This Meal (Maundy Thursday; Luke 22:1-27; April 13, 2017)

This Meal

Maundy Thursday
Luke 22:1-27
April 13, 2017

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

Jesus ate many meals with his followers, so why is this meal the one that we remember most?

Jesus was present at a wedding feast and famously saved the groom from embarrassment by turning water into wine. Not just any wine, but really good wine. Not just a little wine, but a lot.

Jesus ate with his followers at the home of Simon Peter. The meal was served by Simon's mother-in-law who had been sick but had just been healed by Jesus.

Jesus was the guest of honor in the home of Zacchaeus, the short tax farmer who was long on boldness in acting on his new-found faith.

Jesus served his disciples fried fish on the banks of the Lake of Galilee.

Jesus was the host at a meal with about 12,000 guests when he served the whole crowd with two loaves and five fish.

These are meals that were remembered, that figured in some way in his story, and so became a part of the gospels. There were countless other meals, eaten at the home of this host or that, or eaten along a path as they traveled from place to place and found themselves in the middle of nowhere at mealtime.

It's not the food that mattered. It's never the food that matters, at least as long as we have enough to eat. It's the people who are one's companions, a word that refers to those with whom one eats bread. It's the stories that we tell when we eat together, the jokes, the arguments that, though they may become heated, are never more important than the ties that bring us to the same table at the same time. Meals create a bond among those who share them. This is the reason that taking the time for sit-down meals together is so important.

So with all the meals that Jesus and his followers ate together, why is their last meal before Jesus' death the one that sticks with us?

I'm not sure that I can answer the question that I ask myself, so that might not be very satisfying. But I notice one thing about this meal that might make a difference: It is the Passover meal.

Because we have focused for so many centuries on the cross of Jesus as the center of the action this week, we have tended to forget the Passover. The emotional tone of Holy Week is somber, even mournful. We anticipate Jesus' being killed. We imagine, and perhaps rightly so, a foreboding hanging over the meal in the upper room. We know what's coming, of course, and we can't help but allow that knowledge to bleed back into story. It's also true that the story itself has been dropping hints all along the way.

Neither the writer of Luke nor its first readers would have been surprised by Jesus' betrayal and arrest, his trial and sentencing, and the brutal judicial murder that followed. Jesus himself is unlikely not to have known at least in general what was coming. He had made himself into a dangerous nuisance for the powers that be. The powers that be would react with violence. He knew they would. It was what they did.

None of that, however, could change the basic reality of Passover. The festival of Passover was about liberation and its emotional tone was astonished joy. It celebrates the emancipation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. In the Jewish tradition the first Passover meal was eaten on the eve of their deliverance. Each item in the meal had a significance and a purpose that referred to the long nightmare of their slavery and to the joy of their anticipated freedom and their possession of a permanent home in the land of promise.

The God who is celebrated in the Passover is a God who hears the people's cries of distress, who sees their oppression and weariness, who knows their suffering, and who comes down to deliver. Sometimes in our observances of Holy Week this God is hardly to be seen. Instead, we see a God who is angry at our failures and whose anger can only be turned aside if someone dies and the someone turns out to be Jesus who is also God's Son, a God who could be mistaken for an abusive father in some tellings of the story.

I remember once reading an interview at Passover time with a rabbi who was asked whether there were any parallels to the Christian observance of Holy Week. He replied that, really, Holy Week more closely resembled Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, than Passover. My first thought was that this rabbi clearly did not understand Holy Week. My next thought was, "And whose fault is that?" The presence of the Passover meal in the middle of our story hints that if our deliverance isn't the central theme of Holy Week, we may not be getting our own story right.

The Passover meal is not simply a matter of eating the foods that pertain to the day. There is a liturgy that punctuates the meal. There are prayers, hymns, questions and answers, and a retelling of the story. It's a complex little liturgy, especially in its setting. In it, people in the present place themselves into the past, to the eve of deliverance, and imagine themselves as the people who were commanded to keep this feast into their future which is the same future lived in by the people who are imagining themselves into the past.

Part of that future is the fulfillment of God's promise to give to the Israelites a land "flowing with milk and honey" that is, a land that will supply them with all the things that make for a truly rich life. There is more to Israel's imagination about life in the land of promise than good things to eat. Israel imagines a life free from oppression, in which want and worry will be unknown. Israel imagines life as a community in which concentrated wealth and concentrated poverty are equally unknown. Israel imagines a peaceful life in the land of promise, where the community will be free from the violence of kings who seek glory and riches for themselves and demand that the community's sons and fathers kill and die to carry out their dreams of power.

At Passover, Israel remembers its ancient dreams of the future. How can they help but hold the reality of their lives up against the dream? How can they help but find that the reality falls short. Whatever statements come from the king's press secretary in Jerusalem, the promise of the past's future offered in the Passover meal is still largely yet to be kept. In this way the yearly observance of the Passover becomes for them a subversive memory of the future.

Pilate and the Jewish collaborators knew that well. Passover created the space to imagine the world otherwise. Imagining the world otherwise than it is always threatens the powers that be and that is why Jerusalem kills the prophets whom God sends to it and that is why they kill Jesus.

We, too, are a people who gather and, like our Jewish cousins, enter into a story so thoroughly that we act it out. We place ourselves in the past as Jesus' followers who are commanded to observe this feast into the future that we live in. We are called to hear and see, and taste and touch, as if we were there, as if we were once again a part of that meal and those events. This, not some mental recall, is what we mean when we say that we re-member Jesus. We become part of, a member of, him once again.

We hear the promises made to Jesus' followers as promises made to us. We see a future promised to us in the past and when we hold our own present up against it, we, too, find that the promises are not yet fully kept. The meal presents a future in which all come as equals. No one who would eat at this table would have any special status. At this table there would be no leaders and no servants, no owners and no workers. Unlike other tables, this table would not serve to point out the servants and those they serve. This table would make all of us servants to each other. Hierarchies would be leveled. Power would shared. A community of equals would be formed. The poor would come and they would receive nothing less than what they need. The rich would come and they would receive nothing more. That's what we were told. But that's not how it is. The present that was the future of the past still in too many ways fails to resemble the promises that were made.

For us, too, this is, or at least can be, a liberating feast, a meal that frees us from the oppression of believing that there is no space to imagine the world otherwise. For us, too, this meal opens up not only memories of our shared past, but also subversive memories of the future in which all the promises are kept, in which everyone will sit under their own fig tree and eat from their own tree, drink from their own vines, and live without fear, a time when nations will beat their swords into plowshares, their spears into pruning hooks, and study war no more.

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