How did we get here? This is not where we should be. What are we doing? We should be celebrating, so why are we now in shock? Why
are we really gathered here tonight?
Can
you hear the questions? I have spent a lot of time this week truly reflecting
on that evening so many years ago. The disciples were gathered together to celebrate
Passover, just like Jewish families all around the world are doing tonight. They
celebrate Passover to remember God’s faithfulness to them during a time of great horror.
A time when they truly feared for their lives and their safety. A time
when God protected his people, those who followed the instructions of Passover and sacrificed an animal and hung the blood
on the door. They did this so that their first-born sons and animals would not
perish.
A truly troubling text for we often forget that for all those children
who were spared there were even more who were not. All first-born sons, and we
aren’t talking about just the children, but all first-born sons, even those who were then grandfathers were killed that
night, along with the animals. Can you imagine waking the next morning to the
news? The Jewish families were spared, and thankful for this action, but my heart
is troubled by it, for all the lives that were lost.
But for the Jewish families this was a celebration, the beginning to the end of the persecution and slavery they endured. And this celebration has continued from the days of Exodus to today. This is why the disciples were gathered together that evening, they sacrificed a lamb just like everyone
else, but what they didn’t know, was that the true sacrificial lamb was sitting right there with them. He came to his knees to wash their feet, he humbled himself on a night when the pressure and the pain,
the turmoil of human existence was at its greatest degree. Christ kneeled before
this group of people as their servant, as their Passover lamb, there to save them, not from the fate of slavery in Egypt, but from the bonds of sin.
We come together on this night to remember the sacrifice Christ made
for us. We come together to hear the words of institution, on the night of his
arrest, he took bread and broke it, he poured the wine. These words come from
the Lamb of God, his body was to be broken, his blood was to be spilled, and those gathered around the table with him, joked
and carried on. I think of the Da Vinci painting of the last supper.
I have 3 different forms of this painting, one made out
of wax, another in a dark frame that you can barely see and the third was paint by numbers my grandfather did. And I don’t know how intently I have ever really looked at any of them, but this week I have. You have a table with Jesus at the center, and on either side of him is a group of
people, they are actively involved with their own conversations, some glancing at Jesus, but not one person talking with him,
not one person taking this last opportunity of fellowship with this man whom they have been following.
I don’t know what dinner was really like that night. I can’t begin to know how it would have felt to be there on that night. That evening so many years ago with all the disciples gathered around
a table waiting to celebrate Passover, which they had probably done every year of their lives.
They had no real understanding of how different that night would be, they didn’t have a clue that hundreds of
years later those gathered in this room would be coming together around this table remembering that night so long ago.
It was to be a celebration that turned in to something
so different. It truly became a night similar to the one those enslaved experienced
years before. As the disciples sat with Jesus, he became the sacrificial lamb. The disciples who were a motley crew, just about every personality can be seen within
this group, you have the doubter and the defender, the betrayer and the optimist, the quiet one and the confused one. It is astonishing to think that Jesus gathered this group together and within them,
we each can find a bit of ourselves.
Where would you have been that night, would you have been
standing up with Peter and saying surely not I Lord, and then turn around and deny him when things got tough? Or perhaps you might be one of those who scattered the second things didn’t go as you imagined. Would you take out your sword as Peter did?
Or perhaps fall to weakness and fall asleep, when you were asked to stay awake?
It was a night like no other, a night when the disciples
were at their worst. In just a brief moment, everything they had gathered from
journeying with Christ had vanished. It was as though they had learned nothing. How devastating, so little was asked of them that night and in the days to come, and
yet even the little that was did not happen. Jesus was not only betrayed but
he was also abandoned. So again, I ask, how did we get here?
The devastation of letting our Messiah down, he knew the
disciples would, but still having them let him down had to hurt more than he thought it would.
Here Jesus was, preparing to take on the sins of the world and the disciples couldn’t even stay awake; they wouldn’t
just let him wash their feet; they couldn’t just listen to his words around the table; they couldn’t just enjoy
the time that had with him.
We need to know these emotions. We need to understand the humanity of Jesus on that night, for it is through that understanding that
we can take on the full weight of the cross. Our hearts should break, our eyes
should water, and we should feel the pain of Jesus and the disciples. For us
to truly be able to celebrate the tomb being empty, we need to feel the burden of the cross, our hearts need to break. We need to ask how did we get here? For
everyday, our sins do this, every time we sin and hurt others or ourselves, we look away from the cross and the sacrifice
of Christ. Every time we forget, the pain increases, every time we turn away
from God, we might as well be asleep with the disciples. This night is not one
of celebration. It is a night of despair.
We are about to come together around this table, knowing
that Jesus was the sacrificial lamb. We know what Jesus was trying to tell his
disciples that last night. We come to this table tonight so that our hearts can
be prepared for the joy of an empty tomb. The weight we carry on our shoulders
this evening as we come to the table should be felt, but know that God is present, that even though our hearts are breaking,
that God will not forsake us, for Christ offered that prayer up for us before his final breath. May the silence we experience tonight prepare us to truly let Christ enter our hearts.
Rev. Janice M. Tiedeck
