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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
Our Midweek Lenten Special Sermon Series this year called you to “Lift up your eyes to the Bible’s mountains”, and so, when hearing today’s Old Testament Reading, in which the Divinely-inspired prophet Isaiah speaks of the Lord’s preparing a feast “on this mountain”, we might immediately wonder about which mountain Isaiah is speaking. We should guess Mount Zion—also called Mount Moriah, and associated with Calvary, Golgotha, and Jerusalem—and, indeed, a few verses earlier Isaiah had said that “the Lord of Hosts reigns on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem” (Isaiah 24:3 ESV; confer Raabe, ad loc Isaiah 25:6-8, p.469). And, in today’s Old Testament Reading, the prophet, who has been called a “rap artist”, for his poetic alliteration and other sound play in the original Hebrew (Raabe, ad loc Isaiah 25:6-8, p.470), describes the consummation of history as “the full enjoyment of blessedness in the perfected kingdom of God” that comes on the Day of the Lord (Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 25:6, p.439). After describing a feast like no other feast, Isaiah says the Lord of Hosts will swallow up death forever, and we realize that we participate in the Lord’s victory over death by “swallowing” a different “feast like no other feast”. So, considering primarily today’s Old Testament Reading, this morning we direct our thoughts to the theme, “Swallowing Death and Life”.
Prominent in the Bible in general are feasts, mountains, and feasts on mountains. We remember the Lord’s covenant with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai, sealed with a feast (Exodus 24:9-11). We remember the Lord through the prophet Ezekiel’s calling people to a great sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel, where they would eat flesh and blood (Ezekiel 39:17). We remember both the Lord Jesus’s teaching about the Kingdom of God as a royal wedding feast (Matthew 22:2-14; Luke 14:15-24) and His instituting the new covenant with a feast on His Body and Blood in Jerusalem on Mount Zion (Luke 22:19-20). And, we remember the revelation to St. John of the marriage supper of the Lamb and His blessed invited guests (Revelation 19:6-9), apparently in the New Jerusalem that comes down out of heaven from God (Revelation 21:2), on Mount Zion, exalted above all the other mountains, which maybe were leveled or otherwise removed, perhaps into the sea (Isaiah 2:2-3; Micah 4:1-2; Zechariah 14:4; Matthew 21:21). The verse after today’s Old Testament Reading similarly speaks of an opposing mountain being trampled down, as it were (Isaiah 25:10), in connection with the feast like no other on Mount Zion. That feast may well be part covenantal feast, sacrificial feast, coronation feast, wedding feast, and, perhaps especially, victory feast (on the latter, see Raabe, ad loc Isaiah 25:6-8, p.470).
The victory feast on Mount Zion comes as the Lord forever swallows up the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations, namely death (for example, Oswalt, ad loc Isaiah 25:7-8, p.464; compare Keil-Delitzch, ad loc Isaiah 25:7-8, pp.439-440; Kretzmann, ad loc Isaiah 25:7, p.327). Death’s covering is cast over all the people of the Jews, and death’s veil is spread over all the nations of the Gentiles, so either way death affects you and me. Our friends and family and we ourselves suffer from death, in some sense facing physical graves. Ultimately all such suffering, as death itself, is caused by sin (confer Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 25:7-8, p.440). You and I are sinful by nature and so we commit countless, sometimes unspeakable, actual sins, all of which deserve both temporal death (Romans 6:23) and eternal torment. Apart from the repentance and faith that gains admission to the Lord’s victory feast, there is darkness and weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:11-12; confer Isaiah 25:10 and Isaiah 24:7-11, the latter noted by Raabe, ad loc Isaiah 25:6-8, p.470). But, when, enabled by God, we repent and believe, then we benefit from the Lord’s swallowing up death, itself a great swallower (for example, CSSB, ad loc Isaiah 25:8, p.1052). When we repent and believe, then we benefit from the Lord’s taking death away (Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 25:7-8, p.440), making it disappear, eliminating it, so that death itself dies.
