Maundy Thursday (April 14, 2022)

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be alway acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

In the chaos of our day-to-day lives, we get so bogged down by the mundane, it’s hard for us to focus on the mystery of life. We hustle and bustle from thing to thing, we get too easily satisfied with insignificant creature comforts, and we lose sight of the important questions. One way to enter into the mystery of life is to meditate on food. Food is so familiar to us. We eat it, after all, at least three times a day. We have giant grocery stores full of all kinds of food, anything we need or want. If you do any of the cooking in your home, you’ve probably encountered countless onions, cucumbers, tomatoes and shepherded them through the preparation process.

Have you ever heard the phrase “You are what you eat”? I didn’t know this until recently while I was reading a book by a theologian named M. Craig Barnes but apparently the saying can be traced back to materialist philosopher Ludwig Feurerbach who said it as a way of making a totally reductionistic materialist statement: the human being is nothing more than their caloric intake. You are nothing more than the sum total of material substances you absorb.

Feurerbach is not totally wrong, of course. There is a biological reason for food, of course. Like all other animals who have bodies, we require food for nourishment. Without food, the body begins to break down. When we eat food, the body breaks it down into carbohydrates, proteins, and fats that afford us calories which act as fuel. So there is a sense in which eating is purely utilitarian: if we don’t do it, we will die. Unlike other animals, however, humans can think about their food because we possess rational capacities other creatures do not; it’s not common for a lion to sit around and contemplate whether it should eat the rest of the gazelle or maybe just have one serving because he’s trying to watch his figure. Other animals eat purely from instinct; while we do share these instincts with animals, we also possess reason which allows us to consider eating from other angles than the exclusively utilitarian and instinctual.

Because of this, we can say that eating has a social element for humans. When we celebrate, we share meals. When we mourn, we share meals. We even share meals with each other for no special occasion. In our modern day where food is easily accessible, it’s perhaps hard for us to appreciate how important the sharing of food would have been in the ancient world. In the ancient world, you would have been more constrained to the cuisine common in your geographical area. Further, if you were a landowner, you would have been heavily dependent on the food your produced for your own survival. So, as theologian Herbert McCabe points out, if you shared a meal with someone, you were doing two things: first, you were very much bestowing on them physical life (which is why hospitality was taken so seriously by the ancients — it was a life or death matter). But also, you were recognizing others as worthy of sharing life with. This is what makes the rich man’s behavior so reprehensible in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31. The rich man had this poor man laying in his gate and never offered him a single morsel or scrap from his table; he made a judgment that poor Lazarus was not worthy of life. And of course this is a decision that had eternal ramifications as Lazarus makes it to Abraham’s Bosom while the rich man ends up in hell.

This is because food is important on physical and social levels but it is also a prominent theme in Scripture. God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden and gave them fruit from all the trees except the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Of course, once they ate it, they initiated the process we call The Fall. In Genesis 18, we see God come to dine with Abraham. We see Esau sell his birthright to Jacob for porridge. The great Exodus of Israel in the Old Testament is tightly connected with the Passover Seder in which a lamb was consumed by the people. In the forty years of wilderness wanderings, God provided manna from heaven for his people. The sacrificial system involved offering sacrifices from the food supply. In the New Testament, Jesus performs his first miracle at a wedding feast. He miraculously feeds a predominately Jewish crowd of 5,000 and then probably a predominately Gentile second crowd of 4,000. And of course one of the great images taken up by St. John in his Apocalypse is that of the eternal Wedding Supper of the Lamb.

Tonight, we focus our attention on a special instance of eating. We might call it the pinnacle of all eating, the real sustenance that all of our eating anticipates and points us toward: the Holy Eucharist.

When we receive the Eucharist, what do we really receive? The Host tastes like bread, it feels like bread (or maybe cardboard is a better description); the contents of the Chalice smell like wine and taste like wine. But what our Lord told his disciples during the Last Supper, the same words we rehearse every Mass, and the same words St. Paul quotes in our Epistle reading this evening: “this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me” and “This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.” The Eucharist is not a metaphor; it is not merely a sign. Most signs point you to something else: “Disney World is 10 miles that way.” But in Holy Communion, the thing the sign points to, the thing signified, is present.

