Tag Archives: Passover

Bread, Wine, Feet (Maundy Thursday, 4/17/2025)

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Readings

Passover. Our first reading marks its beginning. It celebrates the Lord’s power to save, to make a way where there is no way. It celebrates this God as champion of liberty, enemy of slavery. And here we are tonight, remembering how Jesus observed Passover that night.

Jesus did at least two things. He reinterpreted two of Passover’s symbols, the bread and the wine, to point to his coming death. Liberty, passing from slavery into freedom, demands more than defeating the current human Pharaoh. The underlying problem: our ancestral rebellion and distrust of God, and Jesus’ death deals with that. So, at every Eucharist, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.”

That, it turns out, is the easy part. The harder part: changing our behavior so that we stop acting like little Pharaohs at every opportunity. So Jesus starts washing their feet and caps it with “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

“This is my body that is for you.… This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” “You also ought to wash one another’s feet.” Two sides of the same coin.

What’s going on here? Toward the end of the Gospel reading we heard “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Washing each other’s feet, leaving behind the endless competition for status: that’s finally about love. As is, for that matter, “This is my Body; this is my Blood.” As the Gospel of John says elsewhere “God so loved the world…”

Toward the end of the Song of Songs we hear “Set me as a seal upon your heart, / as a seal upon your arm; / for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave” (8:6a). Pharaoh’s kingdom is powered by death; only love will defeat it.

Eucharist and Liberation (13th Sunday after Pentecost, 8/18/2024)

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Readings (Track 1)

One thing good movies and stories have in common is that they don’t waste our time. If they show or tell us something, sooner or later it’s going to be important. For instance, at the beginning of John’s account of the feeding of the 5,000, he says “Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near.” That’s going to be important later, and he’s invited us to keep it in the back of our minds.

Meanwhile, on center stage Jesus feeds the 5,000 and the next day gets into a long conversation with the crowd. Today’s reading is the last part of it. If we had a bit further in the Gospel we’d have heard Jesus’ disciples saying “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”

The teaching is certainly unexpected. When the conversation started with the crowd still full of bread, Jesus told them: don’t focus on the bread; “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” No one else could or can say this, but it’s not that different from much of what Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospels. (“I am the light of the world”; “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”) Like the crowds, we hear it and think: right, we follow Jesus’ teaching and we have life. Our link to Jesus is through Jesus’ words, or, if you like, through our belief in Jesus words or our obedience to Jesus’ words. We think: OK, it’s not such a barrier that Jesus was in the 1st Century and we’re in the 21st Century. We relate to Jesus like a Buddhist relates to the Buddha or a Muslim relates to Mohammad.

And then we hit the verses we heard today: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” That was as scandalous in the first century as it is today, and Jesus makes no attempt to soften it. The next verse, translated literally: “The one who chews my flesh and drinks my blood…”

In the first three Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) Jesus celebrates the Passover with his disciples, and in the middle of the celebration reinterprets it: “Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’” There’s nothing like it in John’s story of Holy Week; rather, John gives us Jesus’ words “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” here after the feeding of the 5,000 near the feast of the Passover.

Since the time of Moses, Passover has been the Jewish festival. To get something close to it we American Gentiles would have to combine Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. At Passover every generation of Jews is cotemporaneous with those who first experienced the Passover: God liberating them from slavery in Egypt and setting them on a journey to the Promised Land. At Passover every generation says “We were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt and the Lord our God brought us out from there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.”

You don’t mess with Passover. To return to our analogy, imagine the outcry and derision if a president said: “You see, Thanksgiving (or the Fourth of July) is really about me.” But that’s what Jesus is doing. He’s saying to the disciples: you need a more profound, a more complete liberation than the liberation you’ve been celebrating in the Passover. So, taking the bread and wine which already had their own meanings within the celebration of the Passover, he gave them new meanings— this is my Body; this is my blood—so that the same meal could hereafter celebrate that more profound, more complete liberation.

As long as the Church was working from a Jewish center of gravity, the Eucharist as transformation of Passover was obvious. Because that was obvious, it went without saying that Eucharist was about the gathering and sanctification of a people, and their liberation from every form of oppression, the breaking in of the world to come into this world.

