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Maundy Thursday: April 17, 2003
H o m
i l y G r i t s
Maundy Thursday
Year B - April 17, 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation )
Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered,
instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we
may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in
these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives
and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Exodus 12:1-14a You shall eat it hurriedly; it is the Passover of the
Lord
Psalm 78:14-20, 23-25 He led them with a cloud by day * and all through
the night with a glow of fire
1 Corinthians 11:23-26(27-32) For I received from the Lord what I also
handed on to you
John 13:1-15 Before the festival Jesus knew that his hour had come
or Luke 22:14-30 When the hour had come he took his place at the table
¶ When observed, the ceremony of the washing of the feet appropriately
follows the Gospel and homily. When it is desired to administer Holy
Communion from the reserved Sacrament on Good Friday, the Sacrament for
that purpose is consecrated at this service.
¶ Revised Common Lectionary
(Holy Thursday)
Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14 as above
Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19 Dilexi, quoniam - I love the Lord because he has
heard the voice of my prayer
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 as above
John 13:1-17, 31b-35 as above
Since the letters of the Apostle Paul are older than the gospels
themselves, what we have in the epistle reading tonight is from Paul's
letter to the Corinthians, the one we call the first letter, and what we
have here is the oldest account of the Last Supper. It is the oldest
account of the Eucharist of the Church as a re-enactment of that
occasion. As a child in the Presbyterian church until 1954 I remember
these words very well, for the rather barren form of celebration of the
Lord's Supper in that church in those days did not have anything like our
developed eucharistic prayers, the ones we have in the Book of Common
Prayer, or the rich variety of liturgical material now recovered for
optional use by Presbyterians in their new Book of Common Worship.
The minister merely read out these words from I Corinthians, and
immediately passed out the bread in little cubes on a stainless steel
tray, and the grape juice followed in little half shot plastic glasses.
Everyone sat in the pews, and he elders and deacons came down the aisle
to serve the people. This only happened three times a year or so, but I
remember the solemnity and the pronouncing of these words with great
authority from the Apostle, and it also always sound to me as if the
Reverend Stewart Warner, my boyhood hero, the Princeton Seminary
graduate, saying that he had "received these words from the Lord", for
he was quoting Paul who said, "I received from the Lord what I also
delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed, took
bread." This was the Scriptural authority for the tradition of the
Lord's Supper. Tradition means "handing on", giving over from one's
hands into another's hands. What can Paul mean when he says he received
from the Lord what he delivered to the Corinthian church, when we suspect
that he never in fact ever saw or met the historical Jesus of Nazareth.
His only acquaintance with Jesus was in his vision on he Damascus road,
and in the Eucharist itself, which he received not from Jesus but from
the hands of fellow Cjhristians who had baptized Paul, and initiated him
into this table fellowship. Paul now writes to the Corinthians to remind
them of the meaning of this supper, that it is a proclamation of the
Lord's death, that is, an announcement of the meaning of Christ's
betrayal, arrest, and execution. Paul says we are to do this for an
anamnesis of Jesus.
I remember clearly the words inscribed around the mensa of the Communion
Table at the Palatka Presbyterian Church where I was janitor and
bell-ringer as a boy. DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME it said, and it seemed
a cheerless, funereal
sentiment to me, appropriate only when there was a coffin present for a
burial service. One you might find on a ribbon for a wreath at a wake.
The word "remembrance" is a weak word in English, it reminds one indeed
of roses pressed in an old Bible, or a picture of a high school class
with an autograph of a long-forgotten classmate. It reminds one of
souvenirs that have lost their magic, of a dried out sliver of wedding
cake we saved as a fetish from a nostalgic night long ago.
But in the Greek the word anamnesis is wonderful. We all know the
meaning of amnesia -- the loss of memory. But mnesia without the "a" in
front of it means just "memory". Add the "a" and it means "loss of
memory." But the Greek prefix "ana" means "again", and so anamnesia is a
restoration of memory, getting one's memory back again. So Paul says
that the Lord Jesus gave us this cup and this loaf so that we could have
our memory of him restored, our lost memory of his life and death and
resurrection--that we would have it back. The eucharistic Supper is to
restore his presence to us, to bring him back alive into our midst, to
restore the fullness of his life as if by a time machine, a
re-enfleshment of him in this meal.
The denominations, sects, and Churches have fought for centuries over
technical theological definitions of his presence, but none of them has
ever argued for Christ's "real absence" from the Holy Communion, however
they might carelessly treat the "elements" as Protestants say, or
reverence the "sacred species" as Catholics say.
And so we sit at the same table with the disciples in the Cenacle--the
Upper Room--and Jesus is present with us as fully in the sharing of Who
He Is as he was with them. And so everything about this occasion, not
only on Maundy Thursday when we commemorate the anniversary of it, but
every time we do it--whether it is daily, weekly, monthly, yearly--we are
not merely playing with souvenirs or mementos out of the Church's
scrapbook of sentimental party favors from long ago. What happens is
that Jesus comes to put our community back together at his table, to feed
our lives but to prompt us also to the communal, communistic society
wherein all will be fed and none left to starve at the gate. When the
Sacrament is carried from this table to a disabled communicant at home,
it ought also to mean to us that we must share our cupboard with the
hungry homeless street person we pass on the way of our errand, the
socially and politically excluded. When someone begs for food at the
gate of Casa Ave Maria, which is every day, I consider that person to be
begging for the sacrament of sharing, and that to deny such a request is
to excommunicate a hungry believer, whose plea is an act of faith in a
fellow human being. How shall we (and why?) try to convince a stranger
of a high doctrine of eucharistic presence when we ourselves fail to be
really present to them?
Paul believed that our very illnesses and weaknesses and perishing had
something to do with the fact that we hadn't fully re-membered ourselves
at this table into a Body, that we hadn't authentically re-membered the
members of Jesus' true body and blood hanging on each others bones and
flowing in each others veins. The sickness, division, weakness and
wounds of the human community since 9/11 and the declaration of a crusade
of terrorist holy war by the U.S. administration against its own choice
(not the world's) of targets dubbed terrorist by itself, is a crucifixion
anew of the human community, an assault on the planet and its people.
Jesus believed that we always drank in and ingested the profoundest
reality there is, at this table, and that it was at the same time
swallowing crisis and judgment and justice and the very Judge as well.
We do show forth the Lord's death till he come. He wrote the letter to
warn a church which had grown careless and casual in its eucharistic
celebration, where some of them were too eager to escape to the private
dinners or potluck supper they did not always share afterwards. Now we
have grown so careless that we have abandoned the connections of our
table with the table of Iraqi people, of our own family named in the
Ummah, the nation of Islam.
Paul bids us to continually examine ourselves, to discern the corporate
nature of this practice of Holy Commonism, the communism of this
sharing, and to know that its very shape and content comes to us from
Jesus himself, who comes along in every menu of sharing, as every taking
of bread and wine is eucharistic, in his name, whether it be handled by
Quakers sharing bread with Muslims in Baghdad, or the Queen at Windsor,
when she gives Maundy money to a chosen few. The Maundy table is a gift
to every one with hunger for Jesus' presence, and God's justice, and it
comes to us from our Paschal Lamb. Take, eat: this is my Cuerpo. My
Sangre. A Nuevo Allianza.
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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