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| Marc Chagall, The Israelites Eating the Passover Lamb, 1931 |
The events we commemorate on Maundy Thursday, and indeed throughout the coming three days, all take place within the context of the Jewish celebration of Passover in Jerusalem. This evening’s Old Testament reading from Exodus recounts the institution of the Passover meal, known in contemporary Judaism as the Seder.
According to three of the four canonical Gospels, the Last Supper was a Passover Meal. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus sends his disciples to the upper room to prepare the Passover on the First Day of Unleavened Bread, the day when the Passover lambs are being slaughtered, and that evening after sundown they gather for the meal itself.
The Gospel of John, by contrast, describes the Last Supper as taking place a day earlier, “before the Passover,” with the crucifixion of Jesus happening on the First Day of Passover. John, it seems, wants to emphasize that Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross occur on the same day that the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple nearby.
Down through the centuries, scholars have debated which of the two accounts is accurate. Either way, the Last Supper takes place when Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem to keep the feast. Passover, with all its connotations and associations, is “in the air.” And for all four Gospel writers, the feast of Passover supplies the wider context of meaning illuminating not only the Last Supper but also the unfolding drama of the Lord’s subsequent betrayal, arrest, trial, suffering, and death.
Our reading from Exodus rehearses God’s instructions to the Israelites for keeping the first Passover. Despite a series of nine terrible plagues, Pharaoh has persisted in refusing Moses’ repeated demands to let the people go. About to send the tenth and most terrible plague of all, the death of the firstborn sons throughout the land, God instructs the Israelites that the head of each household must slaughter a lamb and smear some of its blood on the doorposts of the house. The lamb is to be roasted and eaten that night, with nothing left over. Then, when the angel of death goes through the land and sees the blood on the doorposts, he will pass over that house and spare its firstborn.
This last plague finally persuades Pharaoh to relent and let the people go. For the Israelites, then, the Passover lamb becomes a sign of deliverance and salvation. However, the Passover meal is not left as a one-off event. The books of the Old Testament record that the Israelites continued to keep Passover, year by year, as the annual commemoration of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt.
A number of biblical scholars have suggested that this annual celebration of Passover was not merely an occasion of piously recalling events that remained confined to the distant past, but rather a means of dynamically re-appropriating and re-experiencing those events in the present. Subsequent generations of Jews did not live through the Exodus from Egypt, but, in a way that is difficult for the modern western mind to understand, by re-enacting those events liturgically they became one with their ancestors who did, and so were reconstituted as God’s people Israel. This mysterious quality of the Passover commemoration is conveyed in the opening words of the Seder, spoken by the youngest child present: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The child represents, of course, the future generations who are to be incorporated into the people of Israel by liturgical participation in the long-ago events of the Exodus.
The Greek word for this sort of transformation of time is anamnesis, the making-present of past events, which translates rather lamely into English as “remembrance.” And Saint Paul uses precisely this same word in rendering the words of Jesus at the Last Supper over the bread and the wine: “Do this in remembrance of me.” In Greek: do this for my anamnesis. A better translation might be: Do this to make me present among you; Do this to recall me into your midst.
Earlier in the same letter, Paul explicitly likens Jesus to the Passover lamb in words that we repeat at the Breaking of the Bread at almost every Eucharist: “Christ, our Paschal lamb has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (Paul’s reference there to “unleavened bread” similarly refers to the matzo bread used in the Passover meal.)
At the Last Supper, Jesus transforms powerful religious symbols inherited from the past. Up until now, the Passover lamb has functioned as a sign of God’s deliverance of his people from slavery. But now Jesus himself becomes the new Passover Lamb, the sacrificial victim whose death delivers his people from the power of sin and death for all time and beyond. More than that, Jesus fulfills the symbolism by showing himself to be the true Passover Lamb, the ultimate sacrificial offering towards which the Passover Meal was always pointing.
During the course of the meal, Jesus invests the familiar elements of bread and wine with new meaning: This is my body; this is my blood. In the context of the Last Supper, these mysterious words have a double significance. First, they predict what’s going to happen the next day. Jesus will die on the cross and his blood will be poured out. Obscure as these words are when he speaks them, his disciples will afterwards be able to remember and understand: Yes, what was it that he said at the supper about his body and his blood? His words not only predict but also interpret his coming death. It is not an ignominious and ultimately meaningless defeat, but rather the inauguration of a new covenant in his blood.
