Just as I Have Loved You

A little less than a month from now, on April 22nd, this being a leap year in which the Hebrew calendar adds an extra month, Jews around the world will observe the first night of the week-long celebration of Passover. Let’s suppose that you are lucky enough to have some Jewish friends who have invited you to share their Passover meal, the Seder. Are you curious about what they do? Would you be a little nervous about joining this meal, afraid you’ll make some terrible gaffe?

When you arrive at your friends’ home, the house is sparkling clean. You hear that, as part of the cleaning, the family has given away or tossed out all foods containing yeast or leaven, and that they won’t eat leavened bread for an entire week. In the dining room, the large table is set with wine glasses and some strange looking foods. As you sit down, the host hands everyone a small prayer book called a haggadah.

You begin by blessing a first cup of wine. Then the host blesses the matzoh, the unleavened bread, saying, "This is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. Whoever is hungry, let him come and eat; whoever is in need, let him come and conduct the Seder of Passover. This year we are here; next year in the land of Israel."

The youngest child asks questions about the Seder, which the father or host answers. As you read and sing your way through the haggadah, you experience the bitterness of slavery by eating bitter herbs, you are reminded of the mortar that the Hebrew slaves worked with by eating a mixture of chopped apples and honey, and you hear of the ten plagues that befell Egypt. For dinner, which follows the second cup of wine, you eat roasted lamb and more matzoh.

After dinner, you drink wine two more times, the host opens the door inviting the prophet Elijah into the gathering, you recite more prayers, and you sing more songs of praise to God. At the end of this meal, having followed the special liturgy, recited the prayers, and sung the songs, you understand perhaps more deeply than you ever did before, how this meal helps Jews to remember, to actively experience for themselves, the liberation of the Exodus event. You understand too why the Exodus event became such an important story for African American slaves and other oppressed people. And you join more deeply, perhaps, with all the rest of the company, and with Jews all over the world, in affirming that, "With a strong hand and an outstretched arm, and with a great manifestation, and with signs and wonders, the Lord took us out of Egypt."

As an observant Jew, Jesus would have participated in Passover Seders during his life. However, we don’t know for sure whether Jesus’ last meal with his friends was a Passover Seder or not. Some scholars think that it might have been a Jewish meal of special celebration, but not necessarily a Seder. We do know that after Jesus’ death and resurrection, his followers preserved at least two memories of what Jesus did at that last meal. The first memory is preserved in our Gospel reading for tonight. It is the memory of how Jesus modelled self-giving love, and of how his followers were to live out that love in their own lives. As we heard, first, Jesus performed the most humble possible service for his disciples, that of washing their feet, all their feet. Jesus’ washed the feet of Judas, who betrayed him. He washed the feet of Peter, who denied him. He washed the feet of friends who, in his darkest hour, deserted him.

Then Jesus made sure that his friends understood the meaning of what he had done. He told them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Facing death, Jesus reassured his friends of his deep love for them, and he charged them to offer that same self-giving love to each other and to all those around them.

The second memory Jesus’ followers kept of his last night is preserved in the epistle reading for tonight: Jesus’ declaration that a new covenant, sealed in his blood, now existed between God and humanity. We also hear his promise to be present to us in bread and wine. In our lesson from the letter to the Christian community at Corinth, Paul remembers for the Corinthian Christians that second tradition, concerning Jesus’ words over the bread and wine of the Last Supper. By Paul’s time, i.e., about twenty years after Jesus’ death, Christians were gathering together in Jesus’ name. Paul reminds them that gathering together for the Lord’s Supper should lead the Corinthians into a deeper form of communion with Jesus and with each other, into a form of active remembrance of the Lord’s love for them similar to what Jews experience in the Passover Seder.

Actually, the Corinthian community was deeply divided. It consisted of a few wealthy families, some artisans and merchants, and a number of slaves. When these new Christians came together for their celebration of the Lord’s Supper, just as Jews do in the Seder, they ate a real dinner. Unfortunately, following the custom of the time, the host served the wealthier members of the community better food in a more comfortable room than he did the lesser community members. So the wealthiest ate well, while those less wealthy ate poorly. If they were slaves, they probably ate very little. In the paragraph just before tonight’s reading, Paul criticizes the Corinthians for their behavior at the Lord’s Supper. In the part of the letter we have just heard, he provides a theological grounding for the instructions he will then give them concerning how they should behave at the Lord’s Supper.

Paul reminds the Corinthians – and us – that in celebrating the Lord’s Supper we actively, experientially remember, i.e., we enter into and appropriate for ourselves, Jesus’ giving of himself over to death. As we actively enter into Jesus’ giving of his body and blood, that event is no longer something that happened a long time ago. It is an event that we experience in our own bodies. It is not that we are, “performing a historical passion play, replicating the movements of Jesus.” Rather, we too are at table with him, we too hear him bless the bread and wine, we too are in communion with him, and we too receive his body and blood from his own hands. We too are included in the new covenant, the covenant that he established on the night he was handed over, the covenant that he ratified by dying on the Cross and rising from the tomb. Ultimately, we too can say, “The Lord died for me.”

But we do not come to Jesus’ table all by ourselves, as atoms. We come to Jesus’ table as part of a community. We come together. “In this shared meal,” we are reminded, “Christians become sisters and brothers in Christ.”1 In this moment we come away from screens of privacy and loneliness. We come out of our fragmented lives. We come hungry, yearning to be fed by God. We leave filled, fed with God’s love. Divisions among us cease. Here we are knit together by our hunger for God and by our experience of God’s satisfying that need for all of us. In receiving the bread and wine, now become Christ’s Body and Blood, we too can say with all our hearts, “Christ died for us.”

As we experience the new covenant in Christ’s blood, and as we are fed by God, we also hear again another commandment, “Do this in remembrance of me.” How do we do this? First of all, we come. We come to the Lord’s Table! Again and again. Again and again we recall our memories of that last night with him. Again and again, we “offer and present ourselves, our souls and bodies.” Again and again, we take into our bodies, the sacrament that feeds us, heals us, and gives us hope. As we remember his death, we marvel again at the depth of his love. And as we proclaim together “the Lord’s death until he comes,” we know that we have had a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, when, in the last day, all of us will be gathered together around the Lord’s Table forever.

And then we go. Enlivened by the Holy Spirit we know that the Lord who showed his deep love for us still lives. Nourished by his Body and Blood, we obey his command to share his love for us with everyone we encounter. We go out into the world, into our homes, into our schools, into our workplaces, into our clubs and secular organizations, hearing his words in our hearts, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” As we care for our children or the elderly, we hear, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” As we volunteer our time to a worthy cause, or as we forgive those who have betrayed us, we hear, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” And as night closes in, on our days and our lives, by God’s grace, we will also hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

May it be so.

1. And following, Ellen Charry, quoted in Synthesis, Vol. 28 No.4, p2.