12 And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?” 13 And he sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him, 14 and wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says, Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’15 And he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready; there prepare for us.” 16 And the disciples set out and went to the city and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.
Today is Maundy Thursday, the day the church commemorating Christ's last supper with his disciples. This is the meal at which he gave his disciples a new commandment (in Latin "mandatum" -- hence "Maundy Thursday) that we are to love one another just as he loved.
Jesus' last meal was a Passover meal -- a meal remembering that fateful night when the Angel of Death struck down all the first born of Egypt but "passed over" the houses of the Israelites, thus sparing their children and enabling them to escape to freedom. It was a meal of Unleavened Bread, a reminder that when the Israelites left Egypt they did so in a hurry, without even time to wait for their bread to rise.
This was an inherently political festival with it celebration of freedom from oppressors. And Jesus and his disciples, suspected of fomenting unrest in the Roman-controlled city of Jerusalem, are forced to eat their Passover in a secret safe house which a man -- carrying a jar of water as a hidden-in-plain-sight sign-- leads them to.
Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Weisel has written of the last Passover he shared with his family in Romania before their internment by the Nazi's. It was a time hauntingly similar to Jesus' last Passover:
"The authorities had forbidden communal prayer in the synagogues, so we arranged to hold services in our house. Normally, on Passover eve, we would chant the melodies with great fervor. Not this time. This time we only murmured the words."
On this night we remember all those past and present who have lived under oppression and without freedom, all those made to murmur and not chant their prayers aloud. We remember the Israelites in Egypt. We remember the Jews of Romania and all other countries made to suffer the fate of the holocaust. We remember Christians living in places like Iraq and Iran where they will meet in secret to eat together tonight. We remember Baptists in the Ukraine and Republic of Georgia, where surveillance by the Russian Bear apparatus is a constant harassment and implicit threat. We remember also the Syrian refugees who left their homeland in haste, without having time to bring anything more than the Israelites before them. We remember them and we pray.
During the Passover meal service called the Haggadah which faithful Jews have observed for generations there is a reading from Psalm 114 which commemorates the Israelites escape from Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, and the crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land:
When Israel left Egypt, when the house of Jacob abandoned an alien tongue,
Judah became his sanctuary, and Israel His reign.
The sea saw them and fled, the Jordan flowed backward.
Mountains skipped like rams, and hills like lambs.
What frightened you, sea, that you fled, Jordan that you flowed backward . . . The earth trembles at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of Jacob's God.
The God of Israel, Jacob's God, is still alive. This is His world. And He is still at work in it. And tonight we remember that this God still has the power to deliver His people from forces of darkness and to set them at liberty in a land of promise and hope.
Tonight we will proclaim this; and whether in great chant or in feint murmur -- it shall be proclaimed.
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