Maundy Thursday

The Last Supper - Chartres Cathedral

I had the astonishing good fortune to stumble upon a Maundy Thursday sermon by Martin Smith today. Here's an excerpt but I really encouage you to click through and read the whole thing:

The Eucharist is the action of a man who has only one last hour to finally get across to his baffled companions what his life meant. They hadn’t gotten it. They hadn’t understood. He faced certain death and he had only an hour left, and nothing but his bare hands and the food on the supper table. What can you do with a loaf of bread and cup of wine when that is all there is to get through the defenses of these stolid and uncomprehending men? Men who right to the end had been arguing about who should get the chief positions in the new regime, one on Jesus’ right and the other on his left?

He took the bread and wine and told them to take them to be his very self. And Jesus had no ‘self-defense,’ only self-giving. Self-giving was the only self he had. So if they took the broken bread to be his broken self, and the poured-out wine as his life-blood willingly shed, then they were receiving himself, the only self he had. In accepting his self-giving, they would receive himself.

...and we cannot receive him at all without becoming vulnerable ourselves. What could be more risky than to allow Christ to be himself, within us?

For everyone who is feeling vulnerable right now - in the sense of truly feeling unsafe - let this holy vulnerability be a source of consolation for you.