Maundy Thursday Online 2021

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to our Maundy Thursday service.

Many of us did not grow up in a Christian tradition that followed the historic church calendar, and so we may not really know what tonight is about. Well two thousand years ago, a group of men gathered together in secret in the city of Jerusalem during the Jewish festival of Passover to share a meal. It’s a meal that goes by many names: The Lord’s Supper, Communion, the Eucharist, the Bread and the Cup, the Mass. What happened that night left such a mark on Christ’s followers that this meal became a way of participating in the very ministry of Jesus, so that churches across the earth have celebrated this meal weekly since the very beginning of the Church.

Tonight, I want to place us in that room with Jesus and the disciples, and watch and listen as they share the meal together. We’ll use Luke’s account of the story as our guide, as we reenact what transpired around the table that night, as Jesus hosted his friends for the Passover meal on the eve of his crucifixion. But let us first pray:

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Let us pray.

Almighty Father, whose most dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it in thankful remembrance of Jesus Christ our Savior, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Luke 22:7

Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover for us, that we may eat it.” They said to him, “Where will you have us prepare it?” He said to them, “Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house that he enters and tell the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ And he will show you a large upper room furnished; prepare it there.” And they went and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.

Christian’s did not make up the church calendar on a whim. The Jewish calendar was their guide. The Jewish people were all about creating rhythms in their day and week and year that reminded them of who they were as God’s people and what He in his love had done for them. And the crown jewel of that calendar was the Passover Festival. Passover told the foundation story of how God had rescued Israel out of slavery in Egypt, protected them through the wilderness, and brought them into the freedom of the Promised Land. It was a week long festival that culminated in the feast of Passover.

And it is not coincidental that Easter and Passover connect every year. It’s because Jesus intentionally chose the week leading up to Passover to be his final week. He clearly knew that his death was imminent. As he was journeying with his disciples to Jerusalem, he told them several times, even though they didn’t believe him, that he was going to die in Jerusalem. And he rode into Jerusalem at the beginning of the Passover Festival on a donkey, like we celebrated on Palm Sunday, and he went to the temple and turned over all the tables making a huge scene and making a lot of enemies. And that act along with everything else resulted in a price being put on his head. And in all four gospels, the week of Holy Week is a week of intensifying conflict and tension with the authorities in Jerusalem, until at last a plot is hatched to kill Jesus, and it all comes to a head on the night of the Passover feast.

Jesus knew that his time was running out. He knew that he had just hours left before he’d be killed. And he wanted more than anything to have one last moment with his disciples. And so he arranged for a quiet place, a secret place. This is like a spy movie, isn’t it? “Go find a man carrying a jar of water, he will take you to the house. And when you get there, tell him the code.” This is a spy movie! But why is Jesus arranging for this quiet and secretive space? So that he could explain to his disciples what was about to happen to him in the hours to come.

And it’s interesting that none of the gospel accounts - Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John - none of them record Jesus giving a lengthy explanation where he lays out the reason he is going to die and the meaning of his death. In fact, throughout the gospels, the handful of passages where Jesus actually talks about the meaning of his death could hardly fill a single page. So, this night is the last chance he has to really describe what he’s about to do. But instead of hosting a lecture, he hosts a meal. A Passover meal, to be specific. Because every part of this meal was a symbol telling that ancient story of redemption from slavery. And what Jesus did on that final night was he transformed the meaning of this meal to center not on God’s redeeming work in the past, but on God’s redeeming work that was about to happen in and through Jesus.

So tonight, we’re going to walk through the Passover meal that Jesus would have hosted for his disciples that night. A meal that had been shared among the Jewish people for 1500 years at that point. And as we go, we’re going to pay careful attention to the ways that Jesus takes this ancient meal and gives it a new significance that centers on him and what he was about to do.

The Passover meal is divided into four major movements that are marked by four cups of wine. And before taking each cup, the host would say a blessing. So, I will sing it in Hebrew, and we’ll then say it together: barukh atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam, haborei puri hagafen.

May you be blessed, O Lord our God, King of the World, who creates the fruit of the vine.

And we’d drink the first cup. The Passover has begun.

Look with me at verse 14:

And when the hour came, he reclined at table, and the apostles with him. And he said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” And he took a cup (like we just did), and when he had given thanks (like we just did) he said, “Take this, and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.”

And it would be at this point that the disciples would be scratching their heads. Because this isn’t how you lead a Passover meal. It’s like when your in-laws invite you over for Christmas dinner, and they didn’t make any sweet-potato casserole. You’re like…you don’t mess with Christmas dinner. It’s the same here. You don’t mess with Passover. You just don’t.

