Maundy Thursday – Exodus 12:1-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26
Do you remember that time when Adam sat in his birthday cake? Or that wonderful story about the nativity set when I was five? Or cousin Joey, and the cheese, and that thing Grandma said that stopped everyone in their tracks? No? Well, let me tell you….
Last summer, when my brother got married, the wedding reception ended around midnight and I rode back to the hotel with my mother and some of our other family members. I was expecting to go directly to bed, as I had preached and presided over the wedding that day, and socializing with my brother and sister-in-law’s friends was an energy-sapping experience. Instead, I found myself being drawn back to my mother’s hotel room where she and others from my extended family would tell stories until the wee hours of the morning.
One of my aunts hates these story-telling experiences, because she feels left out. She married into the family in later years, and as a result, she wasn’t around for most of these stories, since the majority of them recollect times long, long gone. With my thirty-four years of life experience, I wasn’t around either when the remembered events took place. But I feel rather differently than her. For me, the remembering of these stories is more than just a recollection of something that happened long ago. In their retelling, my mother and aunts and cousins get to relive the experiences, and when I am there to hear them, I get to play, too. I become more than just a listener. I get to participate in the story as if I were there. Never mind that I never got to meet my mean old great-grandmother or my mother’s clumsy friends from high school. I feel like I know them. They become alive again in me.
Do you remember when we were slaves in Egypt? When God brought us to safety? No? Well let me tell you….
Three thousand years ago, the story goes, Moses carried the instructions for the first Passover to the Hebrews. The ones who had once been the celebrated guests of Egypt had, through the fortune of time, become slaves. Pharaoh had forgotten how they had gotten there. So the people cried out to God for help, and God sent them Moses. In order to convince Pharaoh to let them go, God had Moses initiate a series of plagues on the Egyptians, but none was quite bad enough to turn Pharaoh’s hard heart. So God prepared for the worst.
Moses told the people to eat a meal together, to take the blood of the lamb and use it to mark their doorways. That way, when the final plague went through Egypt, the Hebrews would be spared. It was through this final plague that God finally was able to save them. Pharaoh was convinced. He set the slaves free.
In John 8, Jesus speaks to a crowd about being set free. And they are shocked. “We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been slaves of anyone.” But of course, this is not true. John says this as a polemic against this group of Jews. The Hebrews have told and retold the story every year at Passover. Through this retelling, they relive the ancient story. It becomes theirs. Though all their lives they have never been slaves of anyone, they become slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt every Passover in the retelling of the story.
It’s strengthened even more by the ritual of it. The plagues are listed with a click of the finger and a dribble of wine. The youngest child asks why this night is different from all other nights, and the parents are able to draw the child and themselves more deeply into reliving the story by their explanation. Bitter herbs are eaten to remember the bitterness of their suffering, and wine is drunk, and the matzoh is searched for, and the whole of God’s work of salvation is remembered and relived.
“This shall be a day of remembrance for you,” Moses says. “You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual observance.”
I’ve always wondered why as Christians we disobey this command of God. The explanation I’ve heard always have something to do with Communion. And to be fair, it works much the same.
Do you remember when Jesus sat with us in the upper room and ate Passover with us? Those strange things he said to us about his flesh and blood? How Judas betrayed him, and how he died, and rose, and promised to come back?
Of course you do. We remember not just because we’ve heard the story. We’ve lived it out. Every Sunday morning when we gather around the table, we experience the whole story of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection once again. We don’t just know it. We live it.
When we wash each other’s feet today, we don’t just follow Jesus’ instructions. No, Jesus actually gets down on the floor in front of us, pours water our feet, wipes them with a towel. Jesus begins to fulfill his promise to come again, because he shows up here, is present with us. Jesus washes our feet, calls us servants and friends, and gives us his commandment to love one another. And we begin to live that commandment, too.
And then He moves to the meal. Jesus himself pours out wine for us, and calls it his blood. Jesus offers us the bread that is his body. And though we did not sit with the disciples those two thousand years ago, even so we take our place at the same table as Jesus feeds us with himself.
Jesus is present there with us. And just as the experience of the Passover is deepened by its ritual, so our ritual is deepened by Christ’s presence. With Jesus here, we don’t just eat his body and blood; we become his body and blood. We are the true body of Christ, present in the world, united with the ascended body of Christ at the right hand of the Father by the sacramental body that we eat and drink and share here. And through this mystic, sweet communion, the world is changed, as we learn to love another in a new and profound way.
All this through a little retelling of a story, gathered with friends and family? “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you,” Paul says. And it all happens, all over again.
Do you remember when we became the body of the living Christ here in the world? When we made it so our friends and neighbors could see and experience God’s presence here too? When the Holy Spirit changed the world through us? No? Well, let us go and tell the story together….
Amen.