The Most Important Meal Ever
On Maundy Thursday, the most important meal ever served, was served. As Amy Mantravadi writes, it was there that Jesus Christ revealed His plan for an entirely new institution, the Holy Christian Church.
In that new institution, Mantravadi writes, “He would give of Himself through three ordinary means, through His Word, through the preaching of that Word and through the sacraments.” Ordinary means refers to the ordinary method God uses to gather and feed His people.
The meal He served the twelve disciples would be one of the ordinary means by which He would give Himself to His people; the others are Holy Baptism and The Word. This first supper He offered His disciples would bring with it a new command, the name from which Maundy Thursday gets its name novum mandatum. “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” John 13:34-35
This is no new law; it is expounded as gospel from their Lord and Master. This is not in the oldness of the letter of the law but in the newness of the Spirit. As a dying parent gives loving instructions to his/her children, Jesus is giving instructions to His disciples whom He called His children. Keep loving each other, keep praying for each other, keep sharing the burdens, keep forgiving each other and building up each other in faith and holiness.
What makes obedience to this command so difficult is the slackness of the Center’s hold on us. The disciples have been held together because He was the center of their lives, the keystone that strikes the arch, the nave that holds the spokes of the wheel together.
These same words spoken today speak to a civilization that suffers deep gulfs of separation. It was the protestant reformers who viewed the law that drives the sinner to Christ. Laboring under the curse of the law following Adam’s Fall, commands can seem opposing to free grace. After Judas had left Jesus began a long discourse with His leaving His disciples in a world that suffers deep gulfs of separation in mind.
What does He do? He assures them of the sovereignty of God, the promise of the coming Holy Spirit and encourages them to abide in Him by loving each other. This is a different love than one should have for one’s neighbor or enemies. As Mantravadi writes, “ this love is different because it is borne of a union with Christ and can therefore only be enjoyed by those that are knit to Him and to each other. Judas may have shared in their meal, but he took no benefit from it.”
One can never take love out of context because it has no beginning or end. It is the world that is dying stage by stage. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 2 Corinthians 13:13. Love is the ongoing body, the Christian church.
For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. 2 Corinthians 5:14-15
