Rev'd Ruth Thomas

Maundy Thursday 2010
St Giles’ Church, Durham. 7pm

In the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So here we meet together again - at night time - to celebrate and remember another of the Lord’s great mysteries. Last time was Christmas Eve and the next will be in the early hours of this Sunday morning - after the great night-time mystery of the resurrection. The settings are a cattle shed for the incarnation, a meal table for the last supper, and a garden for the resurrection and God calls us to these ordinary places at extraordinary times to show us how, in His world, the ordinary does indeed become extraordinary.

But tonight we are called to a meal. It is a very special meal which had great significance for Jesus and his disciples - for it was the great feast of the Passover.
The Passover Supper was being celebrated by Jesus and his followers in memory of the safe journey of the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt. Remember God’s promise to them when he asked them to sacrifice a lamb and mark the door with it-

The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you.

It was the habit up until Jesus’ time both to make continual sacrifices of live animals and to recall the Passover event in a meal, and that is the context and the mindset of the people who were sitting around that table on this night.

But this particular meal on this highly charged and dangerous night for Jesus was to stand alone in the whole history of our story. Let us look back into this long history, the story before this night and follow God’s work up to this point.

Although we sing the words “Once only once and once for all” about Jesus - looking back over Israel’s story we find that there are other ’onces’, times when God has called one person to lead us to the truth of how he wanted us to live. Right back at the beginning we have the story of Adam whose one chance failed - and that led us to the call of Noah. God’s covenant with Noah was the Rainbow and his promise was never to wipe out his people again. And then God calls Abraham to be the Father of all his people. Calling them to do this specific job of work for him, to teach the world how to live. 

And then if we look at the way in which His people were called to worship God as their way of life, we find that in part it is through making blood sacrifices in a very holy place – the Temple. The sacrifices were to atone, to make good, the sins which the people had committed as well as a form of adoration. The people of Israel took the sacrificial animal to the temple because that was where they believed God actually physically lived among them. It was an exceptionally special and Holy place.
God had said to them:
"Consecrate to me all the firstborn. Whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine."

And the point of the sacrifice of the first-born was that it was a blood sacrifice. This is odd and distasteful to us but it was deemed honourable for that beast that its blood should be shed for and so near to the Lord God himself.

But as we look back we see that all of these once-called people did not manage to complete their work. People were still not living the way God wants. They had got tangled up in the complexity of the law and the purpose of the sacrifice so - God makes a final, remarkable and poignant gesture. He sends His firstborn Son as a sacrifice – and his plan is fulfilled. The human race kills Jesus without really knowing the enormity of what it was doing so tomorrow we find ourselves recalling a Roman execution, as the next shameful part of our history.

And so in the space of this one meal, God turns the whole story on its head and says ‘enough’!  Instead of you making blood sacrifices to me I will make one for you – and it will be the last one ever needed because through it and in it all of our sins are borne and atoned by one man. And who was that man to God?  His very first and only born Son – the human son who himself becomes the paschal lamb.

On this night alone our Lord’s great action is almost so simple that we can be forgiven for missing it. It is poignant, all-consuming and all-embracing in its meaning.

Our Lord brings us to a table, to a meal, to a place where he knows every human being down the ages has and will gather - and shifts the entire burden of the people of Israel on to Himself.

In the actions of breaking the bread and of taking the cup Jesus transforms the act of human sacrificial offering into an act of grace whereby God himself offers and becomes a sacrifice for us. Jesus says “this cup is the new covenant in my blood”, marking for us the moment of the final blood sacrifice made once for all.

And this act immediately establishes for us a new locus for a new faith, taking away from us the geography of place which is the Temple and replacing it with what Charles Wesley calls “the altar of the heart”. For although we will recall this night’s meal at a table as a reminder of this gathering the celebration of this simple sacramental gift will spread and happen anywhere and everywhere that faithful people gather together.

In his lent talk, Bishop Tom gave us a powerful image of this single atoning sacrifice.  The setting is a farmyard and the event is a terrible fire.  He tells us that invariably, when the farmer checks round his farmyard after the fire has gone down, he finds the dead burned carcasses of the chickens, but under their wings can still be found live chicks. And so it is tonight - Jesus is preparing to leave us and take the full force of the heat of pain and sin to give himself up to death so that we can live.

But in doing so, on this night he also gives us our fresh, simple and new rule of life.

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.
And if we really do believe that God loved us so much that he let us do this to his Son then we had better be serious about that simple request. We love and we serve one another.
And so his followers have been called from that night to this to gather for our own memorial meal. In this meal, through the sacred actions of our priest who stands as the Christus, as Christ at the table, we remember that night. We praise God for his goodness. We remember the one final blood - human and divine - sacrifice. In this act we invoke the power of God through the Holy Spirit, praying that we shall receive the benefits of this sacramental meal, which the simple gifts of bread and wine become. So as we stand together tonight with God to celebrate another of His great mysteries for us, listen as John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, and Queen Elizabeth I explain it for us in this little verse;
‘Twas God the Word that spake it,
He took the bread and break it;
And what the word did make it
That I believe, and take it.  

               Amen
© Ruth Thomas