Maundy Thursday
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VII, Cycle C
Theme For The Day
When we taste of the Lord's Supper, we remember that the Lord is good.
Old Testament Lesson
Exodus 12:1-4 (5-10) 11-14
The First Passover
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. Appropriately for a day that focuses on Jesus' institution of the Lord's Supper, the Old Testament Lesson is the story of the first Passover. In an effort to shorten this passage, the lectionary editors have suggested that verses 5-10 be omitted. This is unwise, however, since the omitted passage contains the crucial detail that the Israelites were to paint the doorposts of their houses with lamb's blood as a signal to the Lord's avenging angel to pass them by. In terms of source criticism, this is a Priestly (P) account; a similar Yahwistic (J) account follows shortly afterward, in verses 21-23, minus the detailed instructions for the Passover seder meal that are reflected in today's passage. The simplicity of the meal -- comprised of pure foods that are either wild or require no human modification such as leavening agents -- reminds the Jews of their radical dependence on God in the wilderness. The practical clothing that is the garb of travelers reminds them that they continue to be on a journey. The liturgy associated with the meal reminds them of the events that led to their ancestors' liberation from Egypt. Many scholars think Jesus' Last Supper was a Passover meal.
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
The Institution Of The Lord's Supper
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. Paul has just been warning the Corinthians against various abuses associated with the Lord's Supper (vv. 17-22). The meal, which was more of a complete meal than it is in most modern churches, had become an occasion for gluttony and selfish hoarding of food. In an effort to restore the theological integrity of the sacramental meal, Paul reviews the circumstances under which Jesus instituted it. We should be grateful to the Corinthians for their lapse in table manners, because it led Paul to record the liturgical words at the heart of the ceremony -- words that had undoubtedly been handed down from Jesus himself, solemnly remembered by one or more of the disciples who had been present that night.
The Gospel
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Jesus Washes The Disciples' Feet
(See the Fifth Sunday Of Easter.) This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. The word "Maundy" associated with this day is a corruption of the Latin mandatum, or "commandment." The commandment referred to is Jesus' command in verse 34, that the disciples love one another. In verses 1-17, Jesus demonstrates how to live out this commandment, in the visual parable of washing the disciples' feet. His followers are anything but pleased to be the recipient of this action from their Lord. It threatens to overturn all the hierarchical ideas by which they have ordered their lives. Jesus' point is that love transcends all hierarchies, all divisions between people. It is the greatest thing in the world, and consequently every other thing of value in the world ought to be set aside when love shows up, eager to serve. Jesus' response to Peter -- declaring that, unless he receives the footwashing, Jesus will have nothing more to do with him -- may sound harsh, but that is because, for him, this visual lesson is of crucial importance. Who, in our culture, would ever admit they are wary of love? Yet, in approaching us with a basin and towel in hand, Jesus reminds us that love takes priority over all else, including the achievements and marks of social status to which we cling so tenaciously.
Preaching Possibilities
The passages from Exodus and 1 Corinthians remind us of how food can set off powerful triggers to memory. For centuries, the ritual meals of the Passover and the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper have called to mind the presence of God.
Somewhere deep in the human brain is a neurological link between food and memory. Most of us have "food triggers" -- distinctive tastes or smells that immediately carry us back to an earlier time. Often, these are favorite dishes that once were prepared by someone special to us -- maybe a parent or grandparent -- or perhaps they are foods distinctive to a certain place where we used to live. When we taste these foods, the memories come flooding back. There we are young again. Around us are people we once cared about, but who are no longer with us in this life. Then, as we bite into this very special dish, we taste a kind of joy.
It may well have been that same sort of experience the first Christians had, as they gathered to break bread and share one cup, following the Lord's command. It began to happen early on, at the very first celebrations of the Lord's Supper. We can read in Luke's Gospel how, in the village of Emmaus, two weary travelers sat down at table with a mysterious stranger who broke the bread and then vanished out of their sight. "Were not our hearts burning within us," they asked, "while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?" (And, we can probably add, "... while he was giving us the bread to eat?")
It is through the sacraments that this spiritual memory principally comes to life. As we hear the splash of water in the font, as we taste the yeasty bread and the sweet juice of the grape, our minds turn, in ways that are impossible to put into words, in the direction of God. We eat and drink ... and we remember.
Certain nursing homes, especially those that specialize in care for Alzheimer's disease patients, employ a specialized staff member called an "MLA." MLA is medical shorthand for "Memory Loss Assistants." What an MLA does is talk to the patients, read them books, lead them through patterning exercises that help their bodies recover skills like walking. "What do you talk to the patients about?" an interviewer asked one of these memory therapists.
