Sermon for Maundy Thursday
“They shall look on him whom they pierced”
Maundy Thursday is a day of richness, complexity and confusion. The Continuation of the Passion According to St. Luke is complemented by the events of the Last Supper in the Upper Room with the institution of the Holy Eucharist and by the images of service captured in Christ’s washing the feet of his disciples. Something of the meaning of the Passion is already signified in the powerful scene when Jesus gathers with his disciples in the Upper Room. In Luke’s account as we heard yesterday, Christ celebrates the Passover with his disciples. The symbolism becomes clear; He is himself the sacrifice as Paul will proclaim. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast” (1 Corinthians 5.6).
Everything about the Passion comes down to the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday without which there can be no Easter. It begins with Christ in the Upper Room with the disciples and in this amazing moment when he identifies himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover celebration, a celebration of Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian domination, a remembrance that what defines Israel as the people of God is God’s liberating action. As Paul tells us, having learned this from the other disciples in the early Christian Community because he was not there himself nor were we at the original event, Jesus says “take eat, this is my body” and “this cup is the new covenant in my blood”. These are astounding claims. We are to eat and drink “in remembrance of me,” he says. Given in anticipation of his Passion – body broken and blood outpoured – it becomes the ordained means of our participation in his Passion and in its redemptive truth and power. What is transacted in the Upper Room already signals what is transacted upon the Cross and provides for us the means of our participation in its deeper meaning. What is that?
Simply our participation in the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. The true meaning of Communion is Eucharist or thanksgiving. We are gathered into the Son’s love for the Father which is the true meaning of his death on the Cross. That event is ultimately about the prayer of the Son to the Father having taken into himself all that belongs to the truth and untruth of our humanity. Our sins are our untruth; the capacity for love, though not the actuality of love because of sin’s disarray, is the truth of our humanity. We are made for love and so love restores us to love and to the fellowship of love.
