The Mass of the Lord's Supper

When facebook began around ten years ago one of its first features was “relationship status”. From single, to relationship, to engaged, to married. Part of the fun for younger people was to watch their friend’s relationship statuses change from “Jim is single” to “Jim is in a relationship with  X” sometimes back to “Jim is single” again, but hopefully on to engagement and marriage.

Tonight I want to look at a different kind of relationship status and how Jesus’ Last Supper changed it.

The Last Supper doesn’t stand alone. It doesn’t make sense on its own. It can only be viewed in conjunction with the crucifixion. It also becomes the lens though which the crucifixion becomes meaningful. Let’s look at that together.

With hindsight we can speak of Jesus’ crucifixion as a sacrifice and as a spiritual event. But if you were standing on that hill watching it happen two thousand years ago you wouldn’t have recognised its significance. You would have thought you were watching the execution of a Jewish peasant accused of insurrection by the occupying Roman army. Nothing more, nothing less. It was happening to two other men at the same time.

Jesus knew his execution was inevitable. He had placed himself on a collision course with the ruling powers through his uncompromising preaching of a new way to understand God and a new way to live as followers of God. He disrupted the social order and knew that the noose was tightening around him. He could have accepted his martyr’s death with quiet disappointment, and that would have been the end of it.

But instead, Jesus consciously chose to offer his impending death to God as a sacrifice for all humanity. I’ll talk some more about how that works tomorrow, but for now, let’s see how Jesus brought that intentionality into the last meal he ate with his followers.

Jesus broke bread, and said “this is my body given up for you”. He poured wine and said “this is my blood poured out for you”. This made no sense when it was said by a healthy man that evening, until it is married to the breaking and giving up of Jesus’ body and the pouring out of his blood on the cross the next day. Jesus gave purpose to his death, symbolically enacting it in advance, and saying that it would be for them.

Jesus also used an important word, familiar to his hearers at the time, but less so for us: covenant. Jesus said that his blood sealed a new covenant. The covenant was the formally declared and enacted relationship between God and the Jewish nation, on behalf of all humanity. It was declared by God saying “you shall be my people, I shall be your God”. It came with expectations, that the people were to remain faithful to God, but throughout history they could never keep their side of the bargain, leaving them at various times sinful, adrift and alone in a hostile world.

Jesus’ intention was by his sacrifice on the cross to establish a new covenant in which he would stand in for all humanity, in which he would be utterly faithful to God’s call, even to the expense of his life. This is what Jesus did on the cross; be obedient to God till the end, and to be a sacrifice on our behalf.

Where do we fit in? It’s great that Jesus did this, but what about us?

Jesus asks for our involvement in his sacrifice. He instructed his disciples at the supper to do this meal again and again, and to do it in memory of him. St Paul would later reflect that every time we eat this bread and drink this cup we proclaim the death of the Lord, that is, what the Lord Jesus has done for us.

In the Greek and Roman pagan rituals of Jesus’ time, animals were regularly sacrificed to pagan gods. The meat was then eaten, and to eat it was to be involved in the sacrifice. In the same way, when we, here tonight eat the bread and drink the wine which have become Jesus’ Body and Blood, we are involved with Jesus’ sacrifice. We enter into it, and take part in the new covenant which it inaugurates.

In in doing so, Jesus changes our relationship status from adrift in the universe, undermined by our own sin, and existentially alone to in a covenant relationship with the Maker of the Universe. When we eat and drink of the eucharist, we are changed.

The old covenant came with a code of conduct. The famous ten commandments. The Jewish people agreed to keep them as their part of the covenant. Jesus however replaced these ten with just one: love one another. In biblical language love and service are interchangeable, and so Jesus was demonstrating the new covenant’s code of conduct when he washed his disciples’ feet, then told us to do the same.

It is not enough to passively receive the Eucharist. In receiving the Eucharist we take up Jesus’ challenge to love and service. Jesus’ disruption of unjust societies. His challenge to break down hierarchies and social barriers and in which service, not privilege, is greatness.

Tonight we do both of these things. We celebrate the eucharist. We proclaim Jesus’ death. We say “amen” to the new covenant as we receive communion. And we also wash one another’s feet now, to challenge ourselves to live out our new social status: loved and in communion with the God who loves us.