Remember and act
Commentary
Three actions -- the passing over of the houses of Israel while they hurriedly feast, the blessing of the bread and wine and consuming of these in the presence of Christ, the washing of the disciples' feet -- together relate to the grand theme of Maundy Thursday this year.
Remember. Eat. Remember. Eat and Drink. Remember. Wash. None of the acts is to be repeated or celebrated just because God likes to set down rules of action or elements of liturgical reform. Isaiah 58 tells how bored Yahweh could be about these. And the only liturgical reform in which Jesus shows interest has to do with simplifying the life of prayer, the only form of worship that could not cost anyone anything. (A lamb, a loaf, a basin, a turtle dove could cost.)
No, not law or liturgy, valuable as they might be in the full life, but acts worth remembering and commands to remember are what stay in the mind. And, yes, staying in the mind is the achievement of memories reinforced by ritual. We might have made promises to each other when we got engaged, but if they were made over a candlelit dinner, we can light the candles 50 years later and evoke that earlier incident.
So Israel kept telling a story of what might have been forgotten had it not been accompanied by action. So the Christian Church remembers the Present One by having a meal, as he shared and instituted one with his "do this," or "drink this." And if feet are not washed on Maundy Thursday, there are innumerable ways of reinforcing recall of what the effect of all these gestures and actions are to be: that we love one another, for, as Jesus said, "by this [loving] everyone will know that you are my disciples."
Grist For The Mill
Exodus 12:1-4 (5-10) 11-14
The longer I work on this assignment, the more vivid is the reality that the act of preaching or preparing to preach demands selectivity. There is not much reason for any user of these plotlines to be curious about my autobiography. But for the little bit that is there, see if it matches your own: a half century ago, soon it will be, I would sit in a course in which we would devote weeks to John 1:1-14 or 2 Corinthians 5. Not for anything would I yield what we learned there. But that was a classroom, and a congregation brings different needs and expectations to a homily than students (who need a passing grade) bring to the classroom.
So here one is ready to launch into lectures on the meaning of the lamb in ancient Near Eastern religion, or the difference between Passover and Christian Holy Week, or the question as to whether Christians can really do justice to a seder. The heart brings other kinds of questions. In this case: What about empathy for the mothers of Egypt? It is all well and good to celebrate God's presence among a chosen enslaved people. But were all the enslavers guilty, guilty enough that they must all lose a firstborn?
That underside of the story remains to haunt, but this day or night we commemorate the beginnings of the Christian Lord's Supper, or Communion, or Eucharist. Whatever else it is -- and I believe the meal is much more than this -- it is a remembrance, as was the Passover meal for Jews. Christians today may share in the general amnesia of the day, forever moving further from the story that gave a plot to their spiritual life, their life. "This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord." And that celebrating gives occasion for the telling of the story that gives us life.
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
If the Exodus reading permits reflection on the story of ancient Israel and the Passover, the Corinthians epistolary fragment opens the door on the distinctively Christian follow-up: the Lord's Table or Supper.
Philosophers tried to give names to what goes on in the meal not of the lamb but of bread and wine and lamb-language. They came up with transubstantiation and consubstantiation, Real Presence or real absence, in countless versions. Blood has flowed among prisoners and armies over this meal and its meanings. Library shelves in the Vatican and north and west from there groan with tomes to elaborate on particular interpretations.
Then comes the short, stark introduction of the feast. It comes not in recipe book form or as an assertion of dogma. It is a story. Paul "received from the Lord what I also handed on to you." The narrative fragments are minute but vivid. Jesus was betrayed. He took bread and wine. He broke bread and lifted a cup. He gave thanks and broke the bread and gave the cup. "Do this." As in Exodus, the theme is remembrance; most Christians elaborated on that basic. But it dare never be less than a remembrance.
Whenever busy people interrupt a spring day or evening to gather where bread is broken, wine is poured, the prayers are said, in faith they are remembering and Christ is there. Having looked back, they are "remembering the future" as well, for they proclaim "the Lord's death until he comes."
In our verbal/visual culture we all make much of what is written, said, or shown. But remembering the Lord's death is an act made most visible in the lives of people identified with Christ and in whose presence they find themselves.
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
As with all the other Holy Week texts, this long piece of a discourse from the Fourth Gospel invites line by line, semester by semester classroom examination. If one only expounded what came to mind as each verse is read, it would take hours or weeks. So one moves in quickly and makes a choice, knowing that dozens of others are available.
The passage opens with the footwashing and ends with the love commandment and observation. There is no mention of lamb or bread or wine; only a table, left behind, and a basin and towel brought forward. If the Passover story and the Corinthian passage are to reinforce the idea of remembering, this portion of the Gospel provides a clue as to what is to be remembered, and why.
Or, better, who is to be remembered, and what. The readings this month have again and again stressed the humility and humiliation of God, of a Suffering Servant, of Jesus the one emptied of equality with God. In this story of a footwashing commanded -- why is this not picked up universally; do we get by because we "ought" to do it? -- we get a glimpse into the shape of divine action in the human world. But only a glimpse.
