The point of this moment isn’t only the experience or the result. It’s the coming to engage with God’s great project together.
The Last Supper as an invitation to co-create
Maundy Thursday | Mark 14:12-25
I can only imagine what was on Jesus’s mind. Preparing for the Passover meal. Preparing himself for the crucifixion. He had one final night to teach them, prepare them for what was to come.
And they spent it the way you would: eating and remembering.
This isn’t just what you do for holy days (even though it totally is). It is fundamental to the nature of the Passover as a holy time. A practiced remembering. By eating.
It would be easy to focus on the foods themselves; their meanings. It is all set. But these are not merely symbols. They are the liturgy. Eat, hear the story, remember. The process, however, is not only about the past. We don’t only hear about a moment back then. We experience it now. In the eating. And the hearing. The remembering. We are changing.
The Passover wasn’t in the past. It was to be ever present. Because it wasn’t just a story. It was their story of liberation.
And they were asked to return to it each year. To know that freedom. Because God’s story, the whole story, is about transforming a world overwhelmed by evil; freeing it from slavery; and bringing it all into true wholeness.
A Night of Presence
It is hard for many of us, entering into this second Holy Week online. This is especially true tonight. Maundy Thursday is perhaps the most tangibly communal feast in the church. Its principal images are communion and foot washing—symbols of such intimacy and human contact they cannot be fully taken online.
In short, Maundy Thursday is the night of presence. At least, when we take its symbols literally. How do we even Maundy Thursday when the symbols themselves beg for human contact!
The answer is right there, isn’t it? Let’s not take it so literally.
The Point
When the disciples gathered for the Passover that fateful night, do you think God would have changed plans if they skipped a course in the meal? Is the remembering, the unbroken streak in time, the physical contact the only thing that matters? Is it itself the point? NO! Of course not.
It is a method of learning. The purpose of the Passover is to teach people about God. Not how to be good, but how good God is.
Maundy Thursday isn’t about the Eucharist. That isn’t the point. It is, in fact, beside the point. Allied to the point. Neighbors and conspirators with the point.
The point is that God has come. And we get to partner with God’s transformation of the world.
The Eucharist represents and embodies the point. And, when we are so aligned, we embody the point.
So we can most definitely Maundy Thursday without a Eucharist and without a foot washing.
Jesus is freeing us.
The Passover is central to what Jesus is doing because he wants us focused on learning. Specifically, learning the lengths that God would go to make this world the kin-dom come.
What is learning but a turning over of our vision—the way we see the world? To unearth what is beneath our expectations and free our attention to see what we’d rather miss.
A perfect example of this happens the day before the Passover in Mark’s telling. Holy Wednesday.
After three days of big public spectacles and confrontation with Rome and the Temple authorities, Jesus and the disciples remain in Bethany. And there, a woman takes a jar of costly ointment and uses it to anoint Jesus. It’s a potent scene with obvious references to Jesus’s coming burial.
And yet, the central tension in this story is around a misunderstanding.
The disciples are all horrified that this woman would “waste” such a costly resource on Jesus. They’d rather sell it to buy resources to give away. In other words, the modern idea Why splurge when you can feed three times the people at the same cost?
Of course, the disciples aren’t wrong.
And their gut response is not only reasonable and prudent, but generous! They want to help people.
The problem is that they are refusing to see what Jesus is showing them.
They’re focused on answering a question that isn’t asked of them: what is the best thing for me to do? Jesus never asked them that! Nor did he encourage them to denigrate someone else’s expression of generosity.
In fact, Jesus says quite the opposite.
“Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”
She is the gospel in action.
What We’re Carrying
This is what we enter the last days of Holy Week carrying.
That we, just like the disciples, enter the Holy City thinking we’re starting a literal revolution, even if its a love revolution. Even if it’s us making it safe for love, truth, justice, and hope to be our ruling authority.
We think in literal terms. About our government, the money in the bank, and the food in the fridge.
And we think in spiritual terms. Terms that have no effect on the lived world at all! The contents of our hearts, the thoughts we have of being generous to our neighbors and obedient to God.
But all that is laid bare in Holy Week.
Real people, that Thursday night, were planning to put Jesus to death. And Jesus didn’t turn to his closest friends and teach them that their personal, closely-held beliefs are the goal.
He was teaching them to see the kin-dom coming closer.
Not through violence or coercion. None of those ways that pervert creation.
Jesus teaches us to flip it over, so we can see all of creation. When God’s dream is happening and when we pervert it.
Justice and injustice
Love and betrayal
Hope and fear
Beauty and destruction
Freedom and chaos
Truth and deception
Power and responsibility
And when we see it, we can help bring the kin-dom closer.
Re-Experiencing It Now
This story, which tumbles so quickly from the triumphal entry into the dark night that begins the Passion reveals the love of God in the midst of overwhelming darkness. It doesn’t shy away from the grip of evil. In fact, it shines a light on it, overturning the rocks to reveal what grows beneath.
This story is much more than a what-not-to-do. It is the gospel of Jesus the Christ. The expression of God’s very presence in the world. God’s coming to humanity, to be with us, to help reveal how the kin-dom can be with us, right now.
And we get to re-experience it in this way tonight so that we can use this experience to better see our world. All of it.
To be free. To help make the kin-dom now.