Maundy Thursday

Ecclesiasticus 51:1-8
Psalm 78:14-20, 23-25
Exodus 12:1-14a
1 Corinthians 11:23-32
Luke 22:14-30

+ In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

In his book A Life of Jesus, Japanese writer Shusaku Endo begins his chapter on Jesus’ last night as a free man this way: “The time had finally come. It was Thursday.”1 For Christians the world over, Thursday of Holy Week begins the Sacred Triduum, the celebration of the Three Great Days, a single liturgy that begins on the evening of Maundy Thursday and runs through Good Friday and the first mass of Easter on the night of Holy Saturday.2 Tonight Christians commemorate what happened on that particular Thursday in Jerusalem two millennia ago. We call this Thursday “Maundy,” from the Latin mandatum, where we get our word “mandate” or “commandment,” because the account of this night in John’s gospel includes Jesus’ new commandment to his disciples to love each other as he had loved them (John 13:34). To love like Jesus meant they had to serve each other, and he demonstrated his love to them by washing their feet, which we will reenact together tonight. But Thursday also recalls the Last Supper, a meal that would become “the central act of worship”3 for the Christian community. This raises a question: Why is the distinctive celebration of the worldwide Christian community a commemoration of a dying man’s words at his last meal? To find an answer let’s look at what the meal probably was, then at what the dying man said and did there that Thursday.

(1) First, the meal wasn’t just any meal. In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, it was the Passover supper, a meal that composes part of an annual Jewish religious festival. There’s some dispute about whether it was the night Passover began or the night before Passover began, but Jesus did say in Luke 22:15: “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer,”4 so the meal held deep religious significance. What was Passover? The Passover celebration commemorated the singular event in the history of Israel, their deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Israel had been invited down to Egypt to save them from a famine, but they multiplied there until they became a thorn in Pharaoh’s side. It was a thorn Pharaoh couldn’t bear to remove because Israelite labor fueled Egypt’s economy. So Pharaoh made the Israelites slaves, and God’s liberation of his people in the Exodus began with a series of plagues that fell upon Egypt. Exodus 11 recounts the final one, the plague on the firstborn. Moses tells Pharaoh that at midnight on a certain day, God’s justice will fall in Egypt, and because Pharaoh had enslaved God’s firstborn, every firstborn son in every house will die, from the prince of Egypt all the way down to the lowest slave, and even the livestock.

But God’s justice is not partial, and under it all people stand condemned, not just the Egyptians. In The Unfolding Mystery, Edmund Clowney writes: “Israel, too, was a sinful people. The firstborn sons of Israel were also under the threat of the angel of death. In order that the sons of Israel might not die, God provided the ordinance of the Passover lamb,”5 which was tonight’s Old Testament reading. Every Israelite family was to take a lamb without blemish and, at midnight, slaughter it, consume the meat, and mark the doorframes of their home with its blood. The blood would be a sign that God will see, and death will “spring over” or “pass over” that house.

When Jesus wanted to sear into the minds and hearts of his disciples the importance of the death he knew he was about to die, he didn’t give a presentation, he didn’t give bullet points, he didn’t even tell a parable – he acted a parable and called them to a table, to this meal shot through with symbolism of liberation and redemption and forgiveness.

(2) Second point: It’s not just the meal itself, but what Jesus said and did at the meal that was remarkable. Jesus took the form of this meal, and he filled it with himself. At various points during the meal, or “seder,” the host told the Exodus story and explained the symbolism of the elements (bread, wine, parsley, lamb),6 but on this night Jesus didn’t say “This is the bread of our affliction which our ancestors ate when they came from Egypt,” as was the custom; he said “This is my body, given for you.” After supper, he passed the traditional cup of blessing, but he cryptically remarked “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.”

Dr. Timothy Keller even makes much of something the gospels do not say about the meal:

When Jesus Christ got up to bless the food that night, it was the weirdest Passover in history. You know why? When he blesses the food, you can see what foods he blessed: There’s the bread, and all Passover meals have bread; and there’s the wine, and all Passover meals have wine. But not one of the gospels ever talks about there being present a main course. There’s no mention of a lamb being there. Well, that’s stupid, what kind of meal is this without a main course? Why wasn’t there a lamb there? And, of course, you know why, don’t you? There was no lamb on the table because the Lamb of God was at the table. Jesus Christ was the main course. And that’s the reason why when John the Baptist saw Jesus Christ for the first time he said “Behold, the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sin of the world.”7

I have no doubt the disciples had no idea what was going on in front of them as Jesus took a familiar ritual action and reinterpreted it in light of what he now knew waited for him just hours away. Bread, wine, the Passover lamb – symbols rich in texture and meaning, all swirling around that Thursday night in Jerusalem. These symbols swirl around us still, and however deep and impenetrable the mystery of the Last Supper, Jesus’ invitation remains: “Take it, and remember me.” Take it and remember that Jesus loved his friends to the end, even unto death. Take it, and remember that forgiveness always waits at Jesus’ table. Take it, and remember how Jesus’ sacrifice of himself as God’s lamb holds out to all of us the hope of liberation, not just from slavery but from sin and death. Take it, and remember the Thursday when the time had finally come.

Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; therefore, let us keep the feast.

+ In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. Shusaku Endo, A Life of Jesus (New York: Paulist, 1978): 113.

2. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3d ed. (Oxford: University Press, 2005): 1652.

3. Ibid., p. 570

4. Cf. Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Continuum, 1945): 50. Dix opines “Our Lord instituted the eucharist (sic) at a supper with his disciples which was probably not the Passover supper of that year, but the evening meal twenty-four hours before the actual Passover.” However, he concludes “the last supper was a jewish (sic) ‘religious meal’ of some kind.” Ibid.

5. Edmund P. Clowney, The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament (Phillipsburg, N.J., P&R Publishing, 1988): 53.

6. For a very general outline, see <http://www.jewfaq.org/holidaya.htm> (last visited 5 April 2007).

7. From “Supper With Friends,” a sermon preached by Timothy J. Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City on February 4, 2007.