Greetings Family & Friends on this Maundy Thursday,
This evening Christians will take the sacrament of our Lord’s Supper. This Maundy – mandatum – commandment – Thursday practice was inaugurated by our Lord Jesus when he took the “hidden” bread of the Seder identifying it as his own body, and the Passover Cup of Redemption declaring, as he offered it to his 12 closest followers, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” It was this same night, in Gethsemane, that our Lord made the final decision to drink the bitter “Cup of Redemption” to the very last dreg.
For most of my life as a follower of Jesus I’ve believed that these days commemorating his Passion and Resurrection ought to be celebrated at least as enthusiastically as Christmas if not more so. These events are the reason for Christmas. It is, for this that Christ came. “Behold,” writes Walter Wangerin in his superb book, Reliving the Passion ... , “this is the central event of the whole of history; behold this is the sun that keeps the planets and bequeaths importance to the peoples and makes significant even me and all I do: AND THEY CRUCIFIED HIM. It happened. Eternity entered time. They crossed at the cross.
“We are altogether meaningless, except God touch us. God touched us here.
“We fly into an infinity of hell, separated from life and from each other and from divinity forever, except God hold us. God holds us here.”
And so, in this, the week we remember and contemplate “the central event of human history,” I am doing what we didn’t do last Christmas. I am writing a “Seasonal Letter.” I am giving to these holy days some of the attention we customarily reserve for the celebration of Jesus birth. I’ve been prompted to do so through some events I’ll tell you about.
In late March, 2003, Shirley’s and my very valued friends, Mel and Marcia Means, gave us a book that has become my frequent study and meditation companion. In that book, Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God, the writer, Marva Dawn, recommended another book, Reliving the Passion: Meditations on the Suffering, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus as recorded in Mark. I bought it in April that same year. It is a small, simple, yet profound series of 40 reflections, one for each of the days of Lent from Ash Wednesday to the Day of the Resurrection of our Lord. That year, inspired by this exceptionally gifted writer, I established a personal Lenten discipline which I have practiced each year since. This letter is a new piece being added to that ritual.
If ever there were anything to “write home about,” these events we commemorate today and throughout this Holy Week are it. Usually Seasonal Letters are about Family Life, personal passages, individual accomplishments. The magnitude of what happened this week about 1,973 years ago must be the theme of an Easter Season letter. Today is the day Passover begins. The moon is full. Its brilliance reminds us that on the day Jesus was arrested the Passover Lambs were killed for possibly the 12 hundredth time. This time, though, their deaths resolved in the slaughter of the “Lamb sacrificed before the foundation of the world.” It’s beyond imagining. 1,973 or so years ago the events we remember this Week fulfilled what had been enacted on a specific night in every Jewish Community for well over a thousand years. They retold the Passover story not only to recall a great deliverance but to foreshadow the completion of plans formulated before there were clocks, or calendars, or full moons; before there was time. Makes you feel like you’re part of something very large and very important. And so we are.
Because of the ways in which our Lord has used Walter Wangerin to heighten my appreciation of just how marvelous these events are I wish I could send a copy of his book to you. Since I cannot I will share an excerpt from it and a prayer of praise that Wangerin has written. It is a prayer Shirley and I pray with you as you celebrate the miracle of the Passion; the conquest; the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Mark 15: 37 – 39a
And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.
And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.
And when the centurion who stood facing him saw that he thus cried out and
breathed his last …
“A loud cry.” In Greek the words are phone megale, which, transposed, begin to look familiar: a mega-phone.
A shout of triumph!
“… this centurion … has lingered through a truly terrifying storm, a blackness three hours long, here on a hill, exposed to the wind’s lash, protecting … what? Who is this Jesus? The rain runs his body in rivulets, beard and hair stuck to flesh, head bent backward, upward. The rim of his top teeth shows. Whereas his companions have begun shivering and crying in the cold, till now he has held his peace. One curses. One weeps. Common responses. The man in the middle flares his nostrils and groans.
“Then, just in the last minutes, he breathed deeply, he swelled his chest and bellowed a hoarse word: ‘Eloi, Eloi …’ something. Can’t translate. But this, finally, is what the centurion expects. Right about now, six hours into the torment, even the best begin to break. Okay, then: so this Jesus of Nazareth is no different from everyone else who …
“What was that?
“A loud shout! Phone megale! What? What? No, this is not at all what the centurion expects. It’s a cry that he has heard before, to be sure – but never in defeat and never, never in death, always when the soldier has won the battle or the king the war!
“This is a cry of triumph!
“The centurion whirls around to see Jesus: he sees eyes like fiery darts in the darkness; he sees a mouth thin and thin, as thin as the blade of a sword, grinning!
“Victorious? King of the Jews – victorious over what? What do these flaming eyes announce?
“Satan, thou art defeated in my defense! Sin, dispossessed of a people! Death, look about thee; thou art not mighty and dreadful. Lo, I close my eyes and die – and death shall be no more.
“Then, suddenly, he dies. The centurion’s jaw drops. He stares, but he’s seen it before; he knows the signs: Jesus is dead. Dead. No coma, no deeper sleep than another sleep. All at once the eyes see nothing, the mind thinks nothing, the heart has ceased to beat – but suddenly! That’s what rivets the centurion. It is as if this man chose to go fully conscious straight to the wall of death, and there to strike it with all his might and, in the striking, die. Aware of absolutely everything.
“… (This) one thing astounds the centurion: how can a crucified criminal act so convincingly like the victor?”
“O Christ!
When you died, you broke the wall that divided us from God: you struck it, you cracked it, you tore it apart – you made a door of that which had been death before.
And the sign was that ‘the veil of the temple was rent in twain, from the top to the bottom,’ and the mercy seat was made open to my approach.
Amen
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