The Only Thing That Makes Sense (Matthew 26:17-30; Maundy Thursday; April 2, 2015)

The Only Thing That Makes Sense

Matthew 26:17-30
Maundy Thursday
April 2, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

It had been a tough few days. Even though Jesus had never suggested that he was planning a coup of some kind, we can’t blame the disciples for hoping. Their hopes might have been buoyed by the enthusiastic response of the crowd when Jesus staged that little bit of street theater when he came into Jerusalem.

The powerful of Jerusalem–the Romans first, but also the priests and religious authorities–pushed back, of course. People who have power often like to keep it. People who carry the power of a system often believe that the system needs for them to hold on to their power. So of course the Jerusalem powerful pushed back against the threat that Jesus posed.

If Jesus had wanted to take Jerusalem, he could have used the success of Palm Sunday and moved immediately to seize the Temple, expel the Romans and set himself up as king. But he didn’t do any of that. He preached in the Temple. He healed the sick. He gave the powerful plenty of time to figure out how to get rid of him.

Without the drama of a messianic announcement, people got bored. They wandered off in search of new excitement. The sense of a storm about to break grew and the crowds dwindled. The disciples of Jesus watched as the moment passed and the clouds gathered.

Jesus, in the meantime, had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. He knew that people who challenged Rome had short life expectancies. He had done more than challeng Rome. He wasn’t out simply to shove Rome aside and rule in its place. Instead, he aimed to overthrow the system of violent power itself. He knew his own end was coming and soon.

He had tried to tell his followers, but it was hard for them to hear. It meant that they would have to become like Jesus, to take up their own crosses, to run the same risk that Jesus was running. The crowd of his followers shrank. It was smaller that it had been when Jesus entered Jerusalem and smaller than it had been when Jesus fed the folks in the wilderness–a crowd of twelve thousand or so, remembering that he fed five thousand men–with five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

The crowd was down to the inner circle. Matthew tells us that it was just “the Twelve,” but I think that’s not the whole story. We know there were women traveling with Jesus. He would not have shooed them off so he and the boys could have Passover by themselves. The women were there, too. And if the women were there, children were also. Even so, it was just the inner circle now. They gathered with Jesus in an upper room–thirty or so of them, maybe–to eat a meal that was a Passover meal and something else at the same time.

They might not have caught all that was in the air, the subtexts, the overtones, but at least the meal itself made sense. It wasn’t just bread and wine. There were the ritual foods that went with the Passover: wine (four glasses of it apiece–Passover is a not a somber celebration), matzo (unleavened bread), moror (horseradish or other bitter herb), charoses (a mixture of apples, nuts, wine and cinnamon), beitzah (a roasted egg), karpas (parsely with salted water), and, of course, roasted lamb.

Eating and drinking: these are good things. Remembering former times of deliverance in the face of a deadly threat: this is good, too.

Much of Jesus’ mission didn’t make any sense. Why not continue to teach? Why stick his finger in the eye of the lion in its own den? Why pick a fight, a fight he must surely lose? Those things didn’t make any sense. But eating and drinking and telling stories–those things made sense. And that’s what Jesus did on his last night among us.

We still don’t understand it all. But we have our own gathering clouds. When we stop to listen we can hear the groaning of Creation. We can hear the cries of mothers and babies, weeping for the sons and fathers who die at the hands of other sons and fathers in decaying urban neighborhoods and in faraway mountain villages. And in the midst of all of that and more, there are many of us whose worlds have come apart from grief or pain or fear.

We live in a world that has gone astray. We are part of a church that has gone astray. We ourselves have gone astray. We have our sound-bite explanations and our talking-point evasions, but when we are honest with ourselves we realize that we are talking mostly to avoid the accusatory silence. Nothing in our world makes much sense.

But this meal still makes sense. We eat and drink. We tell stories about other meals from our past and the distant past and we draw comfort from the meal, from the stories and from each other–like Jesus did–to face what must be faced, to pick up our own crosses, and to follow in his footsteps.

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