Saturday, June 20, 2015
Maundy Thursday, 2015
SERMON
FOR
MAUNDY
THURSDAY
HOLY
TRINITY & ST. ANSKAR
Take this and eat it
+In the
Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity.
The first Adam stretches forth his hand to
the tree to grasp and take, and we all die.
The New Adam stretches forth His hand to the tree to be nailed on it,
and we all live. Ancient Christians attached great significance to this recapitulation. One that occurred to me
is the beginning of the Words of Institution: Take this and eat it. Jesus
was not the first to offer this advice.
It's pretty much what the serpent said to Eve. The Last Supper is a kind of reënactment of
that Fall, undoing it. Adam and Eve took
and ate, and we all died. The apostles
take and eat and we all live.
The tragic irony of human sin — that is, our conscious
separation from God — is that we are already "like God.", to use the serpent’s language of
seduction. We are created in the Divine
Image and likeness. We don't have to
"take" anything in to achieve that.
It is our nature. But in grabbing
and trying to take it, we disfigure the likeness, and lose it. The profound mythic reality is that we try to
devour everything outside ourselves, in order to enlarge ourselves. We try to
become, by our own will, what we think we ought to be. But we achieve the opposite. We try to be like God, and thus disfigure the
image. We strive to save our life and, by our striving, lose it.
The Last Supper (which is to say, every Eucharist) reverses
this action, undoes the Fall by recapitulation. Now, God Himself tells us to "take and
eat" that which He calls His Body.
As he says in the Fourth Gospel, "My flesh is food indeed, and my
Blood is drink indeed." Now, every
kind of food we eat becomes part of our own body — it is transformed into our
flesh. The heavenly manna that
prefigured this Food became part of the mortal flesh of the, Children of
Israel. They ate it, and they died.
Your ancestors ate manna in the
wilderness, and they died. Whoever eats
my flesh will live forever.
For, alone
of all foods, what God gives tonight does not become our mortal flesh, rather, when
we eat it, our mortal bodies become His
Glorious Body. The ordinary process is
reversed, just as the Godman, reverses the primordial action of the Fall,
commanding us to "take and eat."
In so doing, we not only show forth His Death, we embrace our own: we
give up the illusory life that Adam wants to save and enlarge, and find Eternal
Life, in the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom is the Church, the New Jerusalem that descends
from Heaven adorned like a bride for the Bridegroom, the Bride of Christ, the
Eucharistic Society of interpersonal love, participating in the Life of the Three
Divine Persons. Jesus Christ reverses
Adam and Eve’s grasping alienation from God and from one another in this
Communion – an entirely new unity, that we call the New Creation.
The Holy Gospel according to St. John, the latest of the four
Gospels, omits any mention of the institution of the Holy Eucharist at the Last
Supper. The other three Gospels speak of
it as happening “after supper." John places something else there the Maundy — the New Commandment to love one
another as He has loved us, and the Lord’s illustration of what He means by
washing the Apostles’ feet. John’s
omission is deliberate. At the Last
Supper, He had reclined upon the Lord’s breast; he was not ignorant of the Holy
Eucharist, rather he assumed that all his readers knew of it too. In fact his whole Gospel is full of
references to it — "I am the True Vine,” “I am the Bread that came down
from heaven,” “Unless you eat my Flesh and drink my Blood you have no life in
you,” and so on. John replaced the story
of the institution of the Sacred Banquet. In order to teach something about its
mystical meaning. He seems to be saying
that the pedelavium, the footwashing,
is another way to express the Mystery of Communion in the Body of Christ.
If the only-Begotten Son has undone the grasping of our
mythical progenitors, he has also overturned our fallen notions of social
relationship. Tonight, He shows us the nature of life in the Kingdom, how to
behave in the New Creation. The New Jerusalem is another reversal: the complete
reversal of domination – social, economic, and political. In the Eucharistic Community, there is no
higher or lower, each is the servant of all.
That is the Mandatum Novum,
the New Commandment we now reënact.
"If I 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 unto you.”
You have given us an example, that we should do to one
another as you have done to us. Despise not the work of your own hands, O Lord!
