Christ is arisen! Is the exclamatory sentence for all Christendom that evokes the response, "He is risen, indeed! Alleluia"" It also is thematic of our little gallery: Pic #1 is the Greek icon labeled at the top in Greek, "The Resurrection"; Pic #2 is a guarantee, by ancient Roman marble dealers, that the marble contains no wax, Sin Cera, from which the English word "sincere" comes; Pic #3 is "faith" which continually gives us access to God's grace and His truth about life and salvation; and, Pic #4 shows us the truth about life and salvation in Christ Jesus, which Christendom believes and celebrates this day in all sincerity.
This brings me to my address for this morning:
“In Sincerity and Truth, Celebrate the Passover of God”
1 Corinthians 5:6-8 “Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (NKJV)
My Christian Friends: “Your glorying is not good” says St. Paul. Glorying in what? The Corinthian church was here arrogantly permitting sexual immorality among them instead of warning and purging themselves of such conduct. But sexual misconduct is only one sin that constitutes “leaven” in the Scriptures.
Therefore, we will this morning speak about celebrating Easter with sincerity and truth, and what the conduct for a Christian will be throughout the seven-day festival. Christians will first of all come to an understanding of why St. Paul would use such terms as “leaven” and “Passover”
The word “Easter” is used only in the King James translation of the Aramaic word, Pascha, or “Passover”. Acts Chapter 12:1-4 reads: Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to vex certain of the church. 2) And he killed James the brother of John with the sword. 3) And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to take Peter also. (Then were the days of unleavened bread.) 4) And when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.
Please don’t be disturbed by the old English term “Easter” just because it also has a pagan connotation for the goddess of fertility. Jesus is often referred to as the Sun as well as Son. Why? Eastre (Northumbrian Eostre) is from the Germanic austron “dawn,” which was also the name of the goddess of fertility and spring, originally of sunrise, whose feast was celebrated at the spring equinox, from aust “east” toward the sunrise, just as the brightness of day first appears in the East at the breaking of dawn. Bede, also known as the Venerable Bede, who died in 735 AD, had a lot to write about the term Easter. He was an English Benedictine monk at the monastery of St. Peter and its companion monastery of St. Paul in the Kingdom of Northumbria.
Listen, the Passover was celebrated by all the Hebrew families living in the Land of Goshen in Egypt when the Lord was to send His angel of death to strike down the first born in all Egypt. And there were many Passover lambs as were many families. Exodus 12:21-23 records: “Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel and said to them, ‘Pick out and take lambs for yourselves according to your families and kill the Passover lamb. And you shall take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood that is in the basin. And none of you shall go out of the door of his house until morning. For the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians; and when He sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door and not allow the destroyer to come into your houses to strike you.’”
So it is that St. Paul, in our Epistle for this Easter Sunday, prefigures the real and true Passover Lamb who is to be the sacrifice once and for all for sinful man. This Passover Lamb who was slain for sinners, who became sin so that the sinful might become the righteousness of God, now reigns forever from His Father's throne in heaven. Therefore, this Passover, first given to Moses in Exodus 12, indeed becomes a feast celebrated forever. As it is written in Exodus 12:24, “And you shall observe this thing as an ordinance for you and your sons forever.”
It was on the ecclesiastical time of Maundy Thursday that Jesus Himself celebrated the Passover feast as it was given to Moses. It was the very next day, on Good Friday, that Jesus Himself became the real Passover Lamb! And later John saw Jesus as the Lamb that was once slain, alive on the throne with His Father, and all creatures, everywhere, blessed and praised the Lamb saying, “Blessing and honor and glory and power be to Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, forever and ever!” (Rev. 5:13) We are to be true Christians in character with the New Testament and the New Covenant which supplanted the Old Covenant found in the Law and Prophets and Writings in the Old Testament. That means that we are to be sincere, without hypocrisy, in our Christian religion.
The word “sincere” in the Greek is eilikrineia, sun-bright, or manifested pure. The English etymology of the word “sincere” comes from the Latin that means “without wax.” For in ancient Rome, many merchants dealing in marble would fill in the imperfections of the marble with wax in hopes of deceiving the buyer. So that the buyer of the marble might have the guarantee that their product is what it says it is, the merchant would give a bill of sales with the words, sin and cera, without wax or without pretense, pure and unaffected. Just so is to be our religion as we celebrate Easter, as it is written, “For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Ephesians 6:24, also uses the word, “Grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. Amen.”
Luther teaches on Malachi 4:2 “And the Sun of righteousness will rise for you who fear.” Luther speaks about the sincerity, which is manifested by the brightness of the sunlight regarding righteousness and justification: “In the Mosaic kingdom there is pure darkness. All things are hidden in mystery and are confused. Then the wicked will be separated from the righteous by something shining—obviously, by the open truth of God through the Gospel of Christ. Here you see the kingdom of Christ again described in such a way that it is the ministry of the Word. He is saying: ‘Indeed, a new Sun will shine, and it is not that sun which also animals see. It is the Sun of righteousness, who JUSTIFIES, who sends out the sort of rays that make men righteous and free from their sins, who drives out every harmful attitude of fleshly lust.’ Those rays are the Word of the Gospel, which penetrates hearts and is seen as that Sun only by the eyes of the heart, that is, BY FAITH. It is closer to the righteous than is that visible, physical sun. You see, it shines by the Holy Spirit. It shines day and night. Clouds do not hinder it. It is always rising. ‘It will rise for those of you who fear’—who fear the name of God, obviously; that is, the humble, those who are not presumptuous, those who do not trust in their own works but recognize that they are sinners.”
