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Weekly Reflection
The Last Supper is the First Feast
The Table is the Point: The Holy Thursday Revolution
Welcome to Holy Week, when we remember the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ -- and what it means for life, love, and liberation today. I hope to see you tonight at 6:30 for our Maundy Thursday dinner, foot-washing, and Eucharist in the sanctuary, and then again tomorrow at noon for the Good Friday service. There's more on the full Holy Week schedule below.
Today's reflection on the dinner table -- a table we'll gather around in about three hours -- is an excerpt from "The Cottage" column on Substack by Dr. Diana Butler Bass, the eminent public theologian, activist, and historian of Christianity. She says that writing the first version of this reflection seven years ago was for her, "a theological conversion. My entire understanding of Holy Week and Easter changed. Everything I wrote before this led to it. Everything I’ve written since was birthed by it."
Read the full post here >>
Every Holy Week, Christians move toward Good Friday as the most somber — and most significant — day of the year...
Somber, yes. The most somber day. Of course. But what if it isn’t the most significant? What if the most significant day was the day before — the day of foot washing and the supper, the day of conviviality and friendship, the day of Passover and God’s liberation? What if we’ve gotten the week’s emphasis wrong?
Christians mostly think of Maundy Thursday as the run-up to the real show on Friday. And, because the church has placed such emphasis on Friday, we interpret Thursday through the events of the cross. Thus, when Jesus shares bread and wine with his friends, it becomes a prefiguring of his broken body and the shedding of his blood for the forgiveness of sins. We return to the cross all the time. We see Thursday through Friday. From that angle, it becomes morbid. A doomed man’s final meal while the execution clock ticks.
But his friends didn’t experience it that way. They weren’t thinking about a cross or a blood sacrifice. They saw Friday through Thursday. They were celebrating Passover. They were in Jerusalem with friends and family (not just twelve guys at a long table — sorry Leonardo) at a big, busy, bustling holiday meal to commemorate God freeing their ancestors from slavery. Passover is a joyful meal, not a somber one. And, because Passover was about liberation from a hostile oppressor, it was fraught with political expectations and possibilities. Would God free them likewise from Rome? Was the promised kingdom at hand? They were thinking about their history and their future, and they were enjoying the supper together...
All [Jesus] wanted was for everybody to come, to be at the table, and share food and conversation... What if Maundy Thursday was that?
The Last Supper of the Old World. The last meal under Rome, the last meal under any empire. And it is the First Feast of the Kingdom That Has Come. The first meal of the new age, the world of mutual service, reciprocity, equality, abundance, generosity, and unending thanksgiving...
This table is the hinge of history. The table is the point.
Read the full post from Diana Butler Bass here >>
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