But you have Jesus taking the very first cup, and he’s giving it a whole new meaning. Because the Passover meal is about what? It’s about a past event. It’s about the exodus of the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt, and Jesus is saying that now this meal isn’t pointing backwards, but it’s pointing forwards. Do you see that? It’s pointing forwards to something that’s about to happen, and he clearly says that that something is his suffering. Jesus says that this meal is forward pointing now, and it’s pointing to the fulfillment of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of God coming.

And if you’ve been following along with Jesus during his ministry leading up to this night, you’d know that the kingdom of God was his main message. If you ever heard Jesus teaching, you’d hear him talking about the Kingdom of God. It was a shorthand that he often used to sum up the whole biblical story, and a way of saying that God’s promises to rescue, to bless all the nations, to redeem and forgive his world. It’s all happening. The moment when those promises are coming to true, it’s happening. And Jesus had been saying, it’s here in me. The kingdom of God is here, in me. So, with the first cup of Passover still in hand, Jesus is telling his disciples that this meal that they are sharing is pointing forward to the climactic moment of the kingdom of God arriving in his suffering and death.

After the first cup, they would move to an appetizer of sorts, known as the Karpas. Remember, every part of this meal is symbolic. The meal is all about reenacting a story. So the Karpas would have been some kind of leafy vegetable, maybe lettuce or celery, and they would dip the Karpas in heavily salted water. And they would eat it.

Now, why would they do that? Well there have been many explanations over the years, but the oldest says that the dipping of the Karpas reenacts the story of Joseph and his brothers. So there was Abraham, then Isaac, and then Jacob, and Jacob has twelve sons, and the eleventh son is kind of a jerk, and his name was Joseph. Joseph was Jacob’s favorite son, and he was given a special coat that basically symbolized his special place in the family. And boy did he flaunt it in front of his brothers. And they didn’t really like that, so they make a plan to murder him. But then they think, no that’s too mean, so they decide to sell him into slavery for the rest of his life, because what sibling hasn’t done that, right? So they do that, and they make up a story, because you can’t really tell your dad that you sold his favorite son into slavery, so they took a lamb and they slit its throat, and they dipped Joseph’s special coat in the blood, and they told their dad that a wild animal ate him. So the dipping of the Karpas is a reenactment of the dipping of Joseph’s coat into the blood, because anyone who has bit their lip knows that blood is salty.

And that event, selling Joseph into slavery, sets into motion the series of events that leads the family of Israel into Egypt. This is how they got there.

So at this moment in the meal, after we dip the Karpas and tell the story of Joseph going to Egypt, it was customary for the children to ask the host all kinds of questions. Questions like, “Why are we doing this? Why is the bread all flat? Why is the food so terrible? Why do we do this every year?” Anyone who has tried to uphold any kind of family tradition knows these questions. So at this point in the meal, the host would get out the scroll of Exodus and read the full story of the Exodus. Now, we’re not going to do that. Instead, I’ll tell an abbreviated version:

Our ancestor, Abraham, was a wanderer, and God called him to the land of Canaan long ago, and made promises to him, that through him and his family, God’s blessing would find its way to all the nations of the earth. But there was a famine in the land, and the family had to go down south to Egypt to find food. And in Egypt our family flourished and grew, but the king of Egypt felt threatened and grew afraid, so he made us slaves and killed our children. So our ancestors cried out to God, and God heard their cry and remembered his promises, and God raised up for us a deliverer, Moses. And through Moses, God brought great acts of justice against the injustice of Egypt - ten strikes against the oppression of Pharoah. And in this way, God rescued our people from slavery and brought us back into the land that he promised to our father, Abraham. And that is why we hold this meal, 1500 years later. We’re reenacting God’s great act of liberation, we were once enslaved, but now we’ve been freed.

And so at the conclusion of the reading of the story, they’d all raise their second cup, and they would sing a whole section of Psalms called “the Great Hallel,” which was Psalm 113-118 . So let’s read Psalm 113 together:

Praise the Lord!

Praise, O servants of the Lord,

praise the name of the Lord!

Blessed be the name of the Lord

from this time forth and forevermore!

From the rising of the sun to its setting,

the name of the Lord is to be praised!

The Lord is high above all nations,

and his glory above the heavens!

Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high,

who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?

He raises the poor from the dust

and lifts the needy from the ash heap,

to make them sit with princes,

with the princes of his people.

He gives the barren woman a home,

making her the joyous mother of children.