Just as the Hebrews the night that first day of unleavened bread, the Jews were to put out of their houses all the leaven they had and then not have any leaven for seven days within their houses. This leaven for the New Testament Christian must be spiritualized to represent any form of sin the Christian may hold within his body. It not only represents sexual immorality but also any form of false doctrine. St. Paul tells us to utterly purge ourselves of all leaven so we can celebrate the Passover (Easter), "with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth" (1 Cor.5:8). It is to this point that Christians, who are called to celebrate the Passover, are exhorted to act in the right way toward Easter by spiritually purging out all the old leaven. For St. Paul reminds us in verse 6, “that a little leaven leavens the whole lump.”
As far as the Corinthian Church was concerned, a despicable sexual impurity surely was infecting the whole congregation, even those who thought themselves morally upright or refused to believe that such a thing was happening in their church. Even they were called to purge themselves of such leaven. But don’t take this matter the wrong way as some Christians do. Paul is telling the church to not to associate with anyone who calls himself a brother and is sexually immoral; not to disassociate oneself from doing business in the world with the sexual impure, drunkards, and so forth, for then you would have to go out of the world in order to do business...and we know how impracticable that would be. The little leaven that leavens the whole lump in the Galatian Church was, however, to be gotten rid of and purged.
This leaven dealt with impure doctrine where the Jews were saying that Gentiles had to be circumcised in order to become a follower of Christ. Here St. Paul says, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but faith working through love.” Then Paul reminds them how much the old leaven is dangerous: “You ran well” he tells the Galatians, “Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion does not come from Him who calls you. A little leaven leavens the whole lump.” (Galatians 5:6-9).
Luther gives a great common illustration of the infusion of false doctrine. He says: “Just as good wine or precious medicines are corrupted by a single drop of poison or other impurity, and the pure they are, the more readily defiled and poisoned; so, also God’s Word and His cause will bear absolutely no alloy. God’s truth must be perfectly pure and clear, or else, it is corrupt and unprofitable. And the worst feature of the matter is, the sway and intrenchment of evil is so strong that it cannot be removed; just as leaven, however small the quantity, added to the lump, while it is impossible to arrest its influence or once more to sweeten the dough.”
We simply don’t have all these things, neither do we covet them, because we no longer desire to associate with the papistic church with its works righteousness, or the many government approved liberal churches with their “Social Justice” and “Critical Race Theory” and any other teachings that come from Karl Marx who was for atheistic Communism what St. Paul is to Christianity. Just where are those church bodies now and what will be their end?
The list can go on and on but let it be known that if “studying” any of these impure issues means tolerating them within the Church, then the leaven of unrighteousness has already infected the whole lump and purging it is the only cure. Throw the impure leaven out!
For the feast we are to keep envelopes the entire life of the Christian and is not affected by changes in the world regarding morality or religious doctrine. As Christ Himself taught us, “No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away the garment, and the tear is made worse. Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” (Matt 9:16-17).
You cannot mix the Teutonic goddess of fertility, Eoster, with the risen Christ; neither can you mix your worship of the one true God while in the midst of the immoralities and teachings of this world, what the Bible calls the doctrines of the “Nicolaitans” (Revelation 2:6f, 15). Such churches are self-deceived much like Pontius Pilate who once said to Jesus, “What is truth?”
Truth, for insincere Christians, is relative. Truth, for insincere Christians doesn’t disturb the status quo but rather is most willing to change as society changes. Truth, however, for the children of God is sincere because they are personally related to the Truth, their elder Brother, Jesus Christ who is the Sun of Righteousness.
In the Easter hymn, by Thomas Kingo, is his beautiful poetry of verse 1: “Like the golden sun ascending Breaking through the gloom of night, On the earth his glory spending So the darkness takes to flight. Thus my Jesus from the grave And Death’s dismal, dreadful cave Rose triumphant Easter morning At the early purple dawning.”
If your Easter celebration is to be sincere you can no longer be in fellowship with darkness but confess Jesus Christ, as the very Sun of righteousness. Look now how Paul encourages, through the Gospel message, the proper conduct for a child of God, a Christian. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:11, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.”
You must, just as sure as Christ was the true Passover Lamb, look at yourselves as being pure for His name’s sake and refrain from mixing what is unholy with that which is indeed holy, namely Christ Jesus.
Listen to what Jesus tells you in John 15:3, namely, “You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you.” And, again, isn’t it the very Easter message that Christ was put to death for your sins but that He was also raised again for your justification? In other words, you are holy now as Christ is holy. His purity and righteous He has imputed to you; Christ has covered your sins with His precious blood and has indeed risen from the dead that you may never taste the pains of the second death of eternal hell. Heaven has won the day for all who believe, and hell has been vanquished forever. Hallelujah! Amen.
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