The King's Feast

Please read Mark 14:12–26
 
The Thursday of Holy Week is often known as "Maundy Thursday." Maundy is an old word for the ritual of footwashing. It was on the Thursday of Jesus' last week that he washed the disciples feet to show the need for Christians to serve each other. Some Christian traditions still have footwashing as a ritual to show our humility and duty of service to others, especially our duty to the poor. (This is the origin of the monarch distributing "Maundy Money" today.)

But this post is about another rite that Christ introduced on the same day; one which is observed by almost all Christians - the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, also known as the Eucharist (Thanksgiving) or Holy Communion, or as we might also call it "The King's Feast."

Imagine the scene in the upper room that Thursday night. The disciples have gathered with Jesus to celebrate the Passover meal, just as they had every year since boyhood. They had probably eaten this special meal twenty, thirty or forty times before on previous Passovers. It's as traditional to them as Christmas dinner is to us. Then, in the middle of the meal, Jesus does something totally new and unexpected. He switches from commemorating, through the meal of roast lamb, the exodus from Egypt in Moses' time and now looks forward to a new exodus - a new deliverance for God's people - through his own death as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

The meal is as simple as possible. Bread and wine. Bread symbolising Christ's body broken for us on the cross; wine symbolising Christ's red blood poured out to seal a new covenant between God and his people. The eating and drinking of the bread and wine symbolising the living relationship of faith and obedience that depends on Christ and draws on Christ for spiritual nourishment and life. And the sharing of the loaf and cup with fellow believers symbolising our unity and comradeship as Christian pilgrims on the Way together.

A simple meal of bread and wine and yet the greatest feast this world affords and the foretaste of the great King's feast to come when Christ returns in glory.