Maundy Thursday 

"A Different Night"

The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams

“Why is this night different from all other nights?” So begins the Seder, the Passover meal, celebrated yesterday by Jews throughout the world, as it has been for thousands of years. Betsy and I were privileged to celebrate Passover last night in a Jewish/Christian home along with some 35 university students. It was a moving experience of our common roots as well as a celebration of God’s powerful deliverance.

The foundation of the feast is found in tonight’s first reading from Exodus. In preparation for their liberation, brought on by the angel of death passing over their houses because of the blood of the lamb on their doorposts, Moses and his people were to eat this ceremonial meal. In time it became an annual remembrance of God’s intentional saving power in delivering the Jews from the bonds of slavery and a re-articulation in a ceremonial meal of their identity as God’s chosen people.

As Christians we can ask the same question on Maundy Thursday, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Tonight we commemorate Jesus’ transformation of the Passover meal, according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, by taking and blessing and breaking the unleavened bread and giving it and the cup of blessing to his followers, declaring it to be his body and blood. The early Christians continued in this breaking of the bread, understanding it not only as a defining ritual, but as a life-giving mystery in which they encountered God’s saving presence. This repeated action connected them with the living Jesus and with one another. It made present again the incarnate reality of the transcendent God and Jesus’ liberating them from sin and death. As Paul instructed the early Christians in Corinth, in tonight’s second reading, “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (I. Cor 11:26).

The gift of the Eucharist has come down to us through countless generations of Christians. It strengthens us and draws us into the Divine presence and sustains us for service in God’s name. To celebrate Eucharist is much more than to recite some ancient words and to eat a fragment of bread and to sip from the cup of wine and then to go away unaffected. The Eucharist is rooted in the mystery of the Incarnation, God becoming present among us in the person of Jesus, a man of flesh and blood. Unlike his heavenly Father, the Creator of heaven and earth, people could and did touch Jesus. They reached out to him to be healed, to feel his blessing, to hold him, to wash his feet with tears of repentance. They also, of course, as we will hear tomorrow, betrayed him with a kiss, whipped him, spit on him, crucified him. While in a very real sense, after Jesus’ ascension to the Father, that tangible presence has been no longer available to us to love or to reject, in a sacramental sense, it is available. Through our faithful obedience to Jesus’ command, through the physical, earthly, human act of eating and drinking his body broken for us and his blood poured out for us, we are drawn into the spiritual, heavenly, divine realm of life and union with the unseen God.

We may not be any more at ease with partaking of the Eucharist than we are with obeying Jesus’ other command on this special night, found in our Gospel reading, to imitate him by washing each other’s feet. We may find it all unsettling. Or if we do regularly participate in communion, we may do so mainly out of habit or social pressure, unwilling to attach the same importance and meaning that Jesus gave it. We are not always comfortable in grounding our faith in the physical realm. We prefer to intellectualize or spiritualize our belief, focusing on abstract religious truths. “One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making,” says Frederick Buechner, “is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.” But God’s primary spiritual acts are all expressed in the physical realm: creation, the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the Eucharist, Jesus’ washing the feet of his disciples and commanding them to do the same. God’s love is manifest in the material and temporal, and through that physical realm, we as God’s creatures are connected to the spiritual and eternal.

“He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him,” Jesus instructed his disciples. Jesus abides in us. Just as the blessed bread and wine enter into us and become part of us so that they can no longer be distinguished from us, so too does Jesus enter into us and become part of us. What an amazing thought! “Abide” means to dwell in, to remain with, to find a home with. Jesus lives continually in us. What a difference that should make in our lives, in the way we treat others, in our patience with ourselves, in our hope in the midst of difficulty.

And we abide in Jesus. In the incarnational sacrament of the Eucharist, in eating and drinking “the Body of Christ, the bread of heaven” and “the Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation,” we are, if you will, swallowed up into the Body of Christ, where, in the words of the Prayer Book, we "are united one to another, and the living to the dead.” We become part of something much larger than ourselves, something that far transcends all our limitations, all our sins, all our petty faults and self-preoccupation. We abide in Jesus Christ and become part of his Body, physically and sacramentally connected with the saving Jesus and with one another.

“What makes this night different from all other nights?” Tonight Jesus gives us the gift of himself, the expression and means of continuing life, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. Jesus, who became flesh for us, nourishes us corporeal beings with his own physical and mystical presence, unites us to his victory over the slavery of sin and death, and promises to raise us up at the last day. As often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again.

Exodus 112:1-4, 11-14; I Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35