Footwashing is preserved in a few denominations, or in mainstream groups that now and then like to render vivid what usually is too easily bypassed in story. For that matter, the pope each year washes some feet. But there is a difference. The members of the "few denominations" or "the mainstream groups" can wash and dry feet, show love, and ride their Pontiacs to suburban homes. The pope has a throne to which to retire. Jesus had only a cross, which is why we learn from but cannot match the loving act.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Exodus 12:1-14
There is something tender about Maundy Thursday services. After the extra preparations of Lent, the seemingly inevitable Holy Week funerals, before the darkness of Good Friday and the swelling Easter crowds, the Thursday evening service offers a quiet church, a gathering of the faithful around the sacrament, an interlude.
But in fact for all of the apparent tenderness, the imagery of Maundy Thursday is enough to endanger with overcharge political correctness meters all across the church. It is blood, stem to stern, from the Passover text all the way to the Lord's table, blood enough to engage ancient archetype and contemporary critic alike.
To begin with, there is the lamb, hapless, to be sacrificed, deprived of any significance of its own, reduced to a symbol and then consumed, dare we say guts (at least entrails) and all (v. 10). Amidst all that is ritually mandatory -- "first born," "without blemish," "a year-old male" -- it doesn't even matter whether it is sheep or goat.
With the slaughter, there is the painting. The lamb's blood is to be smeared on both sides and over the top of the entryway to the houses of the faithful, marking them out.
And then the real slaughter begins. Like the Egyptians who so ruthlessly exterminated Israel's children, like Herod who brought Bethlehem into bedlam with Rachel's desolate cries, the angel of the Lord -- God's own messenger -- passes over the bloody doorways to tear open the hearts of Egypt's families, soaking pillows, beds, tables, floors with the running wounds of loss, tears the only dilution in a sea of red.
Politically correct or culturally heretical, who can remember this holocaust as a holiday? Who can read these words without hearing the mothers' cries, the fathers' groans?
And who, swamped in such a bloodletting, cannot hear the cries and groans outside the church door? The technology of the twentieth century, supposed to deliver us from the work in Eden's curse, has made this age -- the vaunted apex of progress -- the advent of the most efficient killers in human history. Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda-Burundi, Sarajevo -- the blood flowing in the text has its match in the world outside of it.
Amidst such torrents, there is one who stands. Instead of spilling blood to take life, he pours himself out to give it. So he says, "This cup is the new testament in my blood, given and shed for you." Here is true comfort, without illusion, beyond interlude, to hold in Holy Week and Easter.
Remember. Eat. Remember. Eat and Drink. Remember. Wash. None of the acts is to be repeated or celebrated just because God likes to set down rules of action or elements of liturgical reform. Isaiah 58 tells how bored Yahweh could be about these. And the only liturgical reform in which Jesus shows interest has to do with simplifying the life of prayer, the only form of worship that could not cost anyone anything. (A lamb, a loaf, a basin, a turtle dove could cost.)
No, not law or liturgy, valuable as they might be in the full life, but acts worth remembering and commands to remember are what stay in the mind. And, yes, staying in the mind is the achievement of memories reinforced by ritual. We might have made promises to each other when we got engaged, but if they were made over a candlelit dinner, we can light the candles 50 years later and evoke that earlier incident.
So Israel kept telling a story of what might have been forgotten had it not been accompanied by action. So the Christian Church remembers the Present One by having a meal, as he shared and instituted one with his "do this," or "drink this." And if feet are not washed on Maundy Thursday, there are innumerable ways of reinforcing recall of what the effect of all these gestures and actions are to be: that we love one another, for, as Jesus said, "by this [loving] everyone will know that you are my disciples."
Grist For The Mill
Exodus 12:1-4 (5-10) 11-14
The longer I work on this assignment, the more vivid is the reality that the act of preaching or preparing to preach demands selectivity. There is not much reason for any user of these plotlines to be curious about my autobiography. But for the little bit that is there, see if it matches your own: a half century ago, soon it will be, I would sit in a course in which we would devote weeks to John 1:1-14 or 2 Corinthians 5. Not for anything would I yield what we learned there. But that was a classroom, and a congregation brings different needs and expectations to a homily than students (who need a passing grade) bring to the classroom.
So here one is ready to launch into lectures on the meaning of the lamb in ancient Near Eastern religion, or the difference between Passover and Christian Holy Week, or the question as to whether Christians can really do justice to a seder. The heart brings other kinds of questions. In this case: What about empathy for the mothers of Egypt? It is all well and good to celebrate God's presence among a chosen enslaved people. But were all the enslavers guilty, guilty enough that they must all lose a firstborn?
That underside of the story remains to haunt, but this day or night we commemorate the beginnings of the Christian Lord's Supper, or Communion, or Eucharist. Whatever else it is -- and I believe the meal is much more than this -- it is a remembrance, as was the Passover meal for Jews. Christians today may share in the general amnesia of the day, forever moving further from the story that gave a plot to their spiritual life, their life. "This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord." And that celebrating gives occasion for the telling of the story that gives us life.
