Maundy Thursday; Reflections upon Eucharist and Passover

Maundy Thursday  April 12,2012     

Ex. 12:1-14a       Ps. 78:14-20, 23-25

1 Cor 11:23-32      John 13:1-15

 Lectionary Link

   I begin with a really bad joke which I’ve told over and over again but there is an obvious point about it.

The rabbi and the priest are talking together and the rabbi says, “Father, you Christians have stolen your religious beliefs and practices from Judaism.”  And the priest replied, “Rabbi, what do you mean?”  And the Rabbi said, “Well, take for example the 10 commandments; you’ve stolen them from us.”  And the priest relied, “Yes, rabbi, we did steal the 10 commandments, but we didn’t keep them.”

  The truth of our Christian origin is that we borrowed much from Judaism, but the punchline truth is that we haven’t kept what we borrowed from Judaism in the same ways in which Jews have kept to their ancient traditions and in the ways in which their own traditions have developed.

  This evening is Maundy Thursday and we commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist.  And we must know that the Holy Eucharist as it appears in the New Testament writing is not presented as a complete Seder or Passover meal.  The first reference to Holy Eucharist is in St. Paul’s writings in his writing about the Lord’s Table.  He found that the church in Corinth had so removed the lines between a meal with holy implications from an actual eating of a meal that the spiritual meaning of the meal was being lost or diminished or trivialized.  St. Paul told the people of the Corinthian church to eat at home before they came to the practice of Eucharist in the gathering so that they would discern the presence of Christ in partaking of the bread and wine.  St. Paul said that he received this tradition from the Lord himself, even though St. Paul never walked with Jesus.  We are told that the early Christian gathered on the first day of the week for the breaking of the bread and the prayers.

  The Eucharist on Maundy Thursday traces the normal practice of Sunday Eucharist back to a Passover time event.   One can find significant ways in which the Eucharist has departed from the Passover tradition.  Of the Passover meal, there are only two elements which remained; the bread and a single cup of wine.  The Eucharist is a weekly celebration on the first day of the week; the Passover was a once a year celebration and most often done with family and invited guests.  When there was a temple it there was a gathering at the Temple because Passover was an important pilgrimage time.   In the Passover meal there were and are prayers and recitations and the four questions which were part of the liturgy of the meal.  Yes, the Eucharist retains words of our salvation history and Jesus is regarded to be understood under the symbol of the Paschal Lamb, but the Eucharist is significantly removed in its identity from the Passover.  I think it best today to allow the Passover Seder to be observed by our Jewish brothers and sisters within the settings of their community.  We can note how our Christian origins involved a significant re-interpretation, re-editing and reduction of what we inherited from Judaism in our formation.   The best way to observe a Passover meal is to be privileged to accept an invitation from our Jewish brothers and sister and learn to understand and appreciate how the Passover tradition still remains for them a crucial root event for their identity as a community of people.

  At the same time we cannot deny that our founding apostles and early teachers understood the life of Jesus from the Hebraic roots of the Christian Gospel.  We “stolen” from the Hebraic roots in the development of Christian theology and practice, but we haven’t kept the theology and practices of Judaism in the ways in which the continuing Jewish communities have kept to their roots.

  I do not think that we want to return to a literalism about a Paschal Lamb.  The Paschal Lamb as the main course of a meal which celebrates a covenant relationship is based upon understanding that God is a God who would kill all oldest sons except for the families with inside information about how to avoid it.  The Israelites had insider instructions to eat the substitutionary Passover lamb, whose blood was on the door post of the homes, because presumably the angels of death would avoid those homes.  The same Hebrew people who had this Passover story also had prophets who proclaimed that God did not want the blood of animals; God wanted the living sacrifice of lives willing to love mercy, practice justice and walk humbly before God.

   The life of Jesus was a living sacrifice, a gift of God’s most intimate presence to us.  His love of mercy, justice and his humble walk brought him to be killed on the cross.

  And so the early Christians believed that the living sacrificial life of Jesus could continue to be in each person and the profound remembrance of this sacrificial presence was known in the bread and the wine, in the feast of the renewal of the remembrance of Christ’s sacrificial presence.

  When Jesus took the role of a servant in washing feet he was exemplifying how the Paschal lamb was to be known in living a life of loving service.  Loving service is how we express being living sacrifices.

   Let us be thankful for the Passover tradition tonight.  Let us be thankful for the integrity of this tradition which is still observed by our Jewish brothers and sisters.

  Let us freely acknowledge how our Christian identity has grown out of the Hebrew-Judaic traditions and let us share with them the notion of dynamic remembrance.  In the Passover meal, the Jews believe that the power of salvation which was present in the Passover deliverance is a power that can be known as they are renewed by the very same saving power today.

  We as Christian believe that the power of the life, death, resurrection of Christ and the Holy Spirit of God are celebrated and dynamically remembered in the Eucharist which we believe is a gift to us by Christ as being the most intimate expression of the social reality of the gathered church.

  Tonight we gather to give thanks, for Thanksgiving, because Eucharist is an act of thanksgiving for the saving power of Christ which is able to inhabit each of us and help us to be living sacrifices for God and each other.  Amen.