Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12.1-14; 1 Corinthians 11.23-26
There is no single word in the English language which can adequately describe, not the conflicting, not the incongruent, not the separated, but the alloyed emotions of Maundy Thursday; perhaps the nearest we can get is bitter-sweet.
But at least we have emerged from the fog. Since the morning of what we call Palm Sunday we have been considering the reality and ubiquity of our uncertainty and the consequent futility of our urge to control; but now we are on firm ground where we meet the solidity and solidarity we crave; while all around are wondering, Jesus knows what he is doing and the narrative of events makes the Old and New Testaments marvellously cohere.
In spite of the Old Testament Reading being, to use vulgar contemporary parlance, in our face, it is surprising how little attention it commanded until the birth of Liberation Theology, in Maundy Thursday commentaries. I managed to get to the age of forty, initially brought up in a strict Roman Catholic family and community and then deeply involved in Anglican theological enquiry, before I made the connection which is liturgically explicit between the Passover and the Eucharist but now it provides the core around which all my Christian commitment revolves.
Moses was charged by God to rescue his Chosen People from their slavery and, after its occurrence up until today, Jewish families remember this deliverance at their Passover meals. At one such (Wright), Jesus gathered his followers together and they re-told the old story but, over time, from their first liberation, the Jewish understanding of Passover evolved such that their prayer was that they would be liberated again, a second time, from tyranny, this time exercised in their own country, a tyranny which they understood to be of their own making, from which only God's Messiah could free them.
So Jesus, God's Messiah, sat at the Passover table and declared four things: first, he was the Messiah who had come to liberate the Chosen People, Israel, from sin, as had been foretold by the Scriptures; secondly, those who chose to follow him, a privilege extended to Gentiles, would be, if you like, collateral beneficiaries of his primary saving purpose; thirdly, these benefits could only be secured through his own death; and, finally, that the offering of his broken body for the world would be perpetuated in what he undertook at table with the bread and wine and which would become the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.
It is in the last two declarations that the bitter-sweetness lies, knowing that human misuse of free will caused the 'necessity' of the death of Jesus which, in turn, has given us eternal life but which has also supplied us with his body and blood as our sacred food along our pilgrim way. In a logical incongruity we are at once weeping for the suffering of Jesus while we hammer in the nails.
The transformation of freedom from earthly powers to freedom from the consequences of the misuse of free will is one of those mysterious transferences between the Old and the New Testament that we too easily slide over in much the same way that we never see in our place of residence what tourists see in it. We hardly say a formal prayer without reference to salvation but in doing so we find it nearly impossible to imagine the world of the Old Testament which lacked any idea of it up until the breakthrough of Daniel and Second Isaiah. But, in our turn, we have lived through Christian Centuries in which the Eucharist has been the centre of theological contention, where a largely clerical war has been conducted to control the meaning of the Sacrament or, consequentially, the lack of meaning. Yes, again we are back with the human desire to substitute certainty for mystery and control for unconditional reception.
Meanwhile, as we were finally coming to a Eucharistic truce in Western Christianity, the Liberation theologians made a decisive link between Eucharistic liturgy and ethics by seeing the Maundy Thursday conjunction of the Exodus and the institution of the Eucharist as one and the same thing, as marks of God's commitment to rescue the poor and the oppressed, not in the after-life but now. Just as the Exodus was a liberation from tyranny, so the Eucharist represents our commitment not only to religious but also to political, universal, sisterhood and brotherhood. When we take the Eucharist we are committing ourselves to God's earthly justice, equality and peace; we are eating sacred food which is supposed, if we allow it, to equip us for our kingdom-building here on earth so that, ultimately, our realm and God's realm will be united as God out of time and God in history are united.
It is in this meal, then, that all uncertainty is swept aside and God's control of human destiny is made crystal clear. Most evil comes about because of the illusion of control which we usually refer to as "pride". It either takes a crisis like the one we are currently undergoing or a massively decisive act, like the Exodus or the institution of the Eucharist, to demonstrate that human control is an illusion, which calls into question all our preciousness and calculation. This is not to say that we are slaves to predestination or fatalism; we are free to do what we are predestined to do but as we do not know what that is, we are free; but only within limits. And these limits are set by our createdness, by our imperfection and our salvation from the consequences of our imperfection which means, strangely, that we are not free after our earthly death, to be nothing.
It is proper at this point to dwell for a few moments on the graciousness of the Eucharist, freely given, in the form of God's broken body, the body of Christ given to His Church, the body of Christ. For there is no day in the Church's Year when we need the Eucharist more than we do now; and our dispersement on this evening makes this deprivation as hurtful as it will ever be.
But, in the absence of the accidents of bread and wine, we must concentrate on the reality of the sacrifice and its salvific consequences, for we who choose to follow. We may not be able to take Jesus in our hands but we are in his hands; and that is what matters most of all.