That gathering, sanctification, liberation is not simply a matter of adopting a particular program, even Jesus’ teaching. It’s a matter of being grafted onto Jesus: “I am the vine, you are the branches.” It’s not simply a matter of ideas, values, goals or decisions. “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

This role for the Holy Eucharist can seem counterintuitive. We often think of our self as other than our body. But the big moments in our lives, birth and death, are body moments, to which we could easily add embracing, making love, sharing food, celebrating a touchdown, etc. So when God sets out to transform us, the body stays centerstage. Circumcision, baptism, Eucharist.

And I wonder if the element of vulnerability in eating and drinking isn’t relevant here. Eating and drinking is letting down our guard, opening ourselves –quite literally—to what we are about to receive. In the case of Holy Eucharist: Jesus’ Body and Blood. “Yes –we say—may Jesus’ life merge with ours so that his life flows through ours.”

“Abide in me as I abide in you.” So it’s just a matter of showing up at Eucharist? No. Consider what Jesus said about this abiding as recorded in John.

  • Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.
  • If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love…
  • If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples…

We can all think of Christians, churches, denominations in different times and places that have latched onto one of these to the virtual exclusion of the others:

  • Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. The Eucharist as magic.
  • If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love… Jesus as Ethical Teacher, or New Moses.
  • If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples… Belief and/or reading the Bible are what’s important.

It’s the same Jesus in the same Gospel who says all three! It only makes sense to show up for Eucharist if there is a real –but always imperfect—desire to keep Jesus’ commandments and to continue in Jesus’ word. That is why from the start the Eucharist has been something shared by the baptized.

The universe, scientists tell us, is held together by forces that pull in opposite directions. The reality I’ve been trying to describe here is like that. On the one hand, our Eucharist is Passover Remixed, celebrating a liberation more profound and complete than Moses could have dreamed. Its constant reduction to an act of individual piety would be absurd were it not so common. The Chinese Government has got it right: the status quo is in danger when Christians come together to celebrate Eucharist. From this perspective the Eucharist is a symbol.

On the other hand, in Eucharist heaven and earth meet, as “Abide in me as I abide in you” gets very personal, very physical, very intimate. How God does this is a mystery, though we Anglicans are pretty sure that neither Roman transubstantiation nor Baptist symbol are adequate explanations. Elizabeth I, as responsible as any one person for the enduring shape of Anglicanism, put it this way: “Twas God the Word that spake it, / He took the bread and brake it; / And what the Word did make it; / That I believe and take it.”[1]

On the other hand –yes, there’s a third hand here; it takes a community to do theology—Jesus tells us “abide in me” because only by staying connected to the vine does the branch bear fruit, and Jesus wants fruit. This brings us back to the feeding of the 5,000. What John has done in sticking the Eucharist in the middle of the feeding of the 5,000 is put us on notice that the world and the sanctuary are part of the same conversation. The multitudes who are like sheep without a shepherd and often needy are not one conversation and Eucharistic theology another conversation.

The UN estimates that about 25,000 people die of hunger every day. So God has us and Christians around the globe coming together to celebrate Eucharist because God doesn’t care? Precisely because God cares God gathers us together, because what happens here is God’s primary strategy for something better happening out there. This is the front line, and that’s why we show up here week after week –for our good and the world’s good.

We come to this table—and then hold the world’s needy before God in prayer, open our checkbooks, participate in the coming elections. We could say that where the Body and Blood are distributed at this table other tables with other distributions start popping up. We could say that it’s part of the same Eucharist, the same outpouring of thanks to God that can transform our world.

The Eucharist: New Passover, Feeding on God, Life for the World. Alleluia.

[1] Source: Clark’s “Ecclesiastical History–Life of Queen Elizabeth”, p. 94 (edition 1675). http://www.worldofquotes.com/author/Elizabeth-I/1/index.html

Extracting Israel from Egypt and Egypt from Israel (Maundy Thursday, 3/28/2024)

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Readings (With the 1 Corinthians reading extended to this)

Getting Israel out of Egypt is half the battle; the other half is getting Egypt out of Israel. The Maundy Thursday readings, with their Passover setting, invite us to think about that.

