On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb was sacrificed, the disciples said to Jesus, “Where do you want us to prepare for you to eat the Passover meal?”
13 He sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the city. A man carrying a water jar will meet you. Follow him. 14 Wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house, ‘The teacher asks, “Where is my guest room where I can eat the Passover meal with my disciples?”’ 15 He will show you a large room upstairs already furnished. Prepare for us there.”16 The disciples left, came into the city, found everything just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover meal.
17 That evening, Jesus arrived with the Twelve. 18 During the meal, Jesus said, “I assure you that one of you will betray me—someone eating with me.”
19 Deeply saddened, they asked him, one by one, “It’s not me, is it?”
20 Jesus answered, “It’s one of the Twelve, one who is dipping bread with me into this bowl. 21 The Human One goes to his death just as it is written about him. But how terrible it is for that person who betrays the Human One! It would have been better for him if he had never been born.”
22 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” 23 He took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. 24 He said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.25 I assure you that I won’t drink wine again until that day when I drink it in a new way in God’s kingdom.” (Common English Bible)
Maundy Thursday 2019
Now that I have landed, infant daughter in tow, solidly in my mid-thirties, I find myself experiencing those annoying pangs of nostalgia for the culture of the 1990s that I grew up in. I end up far more amused than I ever thought I’d be at the commercials and television shows of people with billowing, bright, amorphous clothing and barely-tamed post-80s hair. I can find entire episodes on YouTube of my old childhood mainstays, like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? And I recall utterly nutty things like that decade’s iteration of the seemingly ongoing, too-stubborn-to-die Pepsi Challenge.
You probably know what the Pepsi Challenge entails. It’s a single-sip blind taste test of two colas—Coke and Pepsi. Pepsi naturally frames the results of the Pepsi Challenge as more people preferring Pepsi over Coke, even though much like Red Vines and Twizzlers, or Similac and Enfamil, Coke and Pepsi are pretty much the same thing.
I remember the Pepsi Challenge being a popular thing again during the 1990s, but it took another decade for Malcolm Gladwell to explain in his book Blink the trick for why more people seem to prefer Pepsi: in a single-sip test, humans are biologically predisposed to prefer the sweeter taste, even if over the course of an entire can or bottle, you might not. And Pepsi contains slightly more sugar than Coke!
That was the simple biological truth behind this pop culture phenomenon that has been around for decades—we’re hardwired to prefer more sugar to less sugar. The physical contents of the cups made the outcome preordained. And I think understanding that is important to understanding the Maundy Thursday story, because once the wheels of empire and systemic injustice are put in motion, the ultimate violent fate of Jesus of Nazareth likewise becomes preordained—all of which He told us in the contents of a cup, the chalice which He tells His disciples contains His blood of a new covenant to coexist alongside the covenant of the Tanakh.
There is truth in that pronouncement, uncomfortable but profoundly accurate truth: that what is about to take place is, by this point in time, as inevitable as it is violent. It is inevitable for as long as we as a people are prone to treating the downtrodden and the marginalized thusly. If you are poor, or homeless (or both, as Christ was), your chances of being punished violently by society or the state rather than being treated with kid gloves skyrockets.
That is hardly unique to Jesus, and an important reason for not singling out ancient—and contemporary—Judaism for the treatment of Jesus. Despite his unconvincing handwashing theatrics to the contrary, the death sentence was Pilate’s, and Pilate’s alone, and Pilate represents not Jewishness, but Roman imperialism. If Jesus’s execution represents our opportunity to be liberated from sin, this must include liberation from the sin of reading Maundy Thursday and Good Friday from a lens of antisemitism.
That truth too must be in our understanding of the Last Supper, because it is a powerful testament to the need for truth in our lives, and in our world. The very nature of the chalice’s contents, much like the contents of the cups in the Pepsi Challenge, preordains certain truths of what must happen to Jesus in the next twenty-four hours. But it also highlights what must happen to us in our faithful responses to this story. We must rise to meet Jesus in the bread and the chalice, and in all they entail.
For when Jesus inveighs that the bread and cup are made up of His body and blood, it is not said for shock value, although it probably does, and should, make us a trifle uncomfortable. It should take a bit off the sweetness of the carbohydrates, or off the buzz of the alcohol. We may be biologically predisposed to prefer the sweetness of empty calories, but the Last Supper is hardly either sweet or empty. It is substantial and substantive, enough to offer spiritual nourishment on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis, but also to form a crucial basis of our very identity as Christians.
As many of you know, I am not in fact Presbyterian. I am a member of, and was ordained as a pastor in, the Disciples of Christ, an offshoot of American Presbyterianism born during the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s when we basically discovered that we really did not care for Calvin all that much! Little did you know that I was hired here as a sleeper agent to lure all y’all over to non-creedal Christianity!