Praise the Lord!

Barukh atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam. Haborei puri hagafen

May you be blessed, O Lord our God, King of the world, who creates the fruit of the vine.

Rabbi Gamaliel used to say. Do you all know Rabbi Gamaliel? You for sure know one of his students: a man by the name of Saul of Tarsus, later known as the apostle Paul. His teacher, Rabbi Gamaliel used to say that while there are many ways to celebrate Passover, you have to have three elements, or else it’s not really Passover. You have to have the unleavened bread, the bitter herbs, and the Passover lamb.

So you have to have bread. Bread, we know it and we love it. Then and today it is the staple food. It’s our sustenance. Well, the bread for Passover was unleavened. It was not made with yeast. So, after a year of binge watching baking shows during quarantine, we all know how to make bread at this point, and part of that process is putting yeast in the dough, and then you have to wait several hours, sometimes overnight, for the dough to rise, before you can bake it. But, the bread for Passover doesn’t have yeast. It’s flat and dry. Why? Again, we’re reenacting the story of liberation, and the Israelites didn’t have time to let their dough rise. Exodus 12:39 .

And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had brought out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not wait, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves.

So they were baking with their bags packed. They were making power bars basically. Travel food, because they had to book it at a moment’s notice. That’s what this bread is reenacting.

But look at what Jesus does. Luke 22:19

And he took bread, and when he had given thanks,

Barukh atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam, hamotzi lemech min haaretz

May you be blessed, o Lord our God, king of the world, who brings forth bread from the earth.

he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

So as they are eating the unleavened bread, Jesus just drops this bomb and says, “The bread that you’re eating…it’s my body.” That is a horrifying thing to say at a dinner party. Can you imagine someone saying that at one of your dinner parties? This lasagna…it’s my body. Like this is strange in any culture. But this is the way that Jesus chooses to explain what’s about to happen to him, so let’s put it together.

What do you do with dough? You mash it, and knead it, and grind your fist into it, and roll it out and put it into the oven. And then, you eat it. We grew up on bread. It’s a staple food. Bread is life. We live by bread.

And Jesus says, “this is my body.” What does Jesus know is about to happen to him in the next 24 hours? His body is going to be whipped and beaten and broken, and he’ll be thrown into his own furnace, a Roman torture device. And somehow his broken and beaten body is going to become a source of life. And for who? Jesus says, “for you. For others.” So we live by bread, and we live by the broken body of Jesus.

As we’re begin to ponder this, our attention turns to the bitter herb, the mawror. The mawror is shredded horseradish root, and it is intense. You load it up on some lettuce or bread, and the whole point of eating the mawror is to cause you to cry - for your eyes to well up with tears and your nose to run. It’s supposed to be a shock to your system. So why do we do this? Exodus 1:13

so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives (mawror)bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.

So what we’d say together as we eat the bitter herb, is that the point of this meal is so that every generation sees itself as the generation that came up out of slavery in Egypt. This meal is not just a symbol, but it’s a way to participate in the story of God redeeming his people. We aren’t just remembering, we are living it through this meal. Their tears are our tears. Their slavery is our slavery. Their need for God’s liberation is our need as well. We need the Lord to move powerfully on our behalf, because like our ancestors, we have no hope apart from his grace. So we eat the mawror. The bitter herb.

And finally, the last part of the meal would be the lamb. And this was the most important part. The whole meal has been leading up to this moment, when the story of the Passover lamb is told.

In the last act of justice against Egypt, God sent a messenger of death, a plague, that would sweep through the land of Egypt, and in every house that it passed, the firstborn would die. Now, that’s a lot to stomach. It matches Pharaoh’s unthinkable act, when he killed every Hebrew boy. And in a poetic justice, God’s final act against Egypt is to kill their firstborn.

But God provided something that Pharaoh never did, and that was a way out. A means of mercy. And it was through the Passover lamb. Anybody, Israelite or not, could take a lamb, one year old and without blemish or spot, and they could slaughter it. And taking its blood, you’d spread it over the doorpost of your house, and everyone who was in a house that was covered by the blood of the Passover lamb was spared. The death of the lamb was a means of mercy and deliverance.

And so even before sitting down for this meal, we would have had a lamb prepared, one year old without spot or blemish. We would have taken it to the priest in the temple, who would have slaughtered it, and given us the meat and the blood to take home. We would have painted the doorpost of our home with the blood, and we’d eat the meat of the lamb, all the while remembering the lamb that died for our deliverance.

