On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Where do you want us to prepare for you to eat the Passover meal?”
18 He replied, “Go into the city, to a certain man, and say, ‘The teacher says, “My time is near. I’m going to celebrate the Passover with my disciples at your house.”’” 19 The disciples did just as Jesus instructed them. They prepared the Passover.
20 That evening he took his place at the table with the twelve disciples. 21 As they were eating he said, “I assure you that one of you will betray me.”
22 Deeply saddened, each one said to him, “I’m not the one, am I, Lord?”
23 He replied, “The one who will betray me is the one who dips his hand with me into this bowl. 24 The Human One[b] goes to his death just as it is written about him. But how terrible it is for that person who betrays the Human One![c] It would have been better for him if he had never been born.”
25 Now Judas, who would betray him, replied, “It’s not me, is it, Rabbi?”
Jesus answered, “You said it.”
26 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, “Take and eat. This is my body.” 27 He took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, “Drink from this, all of you. 28 This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many so that their sins may be forgiven. 29 I tell you, I won’t drink wine again until that day when I drink it in a new way with you in my Father’s kingdom.” 30 Then, after singing songs of praise, they went to the Mount of Olives. (CEB)
Maundy Thursday 2020
The minimalist scene was somber at a place that under ordinary circumstances would be filled to the brim with reverent pilgrims seeking a bit of sacredness at one of the most prominent holy sites in all of Christian tradition. As the final cleric exited the church, its gatekeeper ascended a small ladder to swing across the hinge that locked the ancient church’s doors before affixing its lock, descending the ladder, doing the same with a second lock at ground level, and walking away by himself.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, which I remember having the blessing to visit when I was in seminary and being just in awe of it, was officially closed this past week for the first time since the bubonic plague pandemic of the 1300s, nearly seven hundred years ago. This time, it was closed for another pandemic—the coronavirus we are all sheltering in place from today.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is governed by six different Christian denominations—primarily the Roman Catholic, Armenian Apostolic, and Greek Orthodox churches, and secondarily the Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, and Syriac Orthodox churches. Because the sects have a long and storied past of squabbling with each other over their guardianship of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, for many centuries now the keys to the church have been kept by a Sunni Muslim family, handed down from generation to generation, in an uncommon and unconventional covenant to try to help keep the peace in a land that is not often known for peace.
And sometimes, that is what is needed for the betterment of humanity before God—the uncommon and unconventional, something not experienced in our lifetimes, so that as many people as possible might be spared. It is why we are filming today in an empty sanctuary to all of you in your homes, and it is a lesson that is, I think, written all over the story of the Last Supper in the Gospels—if we know where to look.
Matthew describes the Last Supper as the Passover meal, a tradition that dates back some 1200 – 1400 years before Jesus to when the Hebrew slaves were liberated from their bondage in Egypt. Their liberation is the culmination of a supernatural campaign by God against the Pharaoh—who, in ancient Egyptian religion, was deified—as well as the expansive pantheon of ancient Egyptian gods. Each one of the ten plagues targeted the domain of a particular ancient Egyptian deity (so if you ever wondered, "Well, why a plague of frogs," there you have it!). This led all the way up to the plague of darkness, which was meant to demonstrate God’s superiority over Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god and—depending on the era of ancient Egyptian history—the chief ancient Egyptian deity.
And so while we may well be familiar with the instructions that God gives the Israelites for the Passover—so-named so that the final plague, the striking down of the first-born children, would pass over the houses of the Israelites—it is the exclamation in Exodus 12:12 that makes the covenant between God and Israelite so unconventional: “I’ll impose judgments on all the gods of Egypt; I am the LORD.” In a world of polytheism—of religion with many deities—God is expressing the truth that God is, well, God. It is unconventional. It is uncommon. But it is truth.
And this truth of an uncommon covenant with God who bucked all convention is important for us still today. Now, I want to be clear here—the Christian Last Supper is not a replacement of, or a “Christian seder” version of, the Jewish Passover meal. They are two different things that coexist together. We as Christians have no business holding “Christian seders” ever, and certainly not on Zoom this year. The Passover tradition is not ours, and we have no business laying claim to it.
But the parallel here is that just as the Passover meal of the Tanakh represents an unconventional covenant with God as revealed by Moses, so does the Last Supper of the Gospels represent an unconventional covenant with God as revealed through Jesus Christ. The Words of Institution which Jesus speaks over the bread and the cup include the phrase, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many so that their sins may be forgiven.”
While we have likely heard those words so many times, spoken over communion here at church, that they have become routine, I think it helpful to imagine Holy Week as the disciples of Jesus did, experiencing it for the first time, and in real time. They have heard Jesus foretell His death before (and didn’t really want to believe Him), but this, this intonation that what they are consuming is their teacher’s body and blood, this is something they have not yet heard as we have.
What is routine and ritual to us was potentially stunning and shocking to them, especially if we are to consider the immediate context of Jesus predicting the betrayal and all the disciples exclaiming, "Surely not I!" Or, if take as any indication the reaction to Jesus proclaiming Himself to be the Bread of Life in John 6, in which He teaches that we are to consume His body and blood and His audience responds by calling it a harsh teaching and wondering who could possibly accept it.
And yet, we live presently in a world that has had to accept a great many harsh teachings in the past couple of months. We have been asked to keep separate from our closest friends and relatives to protect both them and us, we have taken on catastrophic economic and financial losses so that the loss of life might be not so catastrophic, and we have done so because the social contracts and covenants of old have inarguably failed us.
So something dramatically unconventional was needed in order to save as many lives as possible. And while the medicine is foul and bitter, it represents our best chance at emerging from the wilderness being tended to by the angels, rather than having given into the temptations of Satan.
This is the temptation that Judas Iscariot faces in this moment and succumbs to, as Satan enters into him in the moment. But it need not be what claims us. It must not be what claims us.
The Last Supper is meant to give us food enough for what is to come, for the journey along the Via Dolorosa that wends from Gethsemane to Calvary. It is meant to keep us from being tempted to turn stones into bread, as Satan tried to tempt Jesus into doing in the wilderness.
We must keep ourselves from being tempted by stones masquerading as bread, by pseudo-science masquerading as miracle cures, by people who would take advantage of our anxieties and our worries to hurt us.
For we have a God who is faithful, and who does not desert us, even if the answers to our prayers may not always be the answers we immediately want. That, too, is part of our unconventional covenant. God may not always give us the answers we want, just as we may not always answer God’s questions of what we did or left undone the way that God would want.
Yet the covenant endures. It always has, and it always will. To say that if the churches close doors that the covenant somehow does too is vanity. If the best way for one of the holiest sites in Christianity to be peaceful is for a Muslim family to keep its keys, then I think God is telling us to make that covenant. And if closing that church for the first time in seven hundred years is the best way to keep and preserve human life, then I think God is telling us to make that covenant as well, because the body and blood which seal this covenant are symbolized in some of the most basic of lifegiving elements: bread and drink.
Behold in these elements our future—of the church and of life. To preserve a future for God’s people is fundamental to this covenant that is sealed in Christ’s blood. He knew it when He spoke those words, and He knew it hours later alone in Gethsemane, when His prayer changed from wanting the cup to be taken from Him to God’s will for life to triumph over death to be done. Jesus knew that as much that would be taken from Him, it was all to save and preserve us.
There, in the garden, the stage is now set for His arrest and trial. His trial, like ours, continues inexorably onwards. May they both end with us experiencing resurrection.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Vancouver, Washington
April 9, 2020