March 29, 2024
While they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” 23 He took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. Mark 14:22-23 ~ NRSV
This is the day that Jesus takes those final, painful steps to the pain and humiliation of the cross. Last evening, like followers of Jesus around the world, we held a Maundy Thursday worship service in which we commemorated, through word and action, Christ’s mandate at the end of the Last Supper in John 13:34. (Maundy comes from the Latin mandatun which means mandate/command) Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
How, exactly, are we to love one another? Jesus provides a model through his life, and the Last Supper with four verbs. After all, “love one another” is not to be confused with warm, fuzzy feeling and words. The command requires the actions of taking, blessing, breaking, and giving.
Jesus took the bread, even as he took the action of loving, even to the point of death. I imagine him not only taking hold of the loaf of bread. I imagine him smelling its warm aroma, feeling the crust with his palms, looking at the wrinkles and crinkles in the crust, anticipating the taste of the bread on his tongue, perhaps hearing the intake of the disciples’ breath when they sensed this was no ordinary meal, remembering the miracle of a few fish and broken loaves feeding a multitude.
Jesus blessed the bread, honoring it as a gift of the earth, the sun, the rain, the soil; the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the person who took the time to add water and salt to create something deliciously different from its raw ingredients. He would have remembered the words spoken by God at his baptism and transfiguration, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I take great delight.” He remembered that he was blessed.
Jesus broke the bread. That perfect loaf was good for nothing if it isn’t broken. I imagine he remembered times he’d felt broken in the 40 days of the wilderness, in the rejection by family and friends, in the hostility of the very ones who had longed for and awaited his coming for their whole lives. Perhaps he was anticipating the desertion and denial of his disciples, the betrayal of one who was sitting at table, the way his body would be broken by beatings and nailing to the cross, and the very real possibility that in those moments, he would feel abandoned and forgotten by his Father, God.
The taking, blessing, and breaking were necessary for him to give himself, the bread of life, the cup of salvation, as a sign act of the cosmic reality of evil that would kill him, and love that would raise him again.
That is how we love one another. We take up, examine our own lives, wrinkles and all, and in the reality of our humanity, we discover that we are God’s beloved children as we follow Jesus. We hold it in our hearts and in our minds and our bodies. We remember that we, too, are blessed. We allow our hearts to be broken for the need and pain in the world. And it is through our brokenness that we give ourselves, our love, to one another. That is the good news of Jesus. It is the good news for us. It is the good news for the world.
Consider this in the shadow of the cross. ~ Pastor Anne
Wayfinding 