MAUNDY THURSDAY

April 3, 2023

Christ Episcopal Church, Woodbury, N. J.

 

Exodus 12:1-14a

I Corinthians 11:23-26

 

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. Our Old Testament reading from Exodus recounts the institution of the Passover meal, known in Judaism as the Seder. 

 

According to three of the four canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—the Last Supper was a Passover Meal. Jesus sends his disciples to the upper room in Jerusalem to prepare the Passover, and they gather that evening after sundown for the meal itself. 

 

The Gospel of John, by contrast, describes the Last Supper as taking place a day earlier. 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 nearby Temple precincts.

 

Scholars have debated which of the two accounts is accurate. Either way, the Last Supper takes place when Jesus and his disciples have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to keep the feast. Passover is in the air. And for all four Gospel writers, Passover supplies the wider field of meaning illuminating not only the Last Supper but also the unfolding drama of the Lord’s betrayal, arrest, trial, suffering, and death.

 

Our reading from Exodus recounts God’s instructions to the Israelites for the first Passover. Despite a series of nine terrible plagues, the Egyptian Pharaoh has persisted in refusing Moses’ repeated demands to let the people go. Before sending the tenth and most terrible plague of all, the death of all the firstborn sons throughout the land, God instructs that the head of each Hebrew household slaughter a lamb and smear some of its blood on the house’s doorposts. The lamb is to be roasted and eaten that night, with nothing left over. Then, when the angel of death traverses the land and sees the blood on the doorposts, he will pass over that house, sparing its firstborn.

 

This last dreadful plague finally persuades Pharaoh to relent and let the people go. For the Israelites, then, the Passover lamb becomes the sign of deliverance and salvation. However, the Passover meal is not left as a one-off event. The Israelites continued to keep Passover, year by year, as the annual commemoration of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt. 

 

Some Old Testament scholars have suggested that down through the centuries this annual celebration was not merely an occasion of piously recalling events from the distant past, but rather a means of dynamically re-appropriating and re-experiencing those events in the present. Subsequent generations of Jews may not have lived through the Exodus themselves, but by re-enacting those events liturgically they became one with their ancestors, and so were reconstituted as God’s people Israel in the present. This mysterious quality of the Passover commemoration is conveyed in the Seder’s opening words, spoken by the youngest child present: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The child represents, of course, all the future generations who are to be incorporated into God’s chosen people by their liturgical participation in the long-ago events of their deliverance from Egypt.

 

The Greek word for this transformation of time is anamnesis, the making-present of past events, which translates rather lamely into English as “remembrance.” Saint Paul uses precisely this same word in rendering the words of Jesus at the Last Supper: “Do this in remembrance of me.” In Greek: do this for my anamnesis. A better translation might be: Do this to make me present; Do this to recall me into your midst.

 

Earlier in the same letter, Paul has explicitly likened Jesus to the Passover lamb in words that we adapt at the Breaking of the Bread at 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” explicitly invokes the matzo bread used in the Passover meal.)

 

At the Last Supper, moreover, Jesus takes up and transforms powerful religious symbols inherited from the past. Until now, the Passover lamb has functioned as a sign of God’s deliverance of his people from bondage in Egypt. (And so it continues in Judaism, for God’s covenant with Israel is irrevocable and remains in force until the end of time.) But in the Christian dispensation, Jesus himself becomes the new Passover Lamb, the sacrificial victim whose death delivers all people everywhere from the power of sin and death for all time and beyond.

 

During the meal, Jesus adds new words to the familiar blessings said over the bread and the wine, investing them 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. The Lord’s body will be nailed to the cross and his blood will be poured out. Obscure as these words may be when Jesus speaks them, his disciples will later remember and understand: Yes, it’s what he said at the supper the night before about his body and his blood! His words not only predict but they also interpret his death—not an ignominious and meaningless defeat, but the inauguration of a new covenant in his blood.

 

Second, his words prescribe 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, this pattern will define the Church’s life: meeting together weekly and even daily to break the bread and share the cup, thus perpetually setting forth the Lord’s sacrificial death for our salvation.

 

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 with gratitude and love for the Jewish people, our “elder brothers and sisters in the faith” as Pope John Paul II so memorably called them, who celebrated their Passover Seder yesterday. 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 in his Name.