Passover Begins

Pascha in Pandemic, by Laura Wilson.

Propers: Maundy Thursday, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Food. Next to water and air, it is the most basic of all human needs. If you don’t have food, little else matters. Hunger would drive any of us to extremes. If you do have food, well, then, the world is your oyster. Feel free to plumb the mysteries of the cosmos. A full belly allows for a free mind. It lets us be human, if we would so desire.

Little wonder, then, that food is so intimately connected to religion. Every holiday has some sort of ritual food associated with it, bringing forth childhood memories, associations, and comforts. Bonds are strengthened, identities forged. “Tell me what you eat,” wrote Jean Brillat-Savarin, “and I will tell you what you are.” And this is true not only for the body, but for the mind and the soul as well.

Tonight is about remembrance and food. But not a clinical remembrance. Not just facts from a book. A warm, tangible, edible remembrance, a ritual and religious remembrance, what the Greeks would call anamnesis. Anamnesis is when you remember something in such a way that you are there. You are connected to the original event, spiritually, viscerally. It’s happening again to you, not as repetition but as an eternal return.

For the Israelites—the people of Jesus, the people of God—the most important story they told was the Passover, the old, old story of how God in His faithfulness had chosen to liberate our forebears from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land of their ancestors. God elected slaves to be His special chosen people: a nation of priests destined to bless the whole world. But what made them Israelites? What made them the people of God?

It wasn’t blood. Not really. They claimed Abraham as their ancestor, but Israel had always been a mixed multitude. What made them the people of God was the story that they told: the Word of God, which set them free, forgave their sins, and secured them a future in mercy and grace.

And so every year they told the story, the story of the Exodus from Egypt, the story of their Passover from slavery to freedom, from death to life. And the whole thing was told with and through and in a meal. Remembrance and food.

In this meal, flatbread was served to remind us that God’s liberation occurred so quickly that the bread the people were to prepare had not even time to arise. Lamb was served to remember the blood painted on their doorways, marking them as children of the covenant, children of the promise—and so the angel of death would pass over that house which was marked by the blood of the lamb.

Every year, from the time of Moses on down, this Passover meal was shared, with every generation, with children and parents, neighbors and friends, so that in this meal, in this remembrance, we are there again at the original event. We enter into the story, so that it is for us no longer the tale of God freeing our nth-great-grandparents thousands of years before, but is now the story of our Exodus, our Passover, our liberation out from slavery to promise and freedom and life.

Shared together around the table. Shared together in the breaking of bread. Marked forever as the children of God by the blood of the lamb we have slain.

On this night, Maundy Thursday, we remember Jesus’ Last Supper on earth before His Crucifixion and Resurrection. He has come to Jerusalem to share the Passover with His family and His friends, as He always has His whole life long. But tonight is different. Tonight the line between past and present blurs even more so than usual. Because tonight, at this Passover, more than a thousand years after Moses, death once again is knocking at the door.

For years, Jesus has been building a following. Crowds now form wheresoever He may trod. And whispers have begun to circulate that here, at last, must be the Messiah. Here, at last, must be the long-promised Christ of God. For centuries, they’ve been waiting. The prophets of old, both Gentile and Jew, had long foretold an Anointed One from heaven, one like a Son of Man but so much more. He would be King, High Priest, and Prophet—but not like those before Him who had failed so spectacularly.

No, this Messiah would be different. He would descend from heaven. He would restore the throne of His ancestor David. He would drive the pagans from the land and liberate God’s people again, establish the Kingdom again. Some thought He would be an angel. Some thought He would be a man. Some even thought that He would be God on earth, God in the flesh, if you could imagine.

Now, right on time, right when messianic hope was at its highest pitch, here comes this Jesus, this wandering Rabbi in off the Galilee, whom everyone seems to be talking about. This wonderworker, this captivating preacher. And His ministry builds to a climax, after three-and-a-half years, when He raises a dead man four days in the tomb before the assembled crowds of Jerusalem. And the whole city goes nuts. They hail Him as the Messiah. They hail Him as the King.

And He comes riding into Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, on a donkey. Why? Because in the Ancient Near East, when a king approached a town and his intentions were unknown, he would ride on a horse to indicate war, or on a donkey to indicate peace. So on Palm Sunday, just a few days before, Jesus proclaims two things to Jerusalem, to the City of David, by riding in upon a donkey: that He comes in peace; and that He is the King. And so clearly the Romans have no choice now but to kill Him.

So that’s why this Passover, this Last Supper, differs from the rest: why it is celebrated in secret, in fear, with death knocking at the door. For the Romans and their collaborators will not seize Him by day, before crowds, for fear of starting a riot. But now it is night. It is dark. And for all the Apostles know, the Romans are even now on their way.

Imagine Judas sitting there, Judas at the meal, having already agreed to betray Him; thinking, I suppose, that he must force Jesus’ hand; that in turning Him over to Rome, he will force the Messiah to fight. Is Judas the hero in his own mind? Little matter. For Christ will treat him the same as the others. Judas is an Apostle too.

And so Jesus comforts them. Jesus feeds them—first by taking the place of a servant, washing their feet, setting for them an example, and giving them His final commandment: that they love one another as He has first loved them. And then He turns to the meal, to the Passover story. But He changes the tale He tells. No longer is it the old story of liberation from Egypt, of bread with no time to rise.

Now Jesus takes the flatbread and says, “This is My Body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.” And He takes the cup of wine and says, “This cup is the New Covenant in My Blood, shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in remembrance of Me.” Be joined forever to Me. This is a New Passover, a New Covenant, not like the Passover of old that led one people out from slavery. From now on, the Passover will bind us to Jesus, return us to Jesus, who pours out His life for the world, for the forgiveness of all the peoples of this earth, and even those below it.

And there is no lamb to be eaten here, no lamb on the table in any of the Gospel accounts, for Christ Himself is our Passover Lamb. His is the innocent Blood that we shed; God in the flesh is the Lamb whom we slay. Yet even as we murder Him, He marks us as His own. Even as we kill Him, He forgives us from that Cross. Our New Passover begins here with bread, but does not cease until Jesus proclaims from the Cross: “It is finished!” Then the Meal is done. And not a moment before.

Tonight we wash our feet and eat the bread and drink the wine. And we are there. We are at the table with Jesus. He is the one who washes our feet. He is the one who promises to us the Body and Blood of the Lamb. And we are whom we eat.

And we will fail Him, as we always do. We will fall asleep in the garden. We will lead the soldiers to Him in the night. And then we will scatter, as cowards in fear, and leave Him to die all alone. On a Cross. Hanging in the blackness of the sky.

But this is not the end of His story. No, my beloved.

This is where it all will begin.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.