Maundy Thursday

Psalm 116:1, 12-19   •   Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14   •  

1 Corinthians 11:23-26   •   John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Remember Steve Martin, the comic, before he was “Father of the Bride,” before he was in countless movies; he was the “Wild and crazy guy.”  Well, this could also be God’s subtitle, God: “A wild and crazy god.” Here, in this moment, we are prepared to enter the Triduum of Maundy Thursday through Easter Vigil. We remember today this wild and crazy God who became human in the form of a baby in an occupied land, vulnerable and weak in many ways, but through vulnerability and weakness, God, in Christ shows us that even our lives can be healed, redeemed, saved, blessed.  

Today, on Maundy Thursday, we remember; we remember in the sense that we look back to this night when Jesus was with friends, and when he did this wild and crazy thing of likening the bread they were eating to his very body and the wine they were drinking to his very blood. What a wild and crazy thing to do. For his followers who were well-aware of the sacrificial theology and praxis of the Temple, these words of flesh and blood surely reminded them of the lambs and birds put up for sacrifice. Here, Jesus offers himself, as a full and sufficient sacrifice.

We remember that night on this night,  and we also re-member, that is, we re-create, or re-form, God’s gift to us as we celebrate the Holy Communion, when we offer thanksgiving in the Eucharisto—the Eucharist.  In this moment we embrace the full and abundant way that God has removed our spiritual amnesia, and has instead filled us with anamnesis, that great and wonderful technical Greek word which means to reconstitute and remember the first Communion, the first “Last Supper,” not merely as a mind-trippy remembering, but actually that God is truly present within the bread and within the wine we are about to share together. Setting aside our spiritual forgetfulness and our amnesia, God has filled us with his wild and crazy and Amazing Grace as he offers to us this feast, injected with this deep and abiding sense of anamnesis and remembrance as we celebrate and share the real presence of God in our lives today, in this hour, in this place. Thank God that God is a wild and crazy and wonderfully amazing God!

― The Rev. Peter Carey