Our logo in the Disciples of Christ is the red chalice, which reflects the centrality of holy communion in our worship practice, and emblazoned on that chalice is the Saint Andrew’s cross, as an homage to our Scottish Presbyterian theological heritage.
The chalice is, to me, a fitting image for Christianity because of the universality of the necessity to drink from it. We must drink water to survive physically, and we must drink from the living water Jesus speaks of to survive spiritually. That living water exists in this, the Last Supper, and it makes us people of the cup, of the chalice.
The chalice’s contents are simple juice or wine in purely physical terms. In spiritual, religious terms, though, the liquid contents of the chalice are imbued with the significance of thousands of years of history, of millions of souls of believers, and the truth that has been passed down from generation to generation of those believers: that in encountering Jesus Christ, we might also encounter, bear witness to, and then bear ourselves, the foundational truth of God’s deep and abiding love for us.
That is the truth of which I speak to you, and to which we should adhere and cling in our hearts.
The role we as Christians, as people of the chalice, have to play in times such as these is one of abiding in Christ rather than abiding by what we see around us—and what an important role it is! Our role as truth-tellers and truth-bearers amid an ever-stronger atmosphere of falsity is sorely needed, beloveds. We can be the people who bear the truth that abiding as Christians means not abiding by the very same things which killed Christ: empire and injustice. These we must resist, and here, in the Lord’s Supper, we are given the sustenance with which to do so.
And how right it is that we should do so! There is a Latin idiom, in vino veritas, which translates into, “in wine, (there is) truth.” It is a reference to the fact that after a few glasses of wine, we have this pronounced tendency to be…exceptionally truthful. But I think also the impact of partaking in holy communion should imbibe in us an exceptional truthfulness, a commitment to the divine truth revealed in the ministry and passion of Jesus of Nazareth.
But what if there were additional truths the wine could bear? In the wine, Jesus says, is the forgiveness of sin, for it represents His blood that is poured out for us all. The chalice is what bears that wine, that real and tangible reality of our forgiveness. The chalice, then—our chalice, which we partake of to this day—bears the truth. And in drinking of it, in living it, we, too, bear the truth.
We are truth-bearers, you and I. John’s Gospel is mightily concerned with this notion, this timorous yet enduring thing called truth. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free, John records Jesus as saying in 8:32. No luxury, no optional upgrade is the truth. On the contrary, it is vital to our spiritual liberation as children of the most high God. Truth sets us free from the duplicities and dishonesties that would otherwise take us down with them.
And in this world of doublespeak, where terms like “fake news” and “alternate facts” are thrown about with reckless abandon, the truth is needed today as much as it has ever. Because to partake in Christ means not abiding by the lies and the deceits that injustice would have us believe. Partaking in the Last Supper means not abiding in the empty calories of evil, but in the truth that God loves us.
In such a world as the one we presently live in, truth has been beaten and flogged like an itinerant Nazarene carpenter sentenced to die, wretched and bleeding, mocked and exhausted. But not just yet extinguished. Truth may have taken a beating in these days, but it is not yet well and truly beaten.
That is the weighty substance of the Lord’s Supper. The truth it represents is substantial enough to survive an era of gaslighting and falsehood. No empty calories, no momentary sugary sweetness is it. The knowledge that we are partaking in the sacrifice of our Lord and Savior may taste uncomfortable or bitter going down, but its effects are far more lasting than a sip of soda’s fleeting time on our lips.
For as long as we partake in the one begotten Son of God, Christ reigns in our hearts. And even when we choose not to partake in Christ, God still reigns over creation. We may be able to choose whether, or when, or how to let God in, but we do not get to choose whether, or when, or how God is present in the world. God is still calling us to abide in Christ Jesus despite our allegiances to untruths, and it is up to us to renounce those allegiances and say “Yes!” to that divine call.
Let that be the truth that we carry with us, as truth-bearers, in our souls and on our lips as we go forth from this place, not only tonight, but on each and every day after that.
For what comes after this night we already know, like a reader who flips to the last page of the book, or someone who fast forwards to the end of a movie. Yet Jesus’s disciples have no such luxury. They must live out the passion of their rabbi in real time, with only the knowledge of some foretelling they were told along the road, a foretelling they may or may not have really believed.
This means that I will not end my message with any such good news of resurrection. There will be the time for that, but that time is not this time. Right now, we are, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer would say, in the wilderness.
So too is Jesus, for on this day, and in this moment, He has been utterly forsaken—by His male disciples, by the powers of empire and violence, and finally, in Gethsemane, even by God Almighty.
And the stage is now, at long last, set for His trial and execution.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Vancouver, Washington
April 18, 2019