"We tell them their names," the MLA explained. "We remind them of the names of their family members, and if possible we show them pictures. And then we rehearse, as far as we are able, over and over again, significant events that have happened in their past. We do whatever we can to give them a measure of confidence and hope." It sounds like a wonderful specialty: One that makes a real difference in the lives of people who, all too often, are forgotten by society, simply because they are unable to remember.
There's a certain sense in which the church is like that, and in which we who lead the church are Memory Loss Assistants. We gather here, as a community, once a week -- and sometimes more often -- and we tell each other stories. We sing songs, many of which are very ancient indeed. And we celebrate together the sacraments. As we do so, we are taking one another through a sort of patterning exercise, much like those Alzheimer's patients who sometimes manage to walk again because someone moves their legs. We can't describe how it works, exactly, but we know that somehow it does.
Our faith tells us that we come into this life from out of the presence of God, and that when we depart it, we return (by God's grace) to the heavenly places. There's a certain sense, in fact, in which we can be said to live our entire lives in a haze of forgetfulness. Only rarely does the truth penetrate the hard shell of our consciousness: the certainty that there is another world beyond this one, the world that is most ultimately real.
There's a little parable that illustrates this point. It comes from pastoral theologian, Henri J. M. Nouwen in his book, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (Harper, 1994).
Once upon a time, twin boys were conceived in the same womb. Weeks passed and the twins developed. As their awareness grew, they laughed for joy and said, "Isn't it great that we were conceived! Isn't it great that we are alive!"
Together the twins explored their world. They found their mother's cord that gave them life, and they sang for joy, "How great is our mother's love that she shares her own life with us."
Weeks stretched into months, and the twins noticed how much each was changing. "What does it mean?" asked the one. "It means that our stay in this world is drawing to an end," said the other. "But, I don't want to go," said one. "I want to stay here always." "We don't have a choice," said the other.
"But maybe there's life after birth," said the one.
"NO, we will shed our life cord. How is it possible that we will live without it?" replied the other. "Besides, we've seen evidence of others who've come before us and gone on. Yet none of them have come back to show that there is life beyond. No, this IS the end."
And so, the one fell into deep despair, saying, "If conception ends in birth, what's the purpose of the womb? It's meaningless! -- Maybe there's NO mother after all."
"But there has to be," protested the other, "how else did we get here? And, how do we remain alive?"
"Maybe she lives only in our minds. Maybe we made her up, because the idea made us feel good," replied the discouraged twin. And so the last days in the womb were filled with deep questioning and fear.
Finally the moment of birth arrived! And when the twins had passed on from their world, they opened their eyes and cried. For what they saw -- exceeded their fondest dreams!
Here in this place, with these people, around this table, we seek to rediscover, to remember, what we have previously known but are now in danger of forgetting. "Remember," of course, is the opposite of "dismember." When we remember, somehow we take the scattered, broken pieces of our experience and put them together in a different way: a way that's somehow truer to the essential nature of reality than the random, helter-skelter patterns of living that so often are the measure of our days.
Biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann once said, in a much-quoted address, that one of our most important tasks as Christians is "to practice memory in a world of amnesia." Archbishop Desmond Tutu, working quite independently of Brueggemann in the context of racial hatred in South Africa, picks up on the very same analogy when he says:
... amnesia is the way to hell. There can be no future without forgiveness, and to ever forgive, you have to know what happened. In order for us not to repeat what happened to others, we've got to have a memory. Memory is quite, quite crucial. We must give everything that we have to help people remember. Remember for one thing, the cost of the freedom they have got, so that they will not devalue it. Remember the anguish they went through so that they don't inflict it on others. Remember in order for us to be human.
There's something both human and divine about this gathering around a table, to partake of this sacrament. "Do this in remembrance of me," says the Lord. As we go about the everyday actions of eating and drinking, we know -- in a way that can scarcely be put into words -- that he is here with us. "Do this in remembrance of me," he teaches.
Prayer For The Day
"Do this in remembrance of me," you say, O Lord,
but we must be honest and admit
that we forget.
We forget when we are busy.
We forget when we are self-absorbed.
We forget when we are worried.
We forget for no particular reason.
Lord, you have charged us to be a people of memory,
but we must be honest and admit
that we have failed you in this.
So break the bread,
spill out the wine:
that in the crusty texture
and sweet fragrance
we may remember -- and live. Amen.
