Second Exodus. New Covenant.

It was a Passover meal like many others, where each year the story of their ancestors’ exodus, or delivery from captivity, is retold and celebrated. Ages ago, their ancestors were held as slaves in Egypt, and Passover celebrates God’s deliverance from slavery. Although it would be many years before other ancestors would enter the promised land and the freedom it offered, by Jesus’ day the meal celebrated the gift of that freedom. This was the Exodus, the exit from Egypt, and the most visible evidence of the Hebrew people’s covenant with God.

It was in this context, when Jesus took bread and wine and spoke of a “new covenant,” everyone in the room took notice. There had never been any covenant but THE covenant, but now he spoke of a new one which, like the first, promised deliverance from captivity and the gift of freedom, only this one was not geographical or political. For Jesus, the new covenant was a deliverance from the captivity of sin to the new life of grace.

It would take years to understand such a deliverance, one might say we are trying to understand it still, but tonight we celebrate the beginning of that new covenant, that second exodus, in whose light we sit two thousand years later. If you have ever been in captivity and, more important, come to know the true freedom of God's grace, then this is a night to celebrate.