Maundy Thursday, 2025
Rev. Thomas Van Hemert
Maundy Thursday
1 Corinthians 11:20-32
April 17, 2025
In the name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Not exactly a household word, the word “mercy.” It sounds a little outlandish in everyday speech, as in “Mercy me!” It sounds like something your old-fashioned eccentric aunt might use as an exclamation. But as words go, it receives little usage outside of the Church, where we use it all the time. “Lord, have mercy on us,” we pray in the liturgy, echoing the blind men who sought their sight. We, too, seek healing and recovery, but our blindness is a matter of the heart, clouded and scarred as it is by sin. Yet in that very cry for mercy at the beginning of the service, we acknowledge that we are waiting for One who is capable of addressing our deepest need. Mercy: the tender loving-kindness of God who comes among us to dispense His healing and life.
“Lord, have mercy on us,” we pray. It is both praise and prayer, acclamation and petition. With these words we welcome our Lord and pray His gracious help.
We have come to the right place tonight. Jesus comes in both Word and Sacrament. We have come to the right place to receive His mercy. He gives it to His beloved Church in an exceptional way this holy night. Tonight, we commemorate that night Christ instituted the Sacrament of the Altar, in which He feeds us with His body and gives us His blood to drink.
This, then, is the night of our deliverance, the beginning of our three-day journey with Jesus from His arrest in the garden, to Pilate’s judgment hall, then to the Place of the Skull, through His cross and death, and to His glorious resurrection. Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, and Easter Day.
We have heard the words so often we can almost recite them in our sleep: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night when He was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to the disciples and said: ‘Take, eat; this is My body, which is given for you’”
When we approach the altar, we bend the knee and receive with our mouths the very Bread of heaven. Under this earthly bread we break, and the cup we bless we will eat and drink the flesh and blood of Jesus. And when we do, we will follow His last will and testament: “Do this in remembrance of Me.” In this Sacrament, the Lamb of God has left us a memorial of His mercy.
It is a memorial far different than any other. Visit the great battlefields of the world, and you will find elaborate monuments to celebrate the valor and the sacrifice of the soldiers who died there. Visit the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and you will be dwarfed by the impressive image of the Great Emancipator. But these are all memorials to the dead. The Lord Jesus is the Lamb who once was slain but now is alive forever. And the memorial He instituted is not a monument, but a meal. In this eating and drinking we actively recall, recite, and rehearse His saving mercy.
By eating and drinking of the Lord’s Supper, we partake in a meal and by it, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes again. There had been memorial meals before this one. The night that Jesus was betrayed He had gathered in that Upper Room with His disciples to commemorate the exodus of God’s people Israel from their slavery under Pharaoh. It was the Lord’s Passover. God had once given elaborate instructions to His people for the preparation of this feast. The entrée was lamb, but not any ordinary lamb—a lamb without blemish or defect.
Every time they ate that meal, the Passover meal, the Israelites ate it in remembrance of the Lord and His mercy. It was a meal full of hope and promise, but hope and promise under the very threat of death. That first night in Egypt when God set His people free, it was in the midst of imminent danger. For the angel of death was passing over; in every household in Egypt the firstborn of man and beast would die, except where the blood of a sacrificial lamb marked the door. At those houses, with blood marking the door, the deadly plague passed over, sparing all within.
This, then, was Israel’s Passover, the Old Testament sacramental meal of deliverance. In that meal God’s people dined on the body of the very animal that gave them life by dying in their place. It was a communion of sorts—a communion in the body that died to save.
In the Meal we eat this night, there is a communion as well. But it is a greater communion in a living body, the body of the Lamb of God who has mercy on us. Jesus intervened to rescue us from slavery to sin and death. Jesus, too, was a Lamb without blemish or defect. He had no sins of His own but took upon Himself our sins so that He could die to bring down the ancient curse of death and to end the Father’s wrath against all sin and every sinner. That body of His was the sin-offering. His blood is the sign and seal of our redemption.
The Lord’s Supper is given for you. And those two little words “for you” bring us confidence and consolation in this hour. For God’s love is no shadowy abstraction. It is not some warm fuzzy feeling. It is concrete reality. Sin, death, and hell have been overcome, since Christ, our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed for us.
His love is great enough to include the whole sorrowing, hurting world, but it is exact enough to address each and every one of us personally and individually. God’s love is not a general “to whom it may concern” message, some sort of vague “have a nice day” bulk mail flyer or electronic spam memo. In this Supper, His love has your name on it, “For you.”
Mercy. That is what we need, and that is what the Lamb of God brings us now in His Banquet that He spreads before us and that we eat in His remembrance. “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes”
In +Jesus’ name.
