Giving Blood
Mark 14:12-26

In 1981, a few weeks before our wedding, Marilyn and I were on a ministry team that had been invited to come and minster in West Berlin. (This is before the wall came down.) A group of us also had the opportunity to cross over and visit a church in East Berlin. That was a rather complicated operation. For one thing, although churches were allowed to operate in East Germany, the government didn’t encourage contact between them and Westerners. So we were going to have to sneak our way around somewhat.

For another, we had different nationalities on our team. All the people who belonged to countries that fought on the winning side in World War 2 had to cross at Checkpoint Charlie, while others crossed in other places. That meant that we had to arrange a rendezvous on the other side of the wall. We were given the address of a bar to meet at, but told not to look like we were waiting for someone. It was all very “cloak and dagger.”

On the day when lambs are sacrificed

That’s a lot like the way this morning’s passage begins. Last week we left Jesus out in the village of Bethany where he would usually spend the night during his last few days in Jerusalem. This morning, as we read further in chapter 14 of Mark, his arrest and trial are only hours away. It’s the day before Passover, and Jesus has come back into the city of Jerusalem, to the temple, for the sacrifice of the Passover lamb.

Passover was the festival in commemoration of the time in Exodus 12 when God rescued the people of Israel, who were slaves in Egypt. Each household had to kill and cook a lamb and splash the blood on the doorposts of their houses so that the angel of death would “pass over” their home. And every year since then, Jews have remembered that event, which brought them freedom and made them a nation.

Once the lamb has been sacrificed Jesus and his disciples will need somewhere to eat the Passover meal together so he sends two disciples off into the city to make arrangements telling them, “Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him. 14 Say to the owner of the house he enters, ‘The Teacher asks: Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ 15 He will show you a large upper room, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there.”

This, too, is all very cloak and dagger stuff. Jesus is now a wanted man. And he knows that someone amongst his own closest circle is looking for a way to betray him to the authorities. So things are done in ways that are safe, and that don’t draw attention to him and his friends. He has already made arrangements with someone to eat the meal at their house, and he has arranged a sign, a man carrying a jar of water. Normally only women carried water in jars, men carried water in skins. So, a man carrying water in a jar would have been easy to spot. They’re not to say anything to him, just follow him. When he goes into a house the disciples are to go to the owner of the house and give a password, ‘The Teacher asks: Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’

And so the whole thing is arranged without Jesus’ name being mentioned. They’re shown to “a large upper room.” This is a room built on the flat roof of the house, with an external staircase to get to it. Every house we rented in Pakistan had one of these on the roof, and we used them for the same purpose that Jesus does here; privacy and security. Because it has its own stairs to the roof, people can come and go to that room without having to go through the house. So no-one needs to know what’s going on up there.

16 The disciples left, went into the city and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover.

“So they prepared the Passover.” Whenever I read these kinds of passages in scripture I’m struck by how distant we are from the experiences of Jesus and his disciples. How many people here have slaughtered and animal for food? How many have been present when an animal has been slaughtered? For most of us, meat comes in neat little vacuum packed or frozen packages. The closest we get to the reality of killing animals for food is the red dye that some places put in their meat to make it look more, well, bloody.

We didn’t celebrate Passover in Pakistan, but there was something called Eid al-Azha; which commemorates God’s provision of a ram as a sacrifice in place of Abraham’s son. (They disagree with Jews and Christians over which son it was.) It is a lot like Passover in many ways. Every household buys an animal for the sacrifice and keeps it in their yard for a week or so prior to the festival. If they can’t afford an animal of their own they will go in with others on a sheep, or goat, or cow, or sometimes even a camel. So, for the days leading up to the Eid, the whole town sounds like a barnyard. Then, on the day of the festival, everybody slaughters their animals. It’s done in a similar way to the Jewish practice. The animal’s throat is cut and the blood allowed to drain out. And the town becomes very quiet.

In Peshawar, where we lived, the blood would flow down the open sewers and all the gutters ran red. The garbage dumps at the corners of streets would double in size as all the offal (the animals’ innards that you didn’t eat) was dumped there. And over the next few days those dumps would really stink.

You can’t have a festival based around sacrifice without blood everywhere and the smell of death. If there were three million people in Jerusalem for Passover there would have been 10’s, maybe 100’s, of thousands of animals killed that day. Granted that in Jerusalem the blood would have been collected in bowls to be thrown on the altar and the innards that were thrown on the dump in Pakistan would have been burned as a sacrifice on the altar, but I’m not sure which smells worse; rotting flesh, or burning flesh.

Jesus talks about his own coming death

So this is the context for this passage – lots of blood and death – as Jesus talks about his own blood and death.

through betrayal

As we grow up, we learn that there are certain things that you just don’t talk about in certain situations. For instance, you learn early on as a child that it really isn’t polite to talk about bodily functions at the dinner table. And, in many families, you don’t discuss politics or religion at the table either.