Getting Israel out of Egypt: The first reading tells of the institution of the Passover, a feast the Jews have celebrated every year since that night in Egypt.

Each family was to select an unblemished lamb, the Passover lamb, and to kill it at twilight. Some of the blood went on the doorposts and the lintel of the house and the lamb was eaten, with the family prepared to leave at any moment. That very night God would pass through the land, and Pharaoh would finally let the people go.

Until Jesus’ arrival, no other night was of such importance in the world’s history, for it was one of the defining actions of the true God, announcing that God desires not the obedience of slaves, but rather of free sons and daughters. In our country, African American slaves heard in this story God’s passion for their own freedom.

And every year since the Exodus the Jews have continued to celebrate the Passover to remember their liberation and —often— to reaffirm their confidence in God’s power to deliver them again from new enemies.

As the Gospels tell us, Jesus. the night before his death, celebrated the Passover with his disciples and reinterpreted its meaning. The meal had used bread and wine to celebrate the liberation from Egypt; Jesus reinterpreted the bread and wine in terms of his coming self-offering: this is my body; this is my blood.

Every Sunday when we celebrate the Eucharist, when we say “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” we are remembering this definitive reinterpretation. And to say “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” reminds us of how deeply God desires our liberty, and what God was willing to pay to achieve it. God desires that we be free from both our exterior and interior oppressors, free—in the language of our Gospel reading—to love.

Getting Egypt, that is, getting the enslaving seeking and maintenance of status, out of Israel turns out to be at least as hard. It’s the focus of our New Testament readings. In Luke’s account of the Last Supper even that night the disciples were arguing about who was the greatest. So Jesus tries to get at it by washing the disciples’ feet. It horrifies Peter, not so much (I think) that Jesus is washing his feet, as that Peter has already figured out where Jesus is going to take this: “if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

Our Prayer Book encourages—but does not demand—a reenactment of the foot washing. These days it’s problematic. But the reenactment is less important than its point: a love that is oriented not by my comfort level or preferences, but by the needs of my brother or sister. Love oriented by my comfort level or preferences: that lets Egypt in through the back door. Love oriented by the needs of my brother or sister: that’s the liberty for which Moses struggled and Jesus died.

This business of washing each other’s feet—metaphorically speaking—shows up in that paragraph from Paul’s letter from which our reading was taken. The Lectionary assigns vv.23-26, in which Paul recounts Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist. But why does Paul recount it? For that we need the surrounding context. In those days—also at Corinth—we often celebrated the Eucharist as part of a dinner.

But what happened, what scandalized Paul, was that each family ate and drank from their own basket. The rich, baskets to go from one of the upscale restaurants; the poor, whatever they could find at a local food pantry. Egypt has not only entered through the back door; Egypt is running the place! So Paul recounts the institution to remind them that the Eucharist is about a life given for others, so that celebrating the Eucharist selfishly and as though it’s “business as usual” badly misses the point.

Notice how Paul unpacks this. “For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.” Notice: “the body” isn’t the Eucharistic bread; it’s the living Body of Christ composed of the brothers and sisters gathered around a common table but not —alas— around a common basket. “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner…” “In an unworthy manner” is not about whether I’ve properly confessed before Mass, or whether I have the right sacramental theology, but about whether I’m showing love to my Christian brothers and sisters.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Washing each others’ feet, celebrating the Eucharist in a way that takes Jesus’ Body seriously: two first Century examples of where Jesus’ new commandment needs to kick in, given to us to get us wondering where that new commandment needs to kick in here and now.

Getting Israel out of Egypt: that’s God’s “yes” to our freedom, celebrated in the Passover and transposed—put on steroids—for all people in Jesus’ death as celebrated in the Holy Eucharist. Getting Egypt out of Israel, living freely: that turns out to be an ongoing project. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” May some of Jesus’ passion for our freedom rub off on us.