Category: Maundy Thursday

Text: 1 Corinthians 11:23-25
The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took a piece of bread, gave thanks to God, broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in memory of me.” In the same way, after the supper he took the cup and said, “This cup is God’s new covenant, sealed with my blood. Whenever you drink it, do so in memory of me.”

A Night to Remember

     In my travels I have visited some of the great battlefields in Europe. While walking through countryside that was once a place of death – a place where so many people lost their lives – it’s impossible to not be moved by what had taken place on what are now green pastures.
In the town of Ypres there is a special arched gateway with hundreds of thousands of names inscribed on it – soldiers who had disappeared during the battles and whose remains were never found. Every night at 8pm buglers play the last post, calling everyone to remember those who died from all countries defending their town.
Recently we heard the news that the wreck of the HMAS Sydney had been discovered on the floor of the ocean. This ship sank after a battle with a German ship and all 648 crew members were lost. We have seen on TV families of the crew holding photos of their father or grandfather or uncle and remembering the person whose life had been suddenly cut short.

Remembering people and their deeds of the past is an important part of our lives. We remember with deep appreciation the part that someone has played in our lives.

Sometimes we have what we might call “keep sakes” that help us remember. It may not fetch much if you sold it but as far as you are concerned it is one of your special treasures. Every time you look at it you remember the very special relationship that you had with that person. This is especially so if that person is no longer present with you. Even though death has intervened in your relationship with that person, these “keep sakes” make the memories of that person real and alive.

When Jesus planned his departure from his friends on earth and thought of those who would be his followers throughout the centuries, he wanted something by which they would remember him; remember what happened on the first Good Friday and the reason why he came. And so he gave us a “keep sake”, you might say – the Lord’s Supper.

One of the important aspects of Holy Communion that we emphasise is the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. As we eat and drink the bread and wine we are eating Christ’s real body and blood sacrificed for us on the cross. In a wonderful way our sin is forgiven and our faith in God’s love for us is made stronger.
Our relationship with God is renewed and our hope for eternal life is strengthened as we eat and drink Jesus’ body and blood. As we eat the bread and drink the wine in Holy Communion it is as if Jesus is personally beaming all the love, forgiveness, hope and faith directly on to us from heaven. He says this is “for you” and gives it to you with so much love.

There is another aspect of Holy Communion that I want to especially emphasise tonight. Jesus gave us the Lord’s Supper to help us remember.

He first celebrated this meal just before Judas betrayed him to the temple guards in the Garden of Gethsemane. In an upper room, he celebrated the Passover with his disciples. He took a piece of bread and gave it to his disciples to eat, and said, “This is my body. Remember it was broken for you.” He took a cup of wine and gave it to them to drink and said, “Remember that my blood was shed for your sins.”The Passover was and still is a special time of remembering how God chose his people from the beginning of time and how he led his chosen people out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. God wanted them to remember the way Moses challenged the great Pharaoh of Egypt to let God’s people go, and the series of plagues that were sent to convince Pharaoh to free the Israelites.

God wanted his people to remember how he broke the stubborn resistance of Pharaoh with the warning that the first born in Egypt would be slain. There was only one way to escape this death. Each household was to kill a lamb and put some of its blood on the doorposts of their houses. The flesh of the lamb was to be roasted and eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. When the angel of death saw the blood on the doorposts he would “pass over” their homes and those inside would be safe.

The Israelites did as they were instructed and they were kept safe that awful night. The wailing of mothers who had lost a child was heard throughout the land of Egypt. Saved by the blood of a lamb, the people of Israel left Egypt.

God said, “This day shall be for you a memorial and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord throughout your generations.” Still today, faithful Jews celebrate the Passover at this time of the year and thank God for their deliverance by the power of God.

And so when Jesus and his disciples and all their fellow Israelites celebrated the Passover they looked back and celebrated the fact that without God’s untiring, never-failing love for his people they would have been left for dead in the Sinai desert somewhere. When they celebrated the Passover they recalled with horror the slavery in Egypt, the lash on bare flesh, the scorching heat, working till they dropped. But they also recalled with great delight how God in his love saw them in their anguish and came to their rescue. They remembered the daily supply of food that fell from the heavens, how the cloud led them during the day, and a blazing fire at night – this whole fantastic story of how God rescued these complaining, grumbling, disobedient people is a sheer miracle.

Not only was the Passover a time of recalling, but it was also a time of thanksgiving and celebration. They praised God for his love.

Tonight we are remembering, celebrating and thanking God for his love. We are not celebrating the Passover, the feast that celebrated God’s rescue of his people from slavery in Egypt, but we are celebrating a “new Passover“, our rescue from slavery to sin and death. Jesus gave us a special meal to help us remember, he gave us his body and blood to eat and drink with the bread and wine for the forgiveness of our sins, and to help us remember the great love that he has for us.

This “new Passover” gets its meaning from the cross. Jesus gave his body and blood on the cross for you and me. He did it because of our desperate need to be made right with God. He did it because we are caught in slavery to sin and we can’t do anything to free ourselves. Like the slaves in Egypt we are unable to free ourselves from this slavery. Our situation is desperate. If nothing is done to free us, we would all die as slaves to sin and death. God was prepared to go to any lengths to save us because of his love – even send his only Son to give his body and shed his blood on a cross.

