celebrate it annually, without fail, according to the prescription given in the books of the Torah. And it was Hezekiah’s heartfelt desire to host the Passover and to unite the Israelites in the north with the Judeans in the south. But the preparations were made in haste, and many people, especially from the northern kingdom, came to the feast, but they were not clean. So they had to sacrifice a lot of animals. Hezekiah was breaking the letter of the law governing the Passover feast and how the participants were to be made clean before they arrived and came onto the temple grounds. But they came from everywhere, from all the countries surrounding, flooded into the city and then into the temple itself — a violation of the law of God. But God was evidently pleased with the worship and the faith and the offerings of the people, and he did not hold those irregularities of the ceremony against the people. “The hand of God was also on Judah to give them one heart to do what the king and the princes commanded by the word of the Lord.” Even those who came to the temple unclean, in violation of the law, God pronounced forgiveness of sins and healing.
This particular Passover was unique in the history of Judah — not in the celebration or how it was exactly carried out, but rather how it came to be and when it came to be. Once again in the temple, the mighty acts of God’s salvation became the central focus for the Judeans, their Israelite brothers who attended, and the sojourners in the land who came from foreign countries. King Hezekiah led the nation to a revival of faith and understanding of the Lord God. Despite his best efforts to follow his father David in the faith, Hezekiah’s reforms were short-lived. When Hezekiah’s son Manasseh — who will be the subject of tomorrow night’s sermon — took the throne, he led Judah in the opposite direction. He did evil in the sight of the Lord God and followed the despicable practices of the pagan nations that surrounded Judah. All that Hezekiah had done was virtually wiped out almost overnight. Manasseh rebuilt the high places that his father had destroyed — gardens and temples dedicated to various gods. He erected altars to Baal as Ahab had done. He bowed down to all the host of heaven. That’s the way the Bible speaks of people who worship the sun and the moon and the stars. He built altars to worship the created lights in the sky in the temple courtyards, so they could look upward and worship. His rebellion brought about the destruction of Judah, Jerusalem, and the temple. You see, thousands of bulls and thousands of sheep had been sacrificed for the forgiveness of sins of the people. But then the son of Hezekiah came, and instead of thousands of bulls and sheep being offered, sacrificed for the sins of the people, the greater Son of Hezekiah, the Son of Man, offered his blood as a ransom. The Passover lamb was replaced with the flesh and blood of the paschal Lamb, Jesus Christ — the one of which John the Baptist spoke: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”
By the standards of the priests of the day, Jesus was an unclean lamb. He defiled himself because he had been marched into the praetorium, through the chamber of Pilate the governor, while the Pharisees, if you remember, refused to come on in — because if they entered Pilate’s praetorium, they’d be unclean, and they could not go home and celebrate and sacrifice for the Passover lamb. The Pharisees remained outside, but yet still demanded the death of the unclean Jesus, as they saw it. Yet he was the unblemished Lamb. The son of Hezekiah didn’t need a month to delay. The hour had come. The text says he’d been consecrated by water and the Word and the Spirit into his saving offices of prophet, priest, and king, in the waters of his Baptism in the River Jordan. As the hour of his death drew near, he celebrated the Passover and then gave us the New Testament of the Christian Church, the greater supper. He said to his disciples, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” He was instituting a new one. He was instituting the one of his body and his blood for the remission of sin. He was now replacing those thousands of bulls and thousands of sheep. He was preparing himself a new covenant, a new sacrament, in which his body and blood would be given — and Lutherans like to say, in, with, and under the elements of bread and wine. See, Jesus changed the Passover forever. The Passover became a relic of the past, and the new had come. No longer would this meal be a memorial and a feast regarding the final plague in Egypt and the exodus and the parting of the Red Sea. Instead now Jesus would say, “This is my blood of the covenant” — or some translations, “new testament” — “which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in remembrance of me.”
The King of the Jews, you see, gathers his flock from the whole world, from every country and every tribe. His invitation went beyond Jerusalem and Judah, even beyond Samaria, even beyond Rome. His invitation is sent continually to the ends of the earth, so that nations and kings will come to worship him, the true King of Israel. He will feed them, and he feeds us, with the bread of life, with his very body and his blood. Like Hezekiah, Jesus’s invitation is often not received very well. It’s scorned and mocked. “Bread and wine? Body and blood? Ah, Jesus the only way? Nonsense.” They mock our Lord and his invitation. But the King came into his temple, and came to his own, and his own did not receive him, did they? And as he approached Jerusalem, Jesus said of those people, his brothers and sisters in blood, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God. See, Jesus isn’t content to give us a meal to celebrate in remembrance just once a year. No, he gave us a meal to celebrate each and every Sunday — at the very least, once a week. Lutherans fell away from that practice a long time ago, but many have come back. When we partake in the Lord’s Supper, we are not remembering the Passover. We are not recollecting the exodus. We are remembering our Savior, who gives us the remission of sins, freedom, and life: in the sacrament of the water and the Word, and the remission of sin time and time again in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, his body and blood, Holy Communion. And as often as we do this, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again. In the meantime, we do it again and again, because you keep sinning again. We all do. But he comes to us in his Supper, in the replacement of the Passover, and gives himself, the paschal Lamb, for the forgiveness of your sin. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.