The Last (Eternal) Supper

The Texts for this sermon are Exodus 12:1-4,11-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17,31b-35

The Israelites languished under Egyptian slavery and prayed to YHWH for release. God hears their plea, enlists Moses who appeals to Pharoh, then, due to Pharoh’s obstinacy, God unleashes 7 plagues; the last of which claimed the life of the eldest male child in the household. Except for the Israelites. They were instructed to plan for this last plague and their release, their Exodus, with a carefully prepared meal. 

I’m not going to recite all of God’ instructions, but they are set forth in a way that emphasized the role of the lamb and the meaning of the lamb’s blood.  They were to select a lamb for themselves; 
their lamb, one of their own flock either sheep or goat. 

The lamb’s entire body was to be roasted and offered not as a sacrifice or offering to God but as a meal for Israel. The lamb was “for Israel.” There’s a relationship implied here. The lamb is not an object, it is to be understood in relational terms. Its blood was going to be instrumental in saving them.

They were to take some of the lamb’s blood and put it on the doorposts and lintel of their houses.

The Lamb’s blood is not presented as an offering. It was a sign. A sign that YHWH would Passover them, sparing their eldest son. The Passover of YHWH. 

So, the lamb was to be understood as a signifier of life: and understood as a life given for the Life of Israel. The blood was to be understood as a sign of deliverance. All of which speaks to the relationship between YHWH and Israel. 

God tells them that this meal is to be a memorial. And this is important. Passover was not to be a ritual of remembrance of some past event, but, instead, celebrated as an eternal ordinance. It was to become a real-time invocation of the original event. In other words, timeless, eternally efficacious.  

If I can say it this way: the Passing Over lives in God’s time: the eternal present. Perhaps thinking of time in God’s terms might be called The Ever Present. In our world of linear time with past, present, future and a few nuances in between, we can miss the link between the Passover cited in Exodus 12 and the Lord’s Supper, cited in 1 Corinthians 11.

And this brings us to the supper in the Upper Room. When Jesus celebrates the Passover in the Upper Room, Jesus and everyone in that room were entering into the realm, the reality of the original Passover. And they understood this. But what they did not understand was that Jesus was setting about to enact a cosmic Passover.

When Jesus takes the bread and the cup, Jesus the Lamb of God, is saying my body broken, my blood shed. My life given for your life -- for your salvation; your exodus from slavery to sin and death. So it is that when we celebrate what we call The Lord’s Supper, we are celebrating and 
entering the reality of the Salvific Passing Over. Partaking in a meal that prepares us for what that means.

Understanding the gravity of what Passover means; what the celebrating the Lord’s Supper means: 
God passing over on our behalf freeing us from slavery to freedom by the giving of God’s life for our life, helps us understand the import of Jesus’ act of foot washing. God Incarnate kneeling to wash the feet of God’s followers.

John tells us that Jesus laid aside his outer robe and donned a towel, then as their host, bowed down to wash the feet of his disciples. I don’t think it’s too far a reach to see this act as Jesus, 
God Incarnate laying aside his Glory to wash the feet of each of us. This was an act of radical hospitality: a welcoming, a whole-hearted, humble embracing thereby demonstrating to those disciples and to us what God’s radical love and blessing on earth are to look like, behave like.

When the astounded Peter objects, Jesus says to him: 

If I do not wash you, you have no part with me. (John13:8)  

The word for ‘part’ here is mer’os meaning no share in me. To have a share with Jesus is to have fellowship with him and thus, full fellowship with God and what God wills. If one removes oneself from this act one is refuting the act of humble blessing thereby refuting the glory and love and blessing of God revealed through Jesus.

When Jesus had washed everyone’s feet, he asks his disciples 

Do you know what I have done for you? 

They don’t so he explains: (13:14-17)

Jesus is demonstrating the kind of life they were to live going forward. Just as Jesus was going to lay down his life for them, they were to lay their lives down for others. They were not to become freed slaves so that they could become masters over others, rather, they were to live as liberated slaves 

in service to Christ---offering humble service to others. 

In 1 Corinthians 11, upon telling us that for as often as we eat the bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes, Paul goes on to warn us: 

Therefore whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy 
manner shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. (1 Cor 11:27) 

Now Paul was speaking to a specific abuse the Corinthians were inflicting on the Supper but I think we should also take note of the original context of the Supper wherein Jesus tells us to give testimony to the meaning of the Supper through lives of humble service. 

We are to take the great grace and Salvific work of the Supper into the world, not just by proclamation, but by our other-benefiting humility. A humility that bows with blessing for the sake of the other Life-giving service infused with welcome, love and blessing.

My friends, just as the Israelites in Egypt and the Israelites in Judea languished under oppression,
so do so many within our country, not to mention the world; people who want to live into their full identity, people who have sought refuge with us being vilified, threatened, hunted.

As we seek to live true to what Jesus did and told us to do, as we seek to honor the great saving grace of the Lamb of God, are we not called to put ourselves in service to such as these? 
We are called to go forth, not with towel and water, but with love-driven acts of radical generosity and welcome that elevates the welfare of the other, fired by imagination and courage, empowered by the Holy Spirit. 

Tonight, we are in that Upper Room. We have entered into God’s ever-present time. Jesus is hosting a banquet of salvation for us Jesus is bowing, washing our feet, honoring us.

Telling us to go and do likewise.

May it be so. 

L Quanstrom, Pastor 

Cornelius UMC