April 12, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Exodus 12:1-14a
Psalm 78:14-20, 22-25 He led them with a cloud by day
I Corinthians 11:23-26(27-32)
John 13:1-15 Or Luke 22:14-30
The Lord's Supper on Maundy Thursday is not as is the Passover Seder "a symbol of a symbol", in the words of Gregory Nazianzus. The three great days of Holy Week begin this evening, and they begin with the Passover reading: "Tell all the congregation that they shall take every one a Lamb. You shall eat it in haste, for it is the Lord's Passover. It shall be a memorial for you."
The last mass of Easter day, the evening service, will be the story from Luke's gospel of the walk to Emmaus, and shall end with these words, "Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread."
In between these two lessons, which serve as the two poles of this mini-season, swings the whole history of the institution of this distinctive Christian feast--the Christian Passover, and at its heart the Holy Eucharist.
Devout Jews believed and still believe that when at the Passover Seder they are "virtually" there with Moses and Aaon, coming out of Egypt. But the Passover of the Old Covenant is for Christians now but a passed-over symbol, a symbol of the Christian Eucharist, itself the proximate symbol of the Easter victory, the Easter Exodus of Christ Jesus. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore we shall keep that feast.
The Passover continued for all the years of the old covenant to be eaten standing up, in great haste, because it was always believed that Messiah would come on Passover night, and the faithful must be ready. Early Christians likewise looked for the return of Mesiah Jesus at an Easter Eucharist, and so it is the "tradition", the "handing down" of authoritative practice, to do Eucharist this night, in anticipation, as a bursting forth before its time not only of the Easter Feast but as the first budding of Spring time, as the first flower of the season, but also a foretaste of Messiah's return.
The second coming is anticipated too in Paul's account tonight, in the words about proclaiming the Lord's death till he come. And the warning of judgment is there, the coming of Christ is anticipated, too. No longer as the one who was judged in this night, but as the One who shall waken us all to trial in this night. We gather in hope to wait his return. So we do not go into tomorrow--into the Friday we call Good--as to a funeral, to sit and grieve, but we go as to an abandoned battlefield, the signs of its warfare still scarring the landscape, its horizons still smoking from the ruined weapons of war. It is the Gettysburg of our most disastrous loss and our most decisive victory. The defeated Jesus will not be found there, for it is not to Bad Friday we go, but to the Good One. Oh yes, we shall still see his scars, and in each Maundy Thursday and in each anticipation (as this is) of the everlasting Easter to come, we shall welcome among us a wounded Jesus, whose wounds are badges of his victory and conquest. His chair is not to be like the Elijah chair at Seder, an empty one for ever, for Jesus sits enthroned among us at eucharist, presiding as he did that sacred evening centuries ago. This is the sacrament, the mysterion, of Christ's bodily presence, not the bewailing of his physical absence.
He can never be murdered again, and never displaced from the president's chair at the eucharist, so we ourselves can never be defeated, in spite of the Holocaust of Jesus' brothers and sisters in the inferno of Naziism, in spite of the Holoaust of Latin americans in the "Memory of Fire" torched by the Yanqui invasor over the great motherlands of this hemisphere in these centuries of fire. Jesus' return is not to be triumphalist, as the return of a Columbia space shuttle to gringolandia, to glorify military power and its victory over humankind, but it is to be a return to service, not servility. To Maundy, to a new commandment of Love, to be servants to each other as he has been a servant to us all.
Tonight the Church sheds her widow's weeds and sings a Gloria, and let's us get a peek at her Easter bonnet.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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