Sermon preached by The Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson
Maundy Thursday
Do you remember what Jesus’ cousin, John, said, when Jesus went to be baptized by him in the Jordan River? He said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” We’re familiar with that title for Jesus, but we may have lost sight of why we call him the Lamb of God. The answer is found in what we celebrate in the Paschal Triduum. Tonight begins the Christian Passover, and what Jesus did on the cross is intimately bound with the first Passover, in which God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, saving them from slavery and death. Jesus’ meal in the Upper Room with his disciples took place during the Passover. It was a Passover meal, and that was because the Passover foreshadows and illuminates what Jesus was about to accomplish on the cross.
At the first Passover, every Hebrew family was to sacrifice a lamb. They were to put the blood of the lamb on the doorposts and lintels of their homes, and that blood would be a sign to the angel of death to pass over that house. In every other dwelling in Egypt on that night, the first-born males of both man and beast would die. The plague of death would be so terrible that the Pharaoh would finally be convinced to let the Hebrews, who were enslaved in Egypt, go. The lamb that had been sacrificed was to be roasted and eaten in haste. The people would need nourishment for the journey that was ahead. It was that event that delivered the Israelites from death and enabled them to leave the land in which they had been enslaved. It was that event that began the journey that would lead them to Canaan, the Promised Land.
God had acted dramatically and decisively in the Passover. He had entered the human scene and had come to the aid of his people, in fulfillment of his promise to give them a land of their own. That land he had given them hundreds of years before, through Abraham, and now he had acted to enable them to return. It was God’s will that his people should understand this event as one that defined them for all time. And so, from that time on, every year they would celebrate the Passover as if it was actually happening to them. Thus, when Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples, they were observing it not as an historical event that happened hundreds of years earlier, although of course they knew that it had, but as if it was happening right then. The barriers of time were erased and they were there, in Egypt, making preparations to begin the exodus.
It was in that context that our Lord took bread, gave thanks, broke the bread, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take, eat, this is my Body which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me.’ Likewise, after supper he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink this, all of you: this is my Blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me.’” Jesus had not yet shed his blood when he gave it to his disciples, but that wasn’t a problem, for what he was doing was breaking down the barrier of time. What he would do on the cross would be for all people for all time, past, present, and future. Whenever the people of God would celebrate the Lord’s Supper, they would do it as if they were right there with Jesus in the Upper Room, right there with Jesus at the cross, right there with Jesus at his resurrection. When we do it, we are assured that Jesus himself is present through his Body and Blood. He didn’t say, this represents my Body and Blood or this is a symbol of my Body and Blood. He said, “This is my Body, This is my Blood,” and the Church ever since has believed he meant what he said.
When Jesus’ words, which he spoke in Aramaic, were translated into Greek, the word used for remembrance has a meaning that is very close to what the Jews understood when they observed the Passover. The word is anamnesis. “Do this for the anamnesis of me.” That word is difficult to translate into English. We use the word recall or remember, but those words don’t really capture the meaning of anamnesis, for anamnesis means to bring to the present the event recalled. So when we hear Jesus say, “Do this for the remembrance of me,” we need to understand that word in a much fuller way than we usually use the word remember.
All this is to say that when we celebrate the Holy Eucharist, the institution of which we are observing tonight, we are participating anew in the death and resurrection of our Lord. The barriers of time and place are removed, and we are there at the cross and at the empty tomb. Through his death on the cross we are saved from the eternal death that is rightfully ours through our sin. Through his presence with us we are given the nourishment we need to make the journey to the Promised Land, but this time not a physical land, but the land of heaven, eternal life with God.
In reflecting about what is happening when we celebrate the Holy Eucharist, I will close by reading this reflection on the Holy Eucharist by Dom Gregory Dix, in his book The Shape of the Liturgy: “Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of St. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and tell not a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.”