In Romans 8:35, Paul tells us that Christ intercedes for us to the Father. This is because he is our high priest. In the Old Testament, priests had to continuously repeat their sacrifices because the sacrificial system pointed to something else; but that thing it pointed to is here. Christ is the great high priest who made his sacrifice on the Cross once and for all. In heaven, he is continuously presenting himself to the Father on our behalf. So what is The Eucharist? It is a sharing in that offering of the Son that he makes to the Father.

In the Eucharist, the sacrifice of Christ is made present for us; it is here with us in a tangible way. Sometimes people are uncomfortable with the image of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. Didn’t Christ offer himself once and for all on the Cross? Absolutely! It may have been a feature of some lay superstition during the Middle Ages that they believed every time a Mass was said, Christ was crucified again. But no part of the Church has ever actually taught that officially. We call the Eucharist a sacrifice because it is a sharing in that once and for all sacrifice on Calvary. Calvary is brought to us and we are made partakers of the sacrifice made there. And we know Holy Communion has sacrificial connotations because we separate the Body and Blood of Christ. On the Feast of Yom Kippur (which is also called The Day of Atonement), the priest would slaughter a bull, goat, and two rams and collect their blood in a bowl. The meat would all be offered in fire but the blood would be sprinkled—part of the temple would be sprinkled with the bull’s blood; the goat’s blood would be smeared on the Golden Altar (or the Altar of Incense), and the rams’ blood would be dashed on the northeast and southwest corners of the Outer Altar. Similarly, in the Eucharist, we receive it as a sacrifice because Christ’s Body and Blood are separated.

So what we know is that Christ offers himself to the Father and gives himself, his body, blood, soul, and divinity, to us. The Eucharist is the height of our worship not because of the literarily beautiful canon of the Mass, the various ornaments, and intricate ceremonial. It’s not because of what we do, but what Christ does for us through the Church in giving himself to us.

The Eucharist is a gift from God to us. And of course, when you receive a gift, the appropriate thing to do is offer a gift in return. This isn’t a tit-for-tat ledger, but a way of gratuitously giving yourself to others. So if God gives us his Son, what should we give him in return? “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee;”

Tonight, Maundy Thursday, focuses on two aspects of the Christ story: the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper and Jesus’ washing of his disciples’ feet as he prepared for his Passion.

Why do we call today Maundy Thursday (or as Jude called it when I first mentioned this day to him, “Monday Thursday”)? The name for the day comes from the Latin word "mandatum" which means “command” and refers to Jesus’ words in John 13:34 “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” This command occurs right after the episode we read for our Gospel lesson when Jesus washed the disciples’ feet. The connection is clear: Jesus shows his love for his friends in serving them; he washes their feet. But more than that, we know he’s about to die for them: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” It’s no accident that this Gospel reading about service is paired with a reading about the institution of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is not just another thing we do; it is an entrance into a great and cosmic mystery. It transfigures all of our reality so that we begin to see that what is common is actually sacred. Holy Communion connects us to the worship of heaven, “with angels, archangels, and all the company of heaven,” we worship our Lord together. So maybe we are what we eat. Not in the way Feurerbach meant though. We are what we eat in a much more mystical way because we come together to receive the Body and Blood of our Lord, whereby we are united to him. If we understand that the Bread and Wine brought forward are in fact the Body and Blood of Christ, maybe we too can come to the realization that CS Lewis did when he said, “I have never talked to a mere mortal.” If we encounter him at the Altar, then that should give way to us encountering him in others. Benedict XVI reminds Christians that “A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.” It has practical implications for how we see the world; one that opens us not only to the movement of God but also opens us to relationship with others, particularly to those who are suffering or marginalized. In them, we find Christ. And when we find Christ, we should reciprocate the great gift he gives us through loving service.

“If then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.