To Illustrate
Through memory, love transcends the limits of time and offers hope at any moment of our lives.... One of the mysteries of life is that memory can often bring us closer to each other than can physical presence. In absence, from a distance, in memory, we see each other in a new way.... There is little doubt that memory can distort, falsify, and cause selective perception. But that is only one aspect of memory. Memory also clarifies, purifies, brings into focus, and calls to the foreground hidden gifts. When a mother and father think of their children who have left home, when a child remembers his parents, when a husband and wife call each other to mind during long periods of absence, when friends recall their friends, it is often the very best that is evoked and the real beauty of the other that breaks into consciousness.... This sustaining power of memory becomes most mysteriously available in God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Indeed it is in memory that we enter into a nurturing and sustaining relationship with Christ.
-- Henri J. M. Nouwen
***
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
-- William Wordsworth, from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
***
I could never make myself remember Aunt Cordie or Uncle Othy. I could remember them only by being reminded of them. I never knew when this would happen, but when I was reminded they would just all of a sudden appear to me as they had been on a certain day -- Uncle Othy rowing the boat, Aunt Cordie walking down to the garden, using her hoe as a walking stick -- and then I would see them plain.
-- Wendell Berry's title character, speaking as a boy, reflects back on the elderly couple who took him in when his parents died, and who subsequently died themselves; in Jayber Crow (New York: Counterpoint, 2000), pp. 36-37
***
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
-- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996)
***
It is a story told for children. The title is The Dead Bird, by Margaret Wise Brown. One day, at play, three children discover the body of a bird that has died. They decide to give the bird a proper burial. Carefully they dig the grave and mark the spot. They speak lovingly of the bird's beauty and the joy it brought to life. They grieve the bird as one much beloved.
But it is the final line of Wise's story that is most arresting: "... and they went back every day ... until they forgot."
-- Margaret Wise Brown, The Dead Bird (New York: Harper Trophy, 1995)
***
It is Jewish tradition -- pre-dating the use of modern carved tombstones, but still continuing today, as we can see from the final scene of Schindler's List -- for mourners to bring a stone to the grave of a loved one, and leave it there. Over time, with visitors to the grave each leaving a stone, quite a pile accumulates.
It is the generations that follow after us that determine how we will be remembered.
When we taste of the Lord's Supper, we remember that the Lord is good.
Old Testament Lesson
Exodus 12:1-4 (5-10) 11-14
The First Passover
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. Appropriately for a day that focuses on Jesus' institution of the Lord's Supper, the Old Testament Lesson is the story of the first Passover. In an effort to shorten this passage, the lectionary editors have suggested that verses 5-10 be omitted. This is unwise, however, since the omitted passage contains the crucial detail that the Israelites were to paint the doorposts of their houses with lamb's blood as a signal to the Lord's avenging angel to pass them by. In terms of source criticism, this is a Priestly (P) account; a similar Yahwistic (J) account follows shortly afterward, in verses 21-23, minus the detailed instructions for the Passover seder meal that are reflected in today's passage. The simplicity of the meal -- comprised of pure foods that are either wild or require no human modification such as leavening agents -- reminds the Jews of their radical dependence on God in the wilderness. The practical clothing that is the garb of travelers reminds them that they continue to be on a journey. The liturgy associated with the meal reminds them of the events that led to their ancestors' liberation from Egypt. Many scholars think Jesus' Last Supper was a Passover meal.
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
The Institution Of The Lord's Supper
This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. Paul has just been warning the Corinthians against various abuses associated with the Lord's Supper (vv. 17-22). The meal, which was more of a complete meal than it is in most modern churches, had become an occasion for gluttony and selfish hoarding of food. In an effort to restore the theological integrity of the sacramental meal, Paul reviews the circumstances under which Jesus instituted it. We should be grateful to the Corinthians for their lapse in table manners, because it led Paul to record the liturgical words at the heart of the ceremony -- words that had undoubtedly been handed down from Jesus himself, solemnly remembered by one or more of the disciples who had been present that night.
