Bible Study - Additional Thoughts on Maundy Thursday Sermon

I preached a sermon a few days ago on Maundy Thursday. If you would like to listen to it or read it, you can find it here. It is called “Participation in Christ’s Body and Blood,” based on Mark 14:12-26 and 1 Corinthians 10:16-17, and is about Christ’s love and concern for His disciples, especially in transforming the Passover into a new meal of the New Covenant, in the Lord’s Supper He instituted that Maundy Thursday evening.

There is so much richness in God’s Word, and as happens often, I cannot fit into one sermon all that I think about or would like to say. Some things are also just interesting historical information that doesn’t really fit into a sermon and might not be of general interest.

I will start with a Biblical question. Some of our prayers describe the Lord’s Supper as “a foretaste of the feast to come” and also mention “the marriage feast of the Lamb in His kingdom which has no end.” (You can find this in the third possible Past-Communion Collect on p. 166 in our hymnal, the Lutheran Service Book. If you have the Lutheran Study Bible, you can also find a discussion of “The Heavenly Banquet” on p. 1689 of the LSB, with a number of parables of Jesus and other Scriptures to look at and think about.)

We also hear, in Exodus 24:1, 9-11, that the Lord invited Moses and Aaron and other leaders of God’s people to come up and meet Him as part of sealing the Old Covenant. Based on other Scriptures, the people could only get the slightest glimpse of Him, but this passage says that they “ate and drank” with Him.

We also have the prophecy in Isaiah 25:6-9, which we heard on Easter Sunday. Once Jesus had died and risen from the dead and won His victory over sin and Satan and “swallowed up death forevermore,” there would be a joyous celebration, “a feast of rich foods” for all who reach eternal life through faith in Him. Jesus speaks of this in some of His parables, too, sometimes with the picture image of a wedding feast. See Luke 12:35-38 and Revelation 3:20-21 and the description of the “marriage feast of the Lamb” in Revelation 19:6-9, where the holy Christian church, all believers, are called “the bride” of the Lamb.

We don’t know what all of this means or exactly what heaven will be like, but we do know that there is only peace and joy with the Lord in heaven for all those who live and die in faith in Christ. There is no hunger or thirst, no tears or any troubles or sorrows. There is only joy and blessing and celebrating with the Lord, a great feast or banquet, with all the praise going to our great Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All we need to know will be answered when we reach eternal life ourselves, in heaven with the Lord.

I’ll move on now to some history. At the end of the Maundy Thursday sermon, I quoted from a Communion hymn in our hymnal, the Lutheran Service Book, #639. I had not noticed before that this hymn was written in German by Pastor Wilhelm Loehe, and then translated into English by a Lutheran, Herman Stuempfle, who has other hymns and translations in the LSB.

Rev. Loehe was never in the U.S. but was influential in helping the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in its earliest days, in the 1840s and 1850s. He was a Lutheran pastor in Bavaria and heard of German Lutheran immigrants who were coming to the U.S. but had very few pastors who knew German and could serve them. Loehe started a training program for future pastors and helped send them to the U.S. and other countries. He also helped support one of our seminaries in its very early years in Fort Wayne and provided a few of its pastors, who started Lutheran churches there and in other places, including in Frankenmuth, Michigan, along with ministry to native Americans.

The seminary I attended was the seminary Loehe helped start. It had moved to Springfield, Illinois when I attended from 1969-73, and then was moved back to Fort Wayne, and still is there, as Concordia Theological Seminary. There were and still are halls or areas named after Rev. Loehe, and some of those whom he recruited, including Pastors Wyneken, Sihler, and Craemer, as far as I remember. Pastor Loehe still benefits our churches through his hymns and other things he wrote, as well as his part in our Synod’s history.

I will stop my ramblings now. A blessed Easter season, in Christ’s name.