Part 3: Broken Series

Good morning. Please turn in your Bibles to Luke 22, and put a bookmark in John 21.

Raise your hand if you have a junk drawer in your kitchen. What do you have in the junk drawer? Lids to containers you can’t find? The little hex wrench that came with a piece of furniture? Batteries. Oh yes. Batteries.

Now, raise your hand if you have a junk closet? A junk room? A junk corner of the garage? A junk shed?

Odds are you probably have piles of tools or furniture or lawn equipment that was once sparkly and new, but is now rusted or scratched, missing parts and knobs and handles. It’s on your list to fix. But you’ve got to find the right piece or talk to someone who knows. But you never get to it. And so it just sits there. Eventually, it’s just time to get rid of it.

That’s usually what happens to broken things. We purge them from our lives. They are no longer of any use to us. We throw them out. We put them in a yard sale. Or we put them in a drawer or lock them in a closet or shove them into a corner so that they don’t disrupt the decorating vibe we’re going for in the rest of the house.

Now, I don’t want you raising your hand for this one. But in your heart of hearts, how many of you feel like that is what your family and friends have done to you in your seasons of brokenness?

And again, I don’t want you raising your hand. But how many of you, in your heart of hearts, are afraid that that is what the family of God—the church—would do with you if they ever found out about your brokenness?

How many of you, in your heart of hearts, are terrified that that is what Jesus has already done with you because of your brokenness?

As we continue our series called “Blessed, Broken, Given,” we continue our journey through the gospel of Luke, looking at each time Jesus handled bread in the gospel of Luke. The first time is when Jesus fed the five thousand, he blessed the bread, broke the bread, and gave the bread.

This morning, we are going to look at the last night Jesus was with His disciples before He was crucified. But I don’t want to just look at the scene we call the Lord’s supper. I want to look at what happened immediately after that.

Luke 22, beginning in verse 19:

19 And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 20 And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.[

The occasion here is Passover, the feast which commemorates God’s rescue of Israel from Egypt and God’s judgment of evil. In short, Passover is when God dealt with sin and evil. God delivered His people by providing a covering of blood over their sins. That makes this passage the perfect place to talk about what Jesus does with our own brokenness.

The problem is, the disciples didn’t want to talk about their brokenness. It’s almost comical that at this point, after Jesus has said, this is my body, broken for you; after, according to John’s gospel, Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God, bent down and washed the feet of each disciple that was in that room, including Judas’s, verse 24 says,

24 A dispute also arose among them, as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest.

Are you kidding me? Jesus has JUST NOW SAID, “One of you sitting at the table, sharing in my broken body, is going to betray me.” Can you imagine? These guys are falling over each other to try to prove to Jesus that it couldn’t be them, because they are the greatest of his followers.

That’s when Jesus turns to Peter and says, (verse 31)

31 “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you,[d] that he might sift you like wheat, 32 but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.”

There’s three ways we talk about brokenness today, and we see the first one here.

First, we are broken because we are frail.

Something that isn’t immediately obvious in this passage, unless you know Greek, is that Jesus isn’t just talking about Simon Peter when He says that Satan has demanded permission to have you, that he might sift you like wheat.” In this verse, the “you” is plural. If Jesus spoke Southern, he would have said y’all.