The forgotten day of Easter: Maundy Thursday

Today is Maundy Thursday. It doesn’t often get a guernsey in the Easter celebrations of a lot of our evangelical churches. But we can’t properly understand what happened on Good Friday without the events of Maundy Thursday.

The day before Jesus was executed, he celebrated the ancient Jewish festival of Passover with his disciples. At Passover, Jews eat a meal together to remember the time, centuries before, when God took the life of every first-born son in Egypt, but passed over the houses of the Israelites, who had sacrificed a lamb in place of their son. It was this first Passover that led to the Israelite’s escape from slavery to the Egyptians.

Jesus and his disciples celebrated Passover as Jews had done for hundreds of years, with unleavened bread and wine. But when it came time to eat, Jesus did something extraordinary. As he handed the bread around, he said, “This is my body.” If you’ve heard these words a thousand times in church, they probably don’t sound strange. But imagine how it sounded to the disciples. This bread is his body? What?

It’s a strange thing to say in itself, but the disciples had greater reason to be confused. Jesus was identifying his body with the Passover meal, and the disciples wouldn’t have missed the implication. He was saying that his body would be a sacrifice which would rescue a people from slavery.

More than that, Jesus was saying that the Passover wasn’t actually about God rescuing the Israelites from Egypt at all; he was saying the Passover was really all about him. Not only was this confusing, it was insulting. The Passover was the most sacred festival in the Jewish calendar, and for Jesus to say it was all about him was outrageous.

Jesus, of course, knew something the disciples didn’t. He knew what was going to happen on Good Friday. He would die in our place, like the lamb that died instead of the Israelite son. His death would rescue us from slavery to sin and death. The first Passover was a momentous act of rescue for the Israelites, but it pales in light of the rescue that Jesus’ death would perform. The Passover really was all about Jesus. Maundy Thursday explains what Good Friday means.

Bonus fact! The name Maundy comes from the Latin word Mandatum, which is the first word in the phrase, “Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos”. If you went to a Maundy Thursday service back in the day, you would have heard the priest say this phrase, and so the day came to be named after it.

Challenge! Ten points to the first person to accurately translate the phrase.

Photo by Paurian via Flickr