Delivered on Thursday 20 March 2008 in St George's Chapel

Maundy Thursday

Clark Clifford was White House counsel in the administration of Harry Truman, and U.S. Secretary of Defense in the 1960's. Clifford was once a guest at a Washington dinner party. He politely turned to a woman seated next to him. "Did I get your name correctly?" he asked. "Are you Emily Post?" "Yes," she replied. He said, " ... the world-renowned authority on manners?" She said, "Yes, why do you ask?" "Because," he said, "you have just eaten my salad."

I've no doubt Clifford had been deeply shocked; you could have expected better from the first lady of etiquette. But expectations are curious things. At the end of my sermon on Palm Sunday, I asked the question, what do you expect of Jesus? It's a difficult and searching question. And on that first Maundy Thursday it would have been a question on every disciple's mind. They will have witnessed the triumphant march into Jerusalem. They will have seen Jesus thrash the tables and knock over the pigeon cages in the Temple concourse. They will, without doubt, have known that something was up. But what?

These men, we must remember, had been with Jesus for the past few years. They had seen him still the waves, heal the sick, and turn Perrier into Dom Perignon. But they were also there at Caesarea Philippi. They were there when Jesus looked them in eye and asked: who do you say that I am? What do you expect of me? Confidently Peter replied, with nodding heads all round, 'You are the Messiah'. After which Jesus explained that he would be rejected by the chief priests, and scribes, and that he would be put to death.' So on one hand they had seen the extraordinary miracles but they had also hear our Lord's crushing prediction that he would indeed die. Perhaps it might be easier to square these two sets of evidence now, but on that first night it must have been a real puzzler.

That puzzle had deepened when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey - the symbolic action of a Jewish King. And it further deepened in the course of the dinner party. I suspect that like every other group dining that evening in Jerusalem, one of the party had, earlier in the day, gone into the Temple with a lamb under their arm. There, they had the lamb killed as a sacrifice for sin, and on their return to base they would have put the lamb on a spit to slow roast for the evening meal. This was the great Passover feast, the celebration of the escape from slavery, a memorial to freedom.

And yet when you read the account of this meal in Paul's letter to the Corinthians - as we did earlier - or in Matthew, or Luke, or Mark, there is no mention of this lamb. All the attention is on some unleavened bread and a cup of wine. We are back once again in the land of symbolic action - and it won't have been missed by the disciples. The bread - they will have remembered how, in the middle of the desert, Jesus had fed great crowds with only a few loaves, itself an action that chimed with the story of God feeding the Israelite people with manna as they crossed the desert. The wine - they will have remembered Moses slinging the blood of the new covenant over the people of Israel, and they will have been struck by Jesus description of the wine as 'This cup is the new covenant sealed by my blood'. And could it be - is it just possible - that there is no mention of the lamb because Jesus himself is the Passover lamb? But then, in what way is he the King? Clearly it's all tied in; it's all connected; but how?

In Mark's account the King is clearly connected to the Kingdom. For although at nearly all the parties throughout the city, people will have feasted well into the night, Mark reports that Jesus, in stark contrast, called for abstinence:

Truly I tell you: never again shall I drink from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. [1]

It would have made some considerable sense to have thought of this meal as being the inauguration feast of a new kingdom. After all Jesus had spoken often enough about this kingdom of God. Perhaps this is what this is all about. There will have been those around the table, Judas among them, who will have had sympathies with the local terrorists, the Zealots. The Zealots were a large terrorist group living up in the hills. They were never short of young volunteers, ordinary people who had fallen foul of the oppressive economic situation created by Roman rule. Minds would have run riot - Jesus in combination with these committed nationalists; could this be the beginning of the end for the Romans and the reinstatement of what was once David's empire? Others around the table might have wondered about some cataclysmic grand scale miracle. Goodness knows what, but something pretty special. But no-one could have been spared from wondering just what this kingdom was like. If they had indeed caught glimpses of it as they accompanied Jesus on the dusty roads of Palestine, then surely it would be wonderful indeed.

And there we leave them, wondering what in the world the kingdom of God could be like, would be like. And as we bid them leave, our own reflection continues: what does it mean to speak of the kingdom of God?

May the God who said, 'Out of darkness light shall shine,' cause his light to shine in our hearts, the light which is knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. [2]

[1] Mark 14:22-25

[2] 2 Corinthians 4:6