A few weeks after my father died my mother found a Christmas card that he bought for her, but had forgotten to give it to her. He had actually signed it. It was a tender card expressing his love for this woman to whom he had been married for over fifty years. It was like a gift from the other world as it made her feel that he was still thinking about her. This was all the more significant to her and me because in some ways this kind of tender expression of affection wasn’t his nature and for that reason it was all the more powerful. It became an important story for her to tell to friends and an important memory that sustained her in her grief. It had a sacramental quality, an outward and visible sign of his inner feelings and she carried that particular memory as a final symbol of their marriage and life together which had its tumultuous moments but culminated with the wonderful, unexpected final gift.

This night we as a community of people who call ourselves Christians gather to remember a final gift and to retell the story. Like families sitting around after the death of someone we love, hearing the stories and remembering, laughing and crying and all the while feeling the presence in the stories, in the sharing, in the communion that is occurring.

Our Jewish brothers and sisters gather to tell the story we heard in the first reading, and to remember the Passover of the Angel of death by which their ancestors were delivered from slavery in Egypt and set on a path to become the emblematic people. Becoming the people whose lives of devotion to God and to living in the world with charity and justice was to shed light on the way of the one and only God.

A thousand years later Jesus establishes a new image of this covenant, a new Passover as his death and resurrection have come to be called, and a new symbol of God’s eternal presence in the symbol of bread and wine for his body and blood. There are parallels as I am sure are evident – there is a meal, which foretells an impending deliverance, there is God’s recognition of the bondage of his people, and there is commandment to remember and not forget. And there are divergent points – deliverance from slavery is to be understood at the deeper level of our bondage to our sins, to our insatiable ego which keeps us from loving God and our neighbor; deliverance comes in the form of the sacrificial love of God in human form, Jesus the Christ; and the death is not of others. The way of God seems very different now. And there is the example – which in John’s recollection the disciples experienced in Jesus washing their feet, giving them the example of not being attached to status, but surrendering the ego’s hold in order to be free to serve, to love, to give to the least of these my brothers and sisters.

This day is known as Maundy Thursday, and apart from the remembrance of Jesus giving us the symbols of the new covenant, he also gives us what in Latin is called the mandatum, from which mandate comes, and from which we get Maundy, the new commandment, to love one another as I have loved you, to wash ( or to serve ) one another as I have served you.

So tonight we are here to remember as Jewish families do in the Passover Tradition, why this night is so special. As we hear the words of institution and consecration may the eyes of our minds and hearts be attentive to this ancient ritual’s reminder of how God enters our world. May we receive the bread and wine and cherish the power of these sacramental symbols allowing the memory of that night and the real presence of God to enter us. May we watch the stripping of the altar which follows and open our hearts to what in us needs to die with Christ as we walk the path symbolized by these next three days so we can become the emblematic people through whom God can be seen and touched and understood.

Kent Nerburn in his wonderful little book, Small Graces, tells of the time he gave his small son his old baseball glove. His son looked at it, put his hand in it and said, it’s too big, to which Kent said, It is now, but one day it will fit perfectly. He said his son put it in his room and went out to play. He understood that his son wasn’t able to use the gift or even appreciate it fully but in time, with growth and maturity he would.

This night is the remembrance of the gift of God’s love and presence which we are given and invited to try on over and over again so the world will see us less and God more – love one another as I have loved you!.

Amen