The Gospel
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Jesus Washes The Disciples' Feet
(See the Fifth Sunday Of Easter.) This passage occurs in all three annual cycles of the lectionary for this day. The word "Maundy" associated with this day is a corruption of the Latin mandatum, or "commandment." The commandment referred to is Jesus' command in verse 34, that the disciples love one another. In verses 1-17, Jesus demonstrates how to live out this commandment, in the visual parable of washing the disciples' feet. His followers are anything but pleased to be the recipient of this action from their Lord. It threatens to overturn all the hierarchical ideas by which they have ordered their lives. Jesus' point is that love transcends all hierarchies, all divisions between people. It is the greatest thing in the world, and consequently every other thing of value in the world ought to be set aside when love shows up, eager to serve. Jesus' response to Peter -- declaring that, unless he receives the footwashing, Jesus will have nothing more to do with him -- may sound harsh, but that is because, for him, this visual lesson is of crucial importance. Who, in our culture, would ever admit they are wary of love? Yet, in approaching us with a basin and towel in hand, Jesus reminds us that love takes priority over all else, including the achievements and marks of social status to which we cling so tenaciously.
Preaching Possibilities
The passages from Exodus and 1 Corinthians remind us of how food can set off powerful triggers to memory. For centuries, the ritual meals of the Passover and the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper have called to mind the presence of God.
Somewhere deep in the human brain is a neurological link between food and memory. Most of us have "food triggers" -- distinctive tastes or smells that immediately carry us back to an earlier time. Often, these are favorite dishes that once were prepared by someone special to us -- maybe a parent or grandparent -- or perhaps they are foods distinctive to a certain place where we used to live. When we taste these foods, the memories come flooding back. There we are young again. Around us are people we once cared about, but who are no longer with us in this life. Then, as we bite into this very special dish, we taste a kind of joy.
It may well have been that same sort of experience the first Christians had, as they gathered to break bread and share one cup, following the Lord's command. It began to happen early on, at the very first celebrations of the Lord's Supper. We can read in Luke's Gospel how, in the village of Emmaus, two weary travelers sat down at table with a mysterious stranger who broke the bread and then vanished out of their sight. "Were not our hearts burning within us," they asked, "while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?" (And, we can probably add, "... while he was giving us the bread to eat?")
It is through the sacraments that this spiritual memory principally comes to life. As we hear the splash of water in the font, as we taste the yeasty bread and the sweet juice of the grape, our minds turn, in ways that are impossible to put into words, in the direction of God. We eat and drink ... and we remember.
Certain nursing homes, especially those that specialize in care for Alzheimer's disease patients, employ a specialized staff member called an "MLA." MLA is medical shorthand for "Memory Loss Assistants." What an MLA does is talk to the patients, read them books, lead them through patterning exercises that help their bodies recover skills like walking. "What do you talk to the patients about?" an interviewer asked one of these memory therapists.
"We tell them their names," the MLA explained. "We remind them of the names of their family members, and if possible we show them pictures. And then we rehearse, as far as we are able, over and over again, significant events that have happened in their past. We do whatever we can to give them a measure of confidence and hope." It sounds like a wonderful specialty: One that makes a real difference in the lives of people who, all too often, are forgotten by society, simply because they are unable to remember.
There's a certain sense in which the church is like that, and in which we who lead the church are Memory Loss Assistants. We gather here, as a community, once a week -- and sometimes more often -- and we tell each other stories. We sing songs, many of which are very ancient indeed. And we celebrate together the sacraments. As we do so, we are taking one another through a sort of patterning exercise, much like those Alzheimer's patients who sometimes manage to walk again because someone moves their legs. We can't describe how it works, exactly, but we know that somehow it does.
Our faith tells us that we come into this life from out of the presence of God, and that when we depart it, we return (by God's grace) to the heavenly places. There's a certain sense, in fact, in which we can be said to live our entire lives in a haze of forgetfulness. Only rarely does the truth penetrate the hard shell of our consciousness: the certainty that there is another world beyond this one, the world that is most ultimately real.
There's a little parable that illustrates this point. It comes from pastoral theologian, Henri J. M. Nouwen in his book, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (Harper, 1994).
Once upon a time, twin boys were conceived in the same womb. Weeks passed and the twins developed. As their awareness grew, they laughed for joy and said, "Isn't it great that we were conceived! Isn't it great that we are alive!"
Together the twins explored their world. They found their mother's cord that gave them life, and they sang for joy, "How great is our mother's love that she shares her own life with us."
Weeks stretched into months, and the twins noticed how much each was changing. "What does it mean?" asked the one. "It means that our stay in this world is drawing to an end," said the other. "But, I don't want to go," said one. "I want to stay here always." "We don't have a choice," said the other.
"But maybe there's life after birth," said the one.
"NO, we will shed our life cord. How is it possible that we will live without it?" replied the other. "Besides, we've seen evidence of others who've come before us and gone on. Yet none of them have come back to show that there is life beyond. No, this IS the end."