Second, his words set the pattern that his disciples are to follow henceforth until the end of time: “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup,” writes Paul, “you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” From now on, the life of the Church will be defined by this pattern: meeting together weekly and even daily to break the bread and share the cup, and so partake of the Body and Blood of Christ.
On Maundy Thursday, then, we give thanks for our Lord’s gift of himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. We remember with gratitude the Eucharist’s origins in the Passover meal, which Jesus celebrated faithfully throughout his life. We pray for the Jewish people, our “elder brothers and sisters in faith” as Pope John Paul II called them, who will be celebrating the Passover Seder at this time tomorrow evening. And we rejoice that Jesus is our Passover lamb, who feeds us with his own Body and Blood every time we gather to break the bread and share the cup.
This last plague finally persuades Pharaoh to relent and let the people go. For the Israelites, then, the Passover lamb becomes a sign of deliverance and salvation. However, the Passover meal is not left as a one-off event. The books of the Old Testament record that the Israelites continued to keep Passover, year by year, as the annual commemoration of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt.
A number of biblical scholars have suggested that this annual celebration of Passover was not merely an occasion of piously recalling events that remained confined to the distant past, but rather a means of dynamically re-appropriating and re-experiencing those events in the present. Subsequent generations of Jews did not live through the Exodus from Egypt, but, in a way that is difficult for the modern western mind to understand, by re-enacting those events liturgically they became one with their ancestors who did, and so were reconstituted as God’s people Israel. This mysterious quality of the Passover commemoration is conveyed in the opening words of the Seder, spoken by the youngest child present: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The child represents, of course, the future generations who are to be incorporated into the people of Israel by liturgical participation in the long-ago events of the Exodus.
The Greek word for this sort of transformation of time is anamnesis, the making-present of past events, which translates rather lamely into English as “remembrance.” And Saint Paul uses precisely this same word in rendering the words of Jesus at the Last Supper over the bread and the wine: “Do this in remembrance of me.” In Greek: do this for my anamnesis. A better translation might be: Do this to make me present among you; Do this to recall me into your midst.
Earlier in the same letter, Paul explicitly likens Jesus to the Passover lamb in words that we repeat at the Breaking of the Bread at almost every Eucharist: “Christ, our Paschal lamb has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (Paul’s reference there to “unleavened bread” similarly refers to the matzo bread used in the Passover meal.)
At the Last Supper, Jesus transforms powerful religious symbols inherited from the past. Up until now, the Passover lamb has functioned as a sign of God’s deliverance of his people from slavery. But now Jesus himself becomes the new Passover Lamb, the sacrificial victim whose death delivers his people from the power of sin and death for all time and beyond. More than that, Jesus fulfills the symbolism by showing himself to be the true Passover Lamb, the ultimate sacrificial offering towards which the Passover Meal was always pointing.
During the course of the meal, Jesus invests the familiar elements of bread and wine with new meaning: This is my body; this is my blood. In the context of the Last Supper, these mysterious words have a double significance. First, they predict what’s going to happen the next day. Jesus will die on the cross and his blood will be poured out. Obscure as these words are when he speaks them, his disciples will afterwards be able to remember and understand: Yes, what was it that he said at the supper about his body and his blood? His words not only predict but also interpret his coming death. It is not an ignominious and ultimately meaningless defeat, but rather the inauguration of a new covenant in his blood.
Second, his words set the pattern that his disciples are to follow henceforth until the end of time: “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup,” writes Paul, “you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” From now on, the life of the Church will be defined by this pattern: meeting together weekly and even daily to break the bread and share the cup, and so partake of the Body and Blood of Christ.
On Maundy Thursday, then, we give thanks for our Lord’s gift of himself to us in the Holy Eucharist. We remember with gratitude the Eucharist’s origins in the Passover meal, which Jesus celebrated faithfully throughout his life. We pray for the Jewish people, our “elder brothers and sisters in faith” as Pope John Paul II called them, who will be celebrating the Passover Seder at this time tomorrow evening. And we rejoice that Jesus is our Passover lamb, who feeds us with his own Body and Blood every time we gather to break the bread and share the cup.
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