Maundy Thursday   //   3-20-08

 

Agape Feast/Communion/Footwashing/Tenebrae

Northside Presbyterian and St. Aidan’s Episcopal Churches

 

Scriptures        Exodus 12:1-14       Mark 14:10-42

 

 

The Last Supper, shared. The denial, impending. The Passion: its overture in the garden. All here. All before us.

 

Note how Jesus sets the stage -- his internal, clandestine arrangements. No "highways and byways" invitations, here. No reaching out to the masses. There is no more time for that now. The circle is tightened: a communion, ingested. Closer now, to political execution than to Palm Sunday. The Place of the Skull awaits them all.

 

 

 

Jesus -- caught in perhaps his most powerless evening sing the night of his birth -- consciously draws God's power closer to himself, that he might then pass it along to his disciples. Even as his disciple are in the process of withdrawing from all power but their own. Indeed: As the disciples scramble for their own scraps of authority, Jesus unveils the empowered intimacy of a fully shared meal. Communion – that inclusive kingdom banquet table – where no lack is felt when control of one’s destiny is felt to be lacking.

Here, then, we find Jesus: Recreating, reimagining, refashioning Passover after his memory … Fashioning, in turn, a new society of sharing bread equally with IRS agents and social revolutionaries alike … Fashioning, in turn, a new economy based not on mass production but on right distribution.¹

 

And here, then, we find Jesus’ disciples: Caught as they are in the throes of their powerlessness, they cannot comprehend what this supper is all about. The new Passover, the new society, the new economy – all of it – remain concealed from even their consideration. For while Jesus graciously, poignantly, humanly discloses to them that the Last Supper should truly be the First Supper of the future² – that Christ’s body transforms at this table into the body of Christ – the disciples react the only way they know how. They react not through embrace of transformation. They react through escape into compensation.

 

“Surely, not I?” “Surely, not I?” they respond in fear, when told that one of them would betray him. “I will not deny you”, they all proclaim proudly with Peter, when informed that they would. For Jesus knows that both their fear and their pride would soon let them down. Fear that would tell them, “I dare not look”, and pride that would say, “I need not pass this way.”

 

And so, feasting on their fear and imbibing of their pride, the disciples fall asleep in the bowels of this night. No longer awake – much less aware – to the Passion transpiring. These disciples, who dropped everything at the beginning upon hearing two simple words – “Follow me” – at the end, drop off themselves. Their initial bold pretensions to discipleship – performing without a net, if you will – have now (pardon the pun) Petered out. They cannot envision themselves as Christ’s body yet; their flesh is weak. And so, as Jesus renews his dependence on God with a passionate Eden-like fervor, they nod off, into their stubbornly independent slumber.

 

 

When in the course of our own discipleship the hour of Tenebrae darkness fast approaches … When the powers that await us, patiently in the shadows, crawl out from under the cover of the night to abscond with the Prince of Peace, while we are fearfully not betraying and proudly not denying and while we are sleeping our watch away … When we are rudely awakened to the fact that we can no longer find it within ourselves to nonviolently and lovingly resist the violent and the exploitative and the domineering in this world, because we have been too busily passive and too passively busy to do so … Where – oh where – are we to return for the source of our strength and hope?

 

We are to return … right here. Right here, to this knot of disciples we see around us – frayed though this knot can be. Right here, because our betrayals and denials can only take full effect when we declare our independence from this Body of Christ. Or when the power of this Last Supper – which is, after all, our First Supper – is privatized or sacralized or … just plain forgotten.

 

And so we return to the open secret of this table of communion – of eucharist, which means thanksgiving. Thanksgiving that our dependence on Christ’s Body anywhere translates into the radical independence of God’s Spirit everywhere. An independence that translates into a power the world can never, ever comprehend.

 

Nor can we. And yet – thanks be to God – perhaps, in our dependence on the Body of Christ, we can live into that hope of the Spirit’s independence.

 

Perhaps.

 

 

¹Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: The Day-by-Day Account of Jesus’s Final Week in Jerusalem (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), p. 115.

 

²Ibid., p. 113.