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
If the Exodus reading permits reflection on the story of ancient Israel and the Passover, the Corinthians epistolary fragment opens the door on the distinctively Christian follow-up: the Lord's Table or Supper.
Philosophers tried to give names to what goes on in the meal not of the lamb but of bread and wine and lamb-language. They came up with transubstantiation and consubstantiation, Real Presence or real absence, in countless versions. Blood has flowed among prisoners and armies over this meal and its meanings. Library shelves in the Vatican and north and west from there groan with tomes to elaborate on particular interpretations.
Then comes the short, stark introduction of the feast. It comes not in recipe book form or as an assertion of dogma. It is a story. Paul "received from the Lord what I also handed on to you." The narrative fragments are minute but vivid. Jesus was betrayed. He took bread and wine. He broke bread and lifted a cup. He gave thanks and broke the bread and gave the cup. "Do this." As in Exodus, the theme is remembrance; most Christians elaborated on that basic. But it dare never be less than a remembrance.
Whenever busy people interrupt a spring day or evening to gather where bread is broken, wine is poured, the prayers are said, in faith they are remembering and Christ is there. Having looked back, they are "remembering the future" as well, for they proclaim "the Lord's death until he comes."
In our verbal/visual culture we all make much of what is written, said, or shown. But remembering the Lord's death is an act made most visible in the lives of people identified with Christ and in whose presence they find themselves.
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
As with all the other Holy Week texts, this long piece of a discourse from the Fourth Gospel invites line by line, semester by semester classroom examination. If one only expounded what came to mind as each verse is read, it would take hours or weeks. So one moves in quickly and makes a choice, knowing that dozens of others are available.
The passage opens with the footwashing and ends with the love commandment and observation. There is no mention of lamb or bread or wine; only a table, left behind, and a basin and towel brought forward. If the Passover story and the Corinthian passage are to reinforce the idea of remembering, this portion of the Gospel provides a clue as to what is to be remembered, and why.
Or, better, who is to be remembered, and what. The readings this month have again and again stressed the humility and humiliation of God, of a Suffering Servant, of Jesus the one emptied of equality with God. In this story of a footwashing commanded -- why is this not picked up universally; do we get by because we "ought" to do it? -- we get a glimpse into the shape of divine action in the human world. But only a glimpse.
Footwashing is preserved in a few denominations, or in mainstream groups that now and then like to render vivid what usually is too easily bypassed in story. For that matter, the pope each year washes some feet. But there is a difference. The members of the "few denominations" or "the mainstream groups" can wash and dry feet, show love, and ride their Pontiacs to suburban homes. The pope has a throne to which to retire. Jesus had only a cross, which is why we learn from but cannot match the loving act.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By James A. Nestingen
Exodus 12:1-14
There is something tender about Maundy Thursday services. After the extra preparations of Lent, the seemingly inevitable Holy Week funerals, before the darkness of Good Friday and the swelling Easter crowds, the Thursday evening service offers a quiet church, a gathering of the faithful around the sacrament, an interlude.
But in fact for all of the apparent tenderness, the imagery of Maundy Thursday is enough to endanger with overcharge political correctness meters all across the church. It is blood, stem to stern, from the Passover text all the way to the Lord's table, blood enough to engage ancient archetype and contemporary critic alike.
To begin with, there is the lamb, hapless, to be sacrificed, deprived of any significance of its own, reduced to a symbol and then consumed, dare we say guts (at least entrails) and all (v. 10). Amidst all that is ritually mandatory -- "first born," "without blemish," "a year-old male" -- it doesn't even matter whether it is sheep or goat.
With the slaughter, there is the painting. The lamb's blood is to be smeared on both sides and over the top of the entryway to the houses of the faithful, marking them out.
And then the real slaughter begins. Like the Egyptians who so ruthlessly exterminated Israel's children, like Herod who brought Bethlehem into bedlam with Rachel's desolate cries, the angel of the Lord -- God's own messenger -- passes over the bloody doorways to tear open the hearts of Egypt's families, soaking pillows, beds, tables, floors with the running wounds of loss, tears the only dilution in a sea of red.
Politically correct or culturally heretical, who can remember this holocaust as a holiday? Who can read these words without hearing the mothers' cries, the fathers' groans?
And who, swamped in such a bloodletting, cannot hear the cries and groans outside the church door? The technology of the twentieth century, supposed to deliver us from the work in Eden's curse, has made this age -- the vaunted apex of progress -- the advent of the most efficient killers in human history. Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda-Burundi, Sarajevo -- the blood flowing in the text has its match in the world outside of it.
Amidst such torrents, there is one who stands. Instead of spilling blood to take life, he pours himself out to give it. So he says, "This cup is the new testament in my blood, given and shed for you." Here is true comfort, without illusion, beyond interlude, to hold in Holy Week and Easter.