In verse 18, as Jesus is sitting at the table eating dinner with his disciples, he drops a bombshell. I don’t know what the social rules were in Jesus’ day, but it’s clear from the disciples’ reaction that they weren’t expecting it. He says, “I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me—one who is eating with me.”

We live in a culture of fast-food. People often eat alone. And you often get the impression that eating is an inconvenience, to be gotten over with as quickly as possible so you can get onto something more important. To a great extent we’ve lost a sense of how special it is to eat together.

But most cultures, in most places, at most times have seen eating together as very important. It defines the family unit. When you’re involved in relief work after a disaster, like Myanmar or China, you have to identify family units so you can distribute relief goods appropriately. One of the best way to do that is ask, “Do you eat from one pot.” Eating together is an act of hospitality, it draws strangers into the group. Eating together is an act of trust. You trust that no-one is going to poison you. Which is why, for the people of Jesus’ day, to betray someone that you had shared food with was the worst kind of betrayal.

So when Jesus identifies his betrayer as “one who is eating with me” he is not just making a factual statement. He’s pointing out how terrible this act is. No wonder that the disciples are too stunned to even begin to suspect or accuse someone else. They each ask, “It’s not me, is it?” And each one hopes Jesus will say, “no, it’s not you.” Clearly they don’t know that Judas is the betrayer. Each disciple fears that he himself may be the one that will break under the strain that has already caused them to take all these security precautions.

but according to God’s plan

This may have taken the disciples by surprise, but it’s no surprise to Jesus. If there’s one thing that the gospels make clear, it’s that Jesus was always in control of the situation. He knew what was happening. And he knew that it fitted in with God’s plan to redeem his people. And so we have this strange tension in verse 21. The Son of Man will go just as it is written about him. But woe to that man who betrays the Son of Man!

Jesus could have stopped Judas. He could have told the other disciples, and Judas would never have left that room alive. But he didn’t. So Judas is left free to follow through on the decision that he has already made in his heart.

God does not force people to do things against their will. He allows them the freedom to make their own choices; then he works with those choices to accomplish his will. Proverbs 21.1 says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord; he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.”

[Having lived in a country that uses a lot of irrigation I can tell you that one thing you can’t do with a watercourse is make it go uphill. But if you start far enough up the valley, you can direct the water wherever you want. In the mountain valleys of Pakistan you can look up at the walls of the valleys and see a waterway cut into a sheer rock face 100 feet up, as the people of the valley redirect water from a point miles away up the main valley to a field miles away further down the valley. But the water always behaves according to its own nature. It always flows downhill.]

In the same way, God does not make people do things against their nature. He doesn’t force anybody to do anything; whether accept him, or reject him. But he can work with whatever choices we make to achieve his goals. He’s that big! And so Judas was the means by which Jesus was betrayed, as God foretold, but Judas is still responsible for his own actions. We can never claim, “The devil made me do it” much less “God made me do it.” We are responsible for our own actions.

to bring freedom

Judas’ betrayal may have been the means by which Jesus went to his death, but in that final meal Jesus sets out to fill his coming death with deeper meaning. He has already shocked his disciples once by telling them that one of them would betray him. Now he shocks them again.

There was a standard form of words that was used in the Passover meal. At one point the person leading the meal was supposed to take some of the unleaven bread and distribute it saying, “This is the bread of affliction, the poor bread, which our ancestors ate in Egypt…” But verse 22 tells us that, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.”

The Passover was about looking back to the time when God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt. But Jesus is changing the story. In Jesus’ hands this meal is no longer about something in the past, but about something very much present there in that upper room. He is making this meal about him and his coming death.

This is one reason why we can’t just say that Jesus was a great teacher or a good man. Good men do not take a national holiday and make it all about themselves. It’s as if I had thrown a Canada Day barbeque and then told everybody there that really Canada Day was about me. But that’s precisely what Jesus does. He takes the central event of Jewish history and says that its purpose is to point to him. “Take it; this is my body.”

through the shedding of his blood

Then comes the third shock. The Passover meal includes a number of places where the participants drink from a cup of wine. Towards the end of the meal… he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. 24 “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,”

My body. My blood. Christianity is not about a set of ideas or concepts. It’s about a person. Jesus makes that clear right here at the last supper. He sits at the table celebrating Israel’s historic deliverance from slavery and he inaugurates a new covenant.

A covenant is a promise or an agreement between two people or groups. It’s how Israel understood their relationship with God. He rescued them from slavery and they became his people. That’s what they celebrated at Passover. That covenant began with the blood of lambs splashed on the doors of people’s houses. This covenant begins with the blood of Christ, poured out for many. Just as the blood of those lambs secured freedom for the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, so the blood of Christ secures freedom for us from slavery to sin.

But that isn’t the end. Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God.” Even as he inaugurates a new covenant he looks forward to the day when he will make all things new and when he will return to bring the kingdom of God into fulfilment.

This morning we will celebrate communion. We will re-enact this scene of Jesus breaking the bread and passing the cup. We will remember that his body was broken and his blood spilled, like a Passover lamb, to make us his people and to set us free to serve him, and others in his name.