And it’s just at this moment that Jesus takes the third cup. Luke 22:20 .

In the same way, after the supper he took the cup,

Barukh atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam, haborei puri hagafen.

May you be blessed, O Lord our God, king of the world, who creates the fruit of the vine.

In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, the third cup of the meal, the cup that is connected to the blood of the Passover lamb, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.”

Do you see what Jesus is doing? His disciples were told all their lives that it was the blood of the lamb that brought deliverance and freedom from slavery, and here is Jesus telling them that now, it wasn’t the blood of the lamb, it was his blood. His blood was the means of God’s mercy. His blood brought freedom from slavery. And his blood marked who was a part of God’s people.

You see the blood of the Passover lamb was what sealed God’s relationship with Israel. It marked his covenant people for redemption. And on this night, Jesus says that a new relationship has begun. A new covenant has been formed, and it is sealed with his blood. Twelve hours from now, his blood would be shed as he is whipped, beaten, and hung on a cross until suffocating to death, and his blood would bring freedom for not just the family of Israel, but a whole new family. A new family marked by his blood.

This is how Jesus explained his death to his disciples. These are the symbols that he gave them. He chose a rhythm that was already an essential part of their lives, and he reformed it around his life, death, and resurrection, because he wanted this to be something that they come back to again and again. He could have sat them down and logically gone through all of it, explaining point by point the meaning of his fast-approaching death, but instead he invited them to participate in this Passover meal with him. Because the point was not that they’d just understand his death. The point wasn’t that they just get the meaning behind it. Jesus wanted them to keep participating in it throughout their lives. Every generation is to see themselves as the generation coming out of slavery in Egypt, and in the same way, every generation of his followers are to see themselves as sitting around that table on the night before his death. Jesus doesn’t want us to just understand this meal or his death, he wants us to participate in it. Do you see that? And that’s exactly what we do, week in and week out: we participate in the death of Christ as we come to his table and take the bread which is his body, and drink the wine which is his blood.

Think of what this meal meant for the people of Israel for thousands of years. They heard all about the Canaanite gods, and the Babylonians and Persians and Romans, and how their cultures were so progressive and technological and powerful, and Passover comes around and they remember who they are, and they root themselves in their story. We’re the people of the God of Israel, who rescued us from the hand of Egypt and who promises to deliver us again. It grounded them. And it’s the same for us. There are all kinds of stories out there being told about who we are, what we should be doing, what we need, and what we should want. And what we do each and every week, by coming to this meal, we root ourselves in this story. We touch it. We smell it. We taste it. We participate in the story of Jesus.

And what is that story? It’s the story of God acting on behalf of his people to free them from slavery. But it’s not to Egypt or to Rome that we are enslaved. Jesus came to deliver us from an enemy far more oppressive and a power far more pervasive. What makes our lives bitter isn’t our slavery to Egypt, it’s our slavery to sin. It’s the darkness that envelopes every human heart - a darkness that manifests itself in broken people and broken relationship which spills out to form broken neighborhoods and cities and systems and governments. And we’re all a part of the problem, because all our hearts are in bondage to this mess.

But Jesus saw himself as the way God would rescue the world from that slavery. And like the Passover lamb, it would be his death that would bring our freedom. He would become the whipped slave, beaten and bruised and killed, so that we could be free. The Passover story is the gospel story. It’s our story.

Yet the story of God’s redemption is not ended. We celebrate what God has done in our history, and what he has done for us, but at the same time we still await a new future. All creation still groans and longs for its final redemption. As Jesus left, he promised he would come again and restore all things. As he said at the beginning of the meal, there is another Passover feast yet to be held, when God’s people are reunited with Jesus around his table once more. When the kingdom of God covers the earth as the waters cover the sea, Jesus will share another meal with us, when all things are made new.

And so while this meal points back to what Jesus has done for us, and allows for our participation in his redemptive work on the cross, it also points forward to that future meal in the New Creation, and it allows for our participation in some mysterious way in the glory of that future day in God’s kingdom, when we see our Lord face to face.

And so, at the end of the meal we’d take the fourth and final cup

And as with every cup, let us say a blessing. And this time, let us say the prayer that the Lord taught us. Saying together,

Our Father, who art in heaven

hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come,

thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our trespasses.

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom and the power and glory,

forever and ever. Amen.

Thank you for joining us in this service tonight. I hope to see you tomorrow night either in person or online at 6pm for our Good Friday service. Until then, may the peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and of his son our savior Jesus Christ, and may the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you this night, and remain with you forever. Amen.