And so, the one fell into deep despair, saying, "If conception ends in birth, what's the purpose of the womb? It's meaningless! -- Maybe there's NO mother after all."
"But there has to be," protested the other, "how else did we get here? And, how do we remain alive?"
"Maybe she lives only in our minds. Maybe we made her up, because the idea made us feel good," replied the discouraged twin. And so the last days in the womb were filled with deep questioning and fear.
Finally the moment of birth arrived! And when the twins had passed on from their world, they opened their eyes and cried. For what they saw -- exceeded their fondest dreams!
Here in this place, with these people, around this table, we seek to rediscover, to remember, what we have previously known but are now in danger of forgetting. "Remember," of course, is the opposite of "dismember." When we remember, somehow we take the scattered, broken pieces of our experience and put them together in a different way: a way that's somehow truer to the essential nature of reality than the random, helter-skelter patterns of living that so often are the measure of our days.
Biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann once said, in a much-quoted address, that one of our most important tasks as Christians is "to practice memory in a world of amnesia." Archbishop Desmond Tutu, working quite independently of Brueggemann in the context of racial hatred in South Africa, picks up on the very same analogy when he says:
... amnesia is the way to hell. There can be no future without forgiveness, and to ever forgive, you have to know what happened. In order for us not to repeat what happened to others, we've got to have a memory. Memory is quite, quite crucial. We must give everything that we have to help people remember. Remember for one thing, the cost of the freedom they have got, so that they will not devalue it. Remember the anguish they went through so that they don't inflict it on others. Remember in order for us to be human.
There's something both human and divine about this gathering around a table, to partake of this sacrament. "Do this in remembrance of me," says the Lord. As we go about the everyday actions of eating and drinking, we know -- in a way that can scarcely be put into words -- that he is here with us. "Do this in remembrance of me," he teaches.
Prayer For The Day
"Do this in remembrance of me," you say, O Lord,
but we must be honest and admit
that we forget.
We forget when we are busy.
We forget when we are self-absorbed.
We forget when we are worried.
We forget for no particular reason.
Lord, you have charged us to be a people of memory,
but we must be honest and admit
that we have failed you in this.
So break the bread,
spill out the wine:
that in the crusty texture
and sweet fragrance
we may remember -- and live. Amen.
To Illustrate
Through memory, love transcends the limits of time and offers hope at any moment of our lives.... One of the mysteries of life is that memory can often bring us closer to each other than can physical presence. In absence, from a distance, in memory, we see each other in a new way.... There is little doubt that memory can distort, falsify, and cause selective perception. But that is only one aspect of memory. Memory also clarifies, purifies, brings into focus, and calls to the foreground hidden gifts. When a mother and father think of their children who have left home, when a child remembers his parents, when a husband and wife call each other to mind during long periods of absence, when friends recall their friends, it is often the very best that is evoked and the real beauty of the other that breaks into consciousness.... This sustaining power of memory becomes most mysteriously available in God's revelation in Jesus Christ. Indeed it is in memory that we enter into a nurturing and sustaining relationship with Christ.
-- Henri J. M. Nouwen
***
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
-- William Wordsworth, from "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
***
I could never make myself remember Aunt Cordie or Uncle Othy. I could remember them only by being reminded of them. I never knew when this would happen, but when I was reminded they would just all of a sudden appear to me as they had been on a certain day -- Uncle Othy rowing the boat, Aunt Cordie walking down to the garden, using her hoe as a walking stick -- and then I would see them plain.
-- Wendell Berry's title character, speaking as a boy, reflects back on the elderly couple who took him in when his parents died, and who subsequently died themselves; in Jayber Crow (New York: Counterpoint, 2000), pp. 36-37
***
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
-- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996)
***
It is a story told for children. The title is The Dead Bird, by Margaret Wise Brown. One day, at play, three children discover the body of a bird that has died. They decide to give the bird a proper burial. Carefully they dig the grave and mark the spot. They speak lovingly of the bird's beauty and the joy it brought to life. They grieve the bird as one much beloved.
But it is the final line of Wise's story that is most arresting: "... and they went back every day ... until they forgot."
-- Margaret Wise Brown, The Dead Bird (New York: Harper Trophy, 1995)
***
It is Jewish tradition -- pre-dating the use of modern carved tombstones, but still continuing today, as we can see from the final scene of Schindler's List -- for mourners to bring a stone to the grave of a loved one, and leave it there. Over time, with visitors to the grave each leaving a stone, quite a pile accumulates.
It is the generations that follow after us that determine how we will be remembered.
