A Sermon preached on Maundy Thursday 2 April at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden
Isaiah 58:1-9a, 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, Matthew 5:13-20
One of the big arguments of the Reformation era was about the Eucharist, that mystic feast whose institution by Jesus we celebrate tonight. This was not just an argument between the Roman Catholics and Protestants, but also a disagreement within the Reformation movement. And not far from here, in the city of Marburg, German reformer Martin Luther and Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli and others met to try and resolve the dispute at the Marburg Colloquy from 1 – 4 October 1529. The central disagreement revolved around the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper. Luther maintained that Jesus’s words, as for example recounted by Paul in the 1st Letter to the Corinthians, “This is My body” (1 Cor 11:24), should be taken quite literally in affirming a real presence of Christ in the bread and wine, even writing the words hoc est corpus meum on the meeting table! Zwingli, on the other hand, taught a symbolic or memorial view, emphasizing the memorial aspect of the sacrament, focusing on 1 Corinthians 11:23-25 and especially on the call “Do this in remembrance of Me” and the charge “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.” Emphasizing the word “remembrance,” Zwingli held that the bread and cup served to remind believers of Christ’s once-for-all atoning work, his death, without implying a literal, physical presence in the elements.
I think both Luther and Zwingli showed an astonishing lack of imagination and an unfortunate unwillingness to accept the kind of both/and paradox that is at the heart of much of Christian belief. We believe that Jesus is God and Man, that life comes through death, we trust in the already and not yet of God’s kingdom, that our king comes as a servant, that true freedom is experienced through service and – returning to our passage – that we receive both bread and Christ’s body, both wine and his blood at the Eucharist and that we do this to remember and relive Christ’s sacrifice. To be clear, I’m on the “real presence side” of the argument. I believe that Christ is truly and physically present in the elements. I don’t know how that happens and I don’t really care. There is a lovely poem attributed to Queen Elizabeth I in which she declares her belief in that presence without the need for any complicated explanation:
“Twas God the Word that
spake it,
He took the Bread and brake
it:
And what that Word did make
it,
That I believe and take it.”
And Richard Hooker, the first great Anglican theologian, once wrote: “I should wish that men would spend more time meditating with silence on what we have by the sacrament, and less on disputing about how.”[1]
But we should not neglect the call to remember – it is after all what Jesus asked us to do - and what that means. All the Maundy Thursday readings are about remembering. In the Exodus passage about the Passover (12: 1 – 4, 11 – 14) the Lord tells Moses: “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.” And our Jewish siblings celebrate this with the ritual meal known as Passover every year – also the setting for the Last Supper. As already mentioned, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he recalls and remembers what he had received from Jesus, to share bread and wine in remembrance of Him. And while the word “remember” as such is not used explicitly in the foot washing scene from John’s Gospel, it is implicit in the phrase “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” (John 13:15)
Remembering is important! That’s why dictators and autocrats try and control, suppress or change memories. In George Orwell’s 1984, the totalitarian regime maintains complete dominance over its population through the control of history and memory, specifically by erasing the past and forging historical facts, as expressed in the doctrine: "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Orwell’s novel was not just fiction; it was based on what the Communist and Fascist regimes of his day were doing. And it is sadly not fiction today. Remembering can be an act of resistance!
The word remember, from the Latin rememorari, means on the one hand “call to mind.” To remember is also not to forget to do something, so to act in accordance with the event that is being remembered. To remember the Exodus event is therefore not just to recall the experience of being a stranger in a strange land, to acknowledge the pain of slavery, and to celebrate God’s act of liberation. To celebrate the Passover means supporting the stranger actively working against any form of slavery and oppression and fulfilling God’s mission to liberate all peoples. To remember the Last Supper is therefore not just to share in the bread and wine made holy in remembrance of Jesus, to rejoice in the forgiveness of sin, and to proclaim the Lord's sacrificial and saving death on the cross. To celebrate the Eucharist is to let ourselves be transformed into the likeness of Christ by sharing in Him, to forgive as we have been forgiven, and to love and serve as Christ loved and served and gave himself for us: “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” To quote theologian Richard Hooker again: “We receive Christ Jesus in baptism once as the first beginner of our life, and in the Eucharist repeatedly to bring our life by degrees to its completion.”[2]
That is also why we as Anglicans put the Eucharist at the centre of our weekly worship: We need that regular reminder of Christ’s supreme act of love; we need to be refilled and recharged and recommissioned each week. Remembering is not an option: “Do this!” Jesus says. This charge is amplified in the “mandatum” of Maundy Thursday, in Jesus’ command to the disciples: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34) In the Eucharist we receive and share his love within our community and through it we are empowered and equipped to share his love with the whole world.
Amen.
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