A Gospel Before the Gospel
Alexander Maclaren on seeing Christ in the first Passover.
Last week, I shared an excerpt from John Cumming’s Christ Our Passover, in which the nineteenth-century churchman convincingly proclaims the gospel as understood through the lens of the first Passover. The window to discerning God’s good news through Exodus 12 is flung wide open, not only by Cumming or the apostle Paul before him, but also and principally by Christ himself. Taking the Lord’s words in Luke 24 seriously, we are free and, in many ways, obligated to see the inauguration of this festival as remarkably anticipatory of his eventual death and resurrection. “The Passover,” Alexander Maclaren once succinctly stated, “is a Gospel before the Gospel.”1 Though millennia separate the first Passover from the ultimate one, they both convey the same good news of pardon and deliverance through the expiating blood of an innocent sacrifice.
What makes reading the particulars of that initial Passover feast so compelling, though, is to discern the ways in which it prophesies the true and better Passover to come. “The Passover as a feast is a prophecy of the great Sacrifice,” Maclaren continues, “by virtue of whose sprinkled blood we all may be sheltered from the sweep of the divine judgment, and on which we all have to feed if there is to be any life in us.”2 Every element of the Paschal meal is meant to gesture to the ultimate Paschal Lamb, Christ, whose bloody sacrifice saves all who make it their plea, by faith, before the Judge. The point, as Maclaren notes, though, is that just as the people of God were called to partake of this meal year after year, so, too, is the church summoned to a meal by which and through which they “memorialize” the means and manner of their deliverance. The church’s food, in other words, is the work of Christ for us, which, by faith, is accompanied by the mystery of Christ in us, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27). Here’s how Maclaren puts it:
Our propitiation is our food. ‘Christ for us’ must become ‘Christ in us,’ received and appropriated by our faith as the strength of our lives. The Christian life is meant to be a joyful feast on the Sacrifice, and communion with God based upon it. We feast on Christ when the mind feeds on Him as truth, when the heart is filled and satisfied with His love, when the conscience clings to Him as its peace, when the will esteems the ‘words of His mouth more than’ its ‘necessary food,’ when all desires, hopes, and inward powers draw their supplies from Him, and find their object in His sweet sufficiency.3
Feasting on Christ evokes the heartiest and holiest of ceremonies, the Lord’s Supper, wherein the church preaches to itself and others “the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). The substance of this meal, much like its antecedent, is that which gives and shapes the identity and faith of those who partake of it. Whether it is observed weekly or at some other interval isn’t as paramount as realizing the myriad ways it proclaims deliverance, peace, and pardon for weary sinners. That was the lesson, as God explains it through Moses and Aaron (Exod. 12:21–27). As the Israelites painted their doorways with lamb’s blood, “they confessed,” affirms Maclaren, “that they stood in peril of the destroying angel by reason of their impurity, and they presented the blood as their expiation.”4 The same thing happens through the proclamation of the word of the gospel and, graphically, through the offering of the bread and the cup in the Lord’s Supper.
Accordingly, the account of the first Passover serves as a prelude to the true and better Passover, as instituted by none other than “Christ, our Passover lamb” (1 Cor. 5:7). In my church, we partake of the Lord’s Supper on the first Sunday of every month, with, more often than not, the Lord’s own words on our lips (Luke 22:19–20). I often wonder what was going through the minds of the apostles as they reclined around that table and heard their Teacher’s paradigm-shifting words. More than likely, they didn’t pick up on every point he made until much later. But as the light bulbs flipped on in their heads (Luke 24:44–48), they were surely struck by the audacious authority Jesus demonstrated, as he reimagined the time-worn Paschal festival into an ongoing meal for his church. As Maclaren sees it, this is the feast with which the church’s faith should be saturated:
What an incomprehensible stretch of authority Christ put forth, if He were no more than a teacher, when He brushed aside the Passover, and put in its place the Lord’s Supper, as commemorating His own death! Thereby He said, ‘Forget that past deliverance; instead, remember Me.’ Surely this was either audacity approaching insanity, or divine consciousness that He Himself was the true Paschal Lamb, whose blood shields the world from judgment, and on whom the world may feast and be satisfied. Christ’s deliberate intention to represent His death as expiation, and to fix the reverential, grateful gaze of all future ages on His Cross, cannot be eliminated from His founding of that memorial rite in substitution for the God-appointed ceremonial, so hoary with age and sacred in its significance. Like the Passover, the Lord’s Supper was established before the deliverance was accomplished. It remains a witness at once of the historical fact of the death of Jesus, and of the meaning and power which Jesus Himself bade us to see in that death. For us, redeemed by His blood, the past should be filled with His sacrifice. For us, fed on Himself, all the present should be communion with Him, based upon His death for us. For us, free bondmen, the memorial of deliverance begun by His Cross should be the prophecy of deliverance to be completed at the side of His throne, and the hasty meal, eaten with bitter herbs, the adumbration of the feast when all the pilgrims shall sit with Him at His table in His kingdom. Past, present, and future should all be to us saturated with Jesus Christ.5
That Christ is the church’s meal is downstream of Christ’s words in John 6, where he refers to his flesh as the bread that’s given “for the life of the world” (John 6:51–58). Ever and anon, therefore, those who belong to Christ have their faith strengthened by the loaf of the Lord’s reconciliatory work on their behalf, remembering how he brought them out of sin, death, and darkness, and to himself and his kingdom of light.
Grace and peace to you.
Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Vols. 1–17 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1944), 1:1.41.
Maclaren, 1:1.44.
Maclaren, 1:1.44.
Maclaren, 1:1.40–41.
Maclaren, 1:1.45–46.