Christ, Our Passover Lamb
Author
Faustino de Jesús Zamora Vargas
Summary: Christ is the Lamb of God, innocent and without blemish, whose sacrificial death takes away our sins. He is also our Passover: He was sacrificed for us, rose again, and gives us life. The Lord’s Supper, instituted with bread and wine as symbols of His body and blood, calls us to remember reverently His death, His resurrection, and our enduring union with Him until He returns. By the grace of God, we are a new paschal people. Let us cast off the old leaven that still seeks to defile us and celebrate the cross by serving and honoring Christ with love, holiness, and devotion. There is life in Jesus!
When John the Baptist cried out in the wilderness, announcing the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, he uttered perhaps the most extraordinary prophecy in the history of the Hebrew people
when he proclaimed to his fellow countrymen the arrival of the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Christ himself left us an indisputable statement in the Scriptures when he said of John that “among those born of women there has not risen another prophet greater” than he (Matt. 11:11). John was acknowledging that Christ would be the martyr who was to be innocently slain and that his sacrificial death would wipe away the sins of humanity. The image of Christ as the Lamb of God moves our entire being; it causes us to see and contemplate the glorious scene of his death on the cross, confronts us with the cross itself, and calls us to reconsider—with joy and sorrow, with reverence and emotion—the path of holiness that we have decided to walk.
Christ was the unblemished lamb, the Kebes (a little lamb used for sacrifice in the time of Christ), humble and obedient, who “with his precious blood…as of a lamb without blemish and without contamination” (1 Pet. 1:19) would bear upon the wooden cross your rebellions and mine, those of this increasingly forgetful and foolish world that celebrates the Week of Christ’s Passion and his resurrection as merely one more festive event on its calendar of follies, an occasion for cheap revelry and unbridled passions.
We Christians who have been born again by the grace and mercies of God are celebrating. We celebrate Christ, his resurrection, and his presence in our lives and in his church. Christ is the Passover for Christians because there is life in Jesus. Paul says that “our Passover, who is Christ, has already been sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7). Is there any better reason for the people of God to celebrate? Before being handed over to be led to the slaughter (Isa. 53:7), Christ celebrated the Passover with his disciples and connected the wine and the bread with his blood and his body, turning this event into the most memorable and reverent ceremony of the people of God, which we now call the Lord’s Supper. He established this celebration so that we would remember his death and his resurrection, so that our humanity would become united with his body and his blood as a symbol of an enduring union until he returns victoriously to gather his church.
Let us use this blessed week to rid ourselves once again of the old leaven that still persists in contaminating us. We are a new batch of dough, a new and different people, a Passover people who rejoice in the Lamb of God, who calls us to be a living sacrifice in order to serve and honor him. Let us celebrate the cross, the victory of the life we now enjoy in Jesus, the exalted and perfect lamb who rose again and delights in the children who celebrate him with love and devotion. Do not forget it, beloved brothers and sisters: There is life in Jesus!
May God bless you!