As we eat and drink we remember the new life that Jesus has given us – to love one another just as he has loved us. We remember that just as Christ was a servant who knelt to wash the disciples’ feet he commands us to be servants of one another. We are reminded that in the body and blood of Jesus we are bound together as his dearly loved chosen ones whose key responsibility is to love another. Jesus said at the Last Supper and he says this to us tonight, “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. If you have love for one another, then everyone will know that you are my disciples” (John 13:34).Tonight we join with Christians the world over raising our voices in thanksgiving as we celebrate Holy Communion. In fact, one of the names used around the world for Holy Communion is “Eucharist”, which means “thanksgiving”. Like the Israel of old we thank God for his love and mercy, but unlike the ancient Israelites we have seen God’s love at work in ways that has far outshone the Exodus event. We have seen with our eyes of faith the love of God at work freeing us from sin and death through the agony and dying and rising of Jesus.

We receive bread and we eat with it the body of Christ. We drink wine and hear the words: “This is my blood” and we remember.
We remember with regret that it was our sin that led to Jesus’ death on the cross.
We remember with repentant hearts that our lives have not demonstrated Christ living in us.
We remember with thanksgiving what Christ has done for us through his death and resurrection.
We remember with joy that our sins are forgiven.
We remember with anticipation when we will gather around the heavenly banquet table.
We remember in celebration that we have been given a new life to live as disciples of Christ.

Tonight we remember and celebrate the powerful love of God that has made our salvation possible. Tonight is a night to remember what it cost God to bring us forgiveness and eternal life. Tonight we remember and give thanks!
Amen.

I will wash you John 13-1-17

There are times, perhaps when we have been working in the garden, or painting, or fixing the car, that we get our hands so dirty that they don’t come clean after washing them.  We can scrub and scrub, but to little effect; the dirt has actually stained our hands.  Over time the stain will vanish and our hands will once again be clean.

At the Last Supper, the Passover meal, where the disciples were eating the sacrificial remembrance meal, Jesus gets up and takes off his outer garment, grabs a towel and a bowl of water and washes the disciple’s feet.  Either, one of the disciples has really smelly feet and the odour was ruining the meal, or Jesus was making a spiritual point by washing the dirtiest part of a person’s body.

Of course we know there was more to Jesus’ foot washing than just trying to clean some dirty feet.  Otherwise he would not have interrupted such an important and religiously significant meal with such an un-dignified display.   The Passover meal drew the Jewish people back to the time of the exodus, the night of the Passover.  By eating a specially sacrificed lamb they remembered the night the blood of a lamb was spread on the door posts to protect the people inside the house from the angel of death.  When the angel saw the blood, he passed over the house and the first born male was kept safe, but all those without the lamb’s blood, had their first born killed by the angel.

Jesus deliberately used the significance of this meal to demonstrate the cleansing he was about to accomplish by his blood on the cross.  Every person, man, woman and child, you and me, are stained with dirt.  Every one of those disciple’s gathered with Jesus were stained with dirt.  No matter how much we wash we remained stained, not with physical dirt, but with the stain of sin and death.

Like when we cannot seem to get a stain out of our hands, we cannot get the stain of sin out of our lives; it is a mark that remains with us forever and taints everything we do and say, as Jesus said in Matthew 15: ‘For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man ‘unclean.‘  The stain of sin is at our core and if left, separates us from the holiness of God.

Jesus washes the disciple’s feet to demonstrate that he will be the one who will wash their sinful hearts, just as king David pleaded and prayed for many years earlier ‘Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.  Peter however, rejects the washing because he feels Jesus should not wash his feet, that would be humiliating for him, but Jesus replies, ‘You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”… “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”  The external washing of the disciple’s feet pointed to Jesus’ washing of our hearts that will clean them from the stain of sin once and for all.

The cross was to be the washing instrument and Jesus’ body and blood serve as the cleansing agent through whom God would clean the world of sin, death and the devil.  By washing the feet of the disciple’s, Jesus shows how he must be a servant of the world, a lowly cleaner if you like, just as foretold in Isaiah 53; ‘Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.’

Just as the blood of the sacrificial lamb saved the people of Israel and brought them out of slavery in Egypt, Jesus blood saves us, cleanses us and brings us out of slavery from sin, death and the devil and brings us into God’s presence, as Jesus said ‘Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.’  While Judas would have no part in it and left the room, by faith in Jesus word’s Peter allows Jesus to wash his feet, and he was cleansed.  By faith we allow Jesus to wash us clean.

By faith we trust that his blood has washed us, ready for heaven.  By faith we allow Jesus to be our servant, humble and gracious towards us, washing our conscience by his word and blood and serving us with his body and blood in his Holy meal, as the writer of Hebrews says ‘let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.’

We have been cleansed by Jesus and tonight, as I wash the feet of some of our brothers and sisters in Christ, we are reminded of Jesus servant hood; his expression of love that saw him die in our place to make us clean.  Yet there is something else important demonstrated in this foot washing.  With Jesus in us by faith, we also become servants to one another.  Just by being cleansed ourselves, we are able to cleanse others through acts of love and forgiveness.  We can wash each other by choosing not to bring up past hurts or past sins committed against us.  By the power of God’s word and the Spirit’s encouragement, we can choose not to habour anger and bitterness against each other.

We can also wash each other when we speak, read, sing and pray God’s word to each other.  Jesus is present in his word, therefore his is present washing through the word, as he promised ‘You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.’ A disciple is really being Jesus’ co-cleaner, who’s only work is to be humble and a slave, to bring cleansing to others through the justifying  word of Jesus and to live humbly themselves as they also seek forgiveness from Jesus and other Christians for failing to do this very thing.

This is what it means to love one another and this is what Jesus offers us.  As you experience or witness the foot washing, we will sing to each other the very cleansing words of Jesus ‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.’

 

Amen