Maundy Thursday A

John 13.1-17, 31b-35, 1 Corinthians 11.23-32

Maundy Thursday, like Palm Sunday, begs dramatic re-enactment by the congregation. One can hardly imagine meeting for worship on this night without celebrating the Lord’s Supper. Here at City United Reformed Church we do so around a large table set with white linen, sharing a pot-luck supper by candle-light. The Sacrament is fully integrated into the meal and yet the gospel set for this service is the gospel of John (13. 1-35), which, glaringly, has no meal.

In the companion reading from 1 Corinthians 11.23-32 we get what we call “the words of institution”, a recollection of the words of Jesus spoken in the context of the continuing celebration of this meal fellowship in his name. “Do this remembering me,” he says. The absence of the meal in John is not just because John shifts the celebration of Passover from this night to the day of crucifixion, when the sacrificed paschal lamb coincides with the death of Jesus. We don’t have a meal in John because he wants to shift attention away from ritual action to the content of that ritual action— the invitation to live as Jesus has, as God-bearers to the world.

The reading for Maundy Thursday is nevertheless full of “do-this-remembering-me” commands. The foot-washing that was so shocking to the disciples is meant to illustrate a way of life that the disciples should continue (13.14). This is what you might call basic John. Those who do what Jesus does do what God does, so whoever receives those Jesus sends receive Jesus, and receive the one who sent him (13.20). This is the new commandment, that they should love one another as Jesus has loved them (13.34). Such discipleship embodying the presence of God in the world is what John means by the Pauline formula for the institution of the Lord’s Supper. It is not just a command to continue to celebrate a given ritual action; it is, more fundamentally, a command to live out what is beneath that ritual action— to live as Christ, to put flesh on God’s Word, to live as God’s dwelling place..

In John this story is framed by references to betrayal. When Martin Luther King, Jr., celebrated the Lord’s Supper the first Sunday evening of every month at Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Alabama, he assumed the role of Jesus, seated in the company of deacons dressed in dark suits and wearing white gloves. He would read the words “And he said unto them, ‘One of you shall betray me,’ at which point the organ would cease its quiet, mood-setting background and the congregation would be plunged into a moment of awed silence before the pastor continued his recitation. (Lischer, The Preacher King, 80.)

Set in the darkness of night, the Dexter celebration emphasised the poignancy of a fellowship gathered in an atmosphere of betrayal and danger that becomes a metaphor not only of what the life of Jesus had been but of what the life of King himself would be. And yet the overriding theme here is one of grace, as it would be in King’s philosophy of non-violence. Bread is broken and shared with all, regardless. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. Ritual becomes discipleship, or it is empty of meaning.

Paul calls the cup the new covenant in my blood. By the time Mark wrote the meal that comes in between the bread and the cup seems to have disappeared, so Jesus is made to say “This is my blood” to make a neater parallel with “This is by body”, a move that shifts the emphasis from the sharing of a cup to the cup’s contents. The shift allows Mark to add ‘. . . which is poured out for many’, a phrase which connects this action with Isaiah’s Suffering Servant, who “poured out himself to death “and was numbered among the transgressions” (Isaiah 53. 12).

Mark, incidentally, leaves out the command to do this “remembering me”, presumably sharing John’s concern for that repetition of ritual action that can easily become empty. Instead, Mark locates this phrase in the story of the woman who “pours” the costly ointment onto the head of Jesus, in effect pouring out herself, and Jesus comments, “wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (14.9).

The action of “pouring out” cannot be located in the person of Jesus alone, as in that mechanical, transactional, legalistic theory of blood atonement. This gesture is the fundamental act of all Christian discipleship. In Philippians 2 the Christian is called to “have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus”, who “emptied himself” (Philippians 2. 5,7). In John, at the death of Jesus, his side is pierced and blood and water flow out – not just symbols of the Church’s sacraments but references to the way the death of Jesus – his life poured out – continues to be acted out in a Church that has learned to love as he loved. Maundy Thursday, like Palm Sunday, begs dramatic re-enactment by the congregation, re-enactment that must not end in ritual but become a way of life performed in memory of him.