In today’s Old Testament Reading, Isaiah refers to the Lord in four different ways: the Lord of Hosts, the Lord God, our God, and the Lord. Yet, we know that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Son of God, in particular took on human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary and died on the cross in order to defeat death for all people, including us. We did not win the victory ourselves, but Jesus won it for us (confer Raabe, ad loc Isaiah 25:6-8, 270). As the Hymn of the Day put it, “death is swallowed up by death” (Lutheran Service Book 458:4). The Lord’s swallowing up death forever by His death should not have been a surprise to anyone (contra Leupold, ad loc Isaiah 25:8, p.397), for the victory over the devil and the sin and death that He brought about had been prophesied in the beginning (Genesis 3:15). There was no instant gratification, but God’s people long waited in faith for the sure and certain prophecies to be fulfilled, and those prophecies were fulfilled (Oswalt, ad loc Isaiah 25:9, p.466; Luther, ad loc Isaiah 25:9, AE 16:198). Today’s Gospel Reading tells us that He Who was crucified rose (Mark 16:1-8); the Gospel Reading may not provide any eyewitnesses, but the Epistle Reading offers more than 500 eyewitnesses (1 Corinthians 15:1-11). And, in that Epistle Reading, St. Paul emphasizes the Gospel that Christ died for our sins and was raised on the third day, in accordance arguably with both the Old and New Testament Scriptures, as he preached them then and as others preach them today and so as we believe, teach, and confess in the creeds.
Today’s Old Testament Reading is also selected as the Old Testament Reading for my funeral, at least in part because of the Reading’s mention of fine food and beverage. You may know that during graduate school I worked at a five-star restaurant in Austin for nearly five years and that during that time I also had opportunities to feast on haute cuisine at top-rated restaurants in Chicago and New York City. Yet, the feast described in today’s Old Testament Reading, and the Holy Supper to which it prophetically points, are still better than the best food and beverage that any amount of money could ever buy! Long before today’s bone-broth diet-fad, today’s Old Testament Reading mentions rich food full of marrow: meat with extra marrow mixed in (Keil‑Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 25:6, p.439); healthy and desirable, so no worries about cholesterol; a delicacy for most people, as usually only royalty ate meat; and as if God’s portion of the sacrifice was being given to His people (Oswalt, ad loc Isaiah 25:6, pp.463-464). And, long before today’s winemaking technology, today’s Old Testament Reading mentions well-aged wine well refined: wine left on its fermented sediment to improve its strength and flavor and then decanted and filtered so that the wine was served clear (see, for example, Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 25:6, p.439; Kretzmann, ad loc Isaiah 25:6, p.326). Recently I have said that if you want good bread and wine then the Holy Supper is not the place to come for it, and it is not! There are other places for better bread and more-wonderful wine, and you maybe cannot even eat bread or maybe do not like wine. But, what makes the Holy Supper “the best” is that it is the food and drink of life (Oswalt, ad loc Isaiah 25:6-8, p.463, with reference to John 4:13-14; 6:35, 58; 7:37‑38). At this Rail, the Lord’s baptized and absolved guests “swallow”, or take in, life by “swallowing” Him Who swallowed-up death and lives to give life. As we sang in the Hymn of Praise, “This is the feast of victory for our God”. In today’s Old Testament Reading, the Lord’s feast essentially is parallel to His swallowing up death, so we should not be surprised that this feast gives us life, not to mention salvation, by forgiving our sins.
In Isaiah’s prophecy, different timeframes are merged together. As we who repent and believe are in Christ, we have the victory over death as our possession already now, even if we do not yet fully experience it until the Last Day. Then, all people will be resurrected in their bodies: the unrepentant unbelievers to eternal torment, and the repentant believers to eternal life, glorified by their blessed vision of the Lord in His nearer presence. Then, as today’s Old Testament Reading describes, the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of His people He will take away from all the earth. Yet, already now, concerned for the pains and suffering of His people (Leupold, ad loc Isaiah 25:8, p.398), the Lord Himself stoops, as a mother might do for a child (Oswalt, ad loc Isaiah 25:7-8, p.465), to tenderly comfort us. For example, we who repent and believe and have had loved ones go before us in the faith are comforted already now as in the Holy Supper we join not only in worship with all the company of heaven, but we also are joined more intimately with them in the Body of Christ that is both the Church and the Sacrament, a foretaste, the liturgy says in a number of places, of the feast to come. We have peace and joy already now, but then we will have peace and joy to the fullest (confer Psalm 22:26, noted by Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 25:6, p.439; also confer Matthew 5:6).
This morning we have considered primarily the Old Testament Reading with the theme “Swallowing Death and Life”. In one of the verses that follows today’s Epistle Reading, the Divinely-inspired St. Paul freely renders today’s Old Testament Reading as saying (Keil‑Delitzsch, ad loc Isaiah 25:7-8, p.440), “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:34 ESV; confer 2 Timothy 1:10). Death may swallow up the living now, but the Living One effectively has swallowed up death forever, and, in swallowing Him, we swallow life. We do not have to wait for the exalted Mount Zion of the Last Day, for today this is our place of worship and the seat of God’s presence. Then, without our afflictions, but even now in our afflictions (Luther, ad loc Isaiah 25:9, AE 16:198), we can, as Isaiah described, be glad and rejoice in His salvation.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +