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Sermon: Maundy Thursday
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7:45 pm - 21st April 2011
Readings: 1 Corinthians 11:23-26
“It is an excellent thing, brothers and sisters, to go from one feast to another, to pass from one prayer to another, to advance from the keeping of one feast or solemnity to another.” So wrote S Athanasius (Easter Letter, 5) in the fourth century.
Tonight we are entering into a seamless liturgy, which goes from this beginning without ending until we reach the glory of the Easter celebration itself. It is true that there are pauses between tonight’s Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Vigil parts of this liturgy - and we might even expect to go home briefly between these. But essentially, we are now beginning one continuous liturgy of these Three Holy Days of the Triduum.
Throughout the stages of this liturgy in several parts over several days, it is not as if we pretend that we don’t know what will happen next – how the story will end. We know that in tonight’s celebration of the institution of the Eucharist, and of obeying the Lord’s command to serve one another; in tomorrow’s celebration of the Lord’s Passion; and in the Great Vigil in which we usher the Church back into life, we are celebrating our continuing and renewed participation in God who is among us as the crucified and risen Saviour.
At home I have a copy of a very wonderful picture of the Last Supper, painted by the Polish artist Bohdan Piasecki. The background colouring is dark and shadowy, with gently highlighted white and golden shades of the long table emerging from the dark. If you have been here when the church is darkened except for the lit altar, you will get some idea of what I mean. Around the table in the picture, the artist has created a vibrant scene. In his raised hand, our Lord is holding one of several large pieces of bread set before him; eleven apostles are seated around the table; and scattered here and there between them are women and children. It is a picture commissioned in 1998 by a group of people campaigning for an inclusive Church. The vibrant scene with women, children and men contrasts with Leonardo da Vinci’s beautiful but passive great masterpiece of the same scene. We sometimes need to take a new look at what is very familiar, and at what we think we know very well.
Aidan Kavanagh was an American Benedictine liturgical scholar with a knack for alerting his readers to long-forgotten aspects of both liturgy and of human behaviour. He says,
To know Christ sacramentally only in terms of bread and wine is to know him only partially, in the dining room as host and guest. It is a valid enough knowledge, but its ultimate weakness when isolated is that it is perhaps too civil ... . However elegant the knowledge of the dining room may be, it begins in the soil, in the barnyard, in the slaughterhouse; amid the quiet violence of the garden, strangled cries, and fat spitting in the pan. Table manners depend on something’s having been grabbed by the throat. A knowledge that ignores these dark and murderous human [actions] is losing its grip on the human condition. (The Shape of Baptism)
And so, tonight’s reading from the first Letter of S Paul to the Corinthian church, reminds us that this sacrament of the self-gift of Jesus originated on the night before Jesus died.
The invitation remains for us to ponder deeply S Paul’s words concerning the tradition of the Eucharist. We also are to do this in remembrance. The Hebrew understanding of remembrance is a lot stronger than simply recalling a static memory. It is rather, bringing the past into the present – making real and effective in the present, an event of the past, to give hope for the present and the future. This is what we do every time we celebrate the Eucharist, when the priest prays the anamnesis in the Great Thanksgiving:
Therefore we do as our Saviour commanded: proclaiming his offering of himself...upon the cross, his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension
This is anamnesis; remembering, to make real and effective in the present an event of the past to give hope for the present and the future. Anamnesis, you will recognize, is the opposite of amnesia, in which we do not remember. When we do not remember, we forget. And ultimately we forget who we are; we lose our identity. And so anamnesis remembering, is at the core of our identity; of remembering who we are.
Long before the diet people got hold of the phrase, S Augustine reminded us that we are what we eat. He was making the link between the holy sacrament of the Eucharist and the words to which we give our assent in the liturgy, We are the body of Christ.
We might ponder some more words of S Paul’s Letter from tonight:
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Proclaiming is more than preaching. We are called to proclaim with our lives. We are called to become people of the Eucharist; giving our lives in generous abundance for others; offering the toil of all that we labour at, to bring about the presence and the reign of God. In the Eucharist itself, we bring bread and wine, the work of human hands, and we receive back the life of Christ’s body and blood to give hope for the present and the future.
We know that when this three-day liturgy resumes tomorrow, we will enter into the death of Christ, not in the gloomy manner of a state funeral, but as a celebration of the Lord’s saving Passion. And because we know how the story of these three days ends, we can already confidently look ahead, and proclaim in some words Rowan Williams wrote nearly thirty years ago:
The resurrection is not properly preached without an awareness of the human world as a place of loss and as a place where men and women strive not to be trapped in that loss. (Resurrection)
Tonight, tomorrow, on Sunday, let us remember who we are.
Fr Martin Davies