handed on to us (a sermon for Maundy Thursday)

One of my most cherished gifts from my grandmother is a recipe box. She sent it to me and Daniel as a wedding gift, and it’s filled with family recipes divided by category along with blank cards for us to add favorite recipes of our own. The recipes, most of them typed on her old typewriter, are accompanied by little notes - where she learned it, or what event she brought it to, or what tweaks she found worked best. 

There’s her green bean salad recipe, which came from one of my grandfather’s family potlucks in Illinois in 1957. At the bottom, she notes that the original recipe called for diced celery and green pepper, but after my dad and his brother kept picking them out, she just stopped adding them. 

Or, there’s her recipe for sand tarts - almond-flavored butter cookies coated in powdered sugar - which she learned to make as a child. She notes that “every ethnic group has a variation of this recipe”; while “sand tarts” is what they called them in Texas, other places call them “Butter Balls” or “Mexican wedding cakes” or something else. 

Neven Krcmarek on Unsplash

Whenever I make these recipes, I am transported back into my grandmother’s kitchen, recalling memories of picnics and family dinners and holidays spent together. I remember one Christmas posting to Facebook a photo of the sand tarts I made, which elicited a comment from my dad’s cousin of all the memories she had of making the same recipe with her mother. These recipes are more than type-written index cards; they are history, and family, and memories, and, most of all, love.

On Maundy Thursday, our focus in the timeline of Jesus’ last week is on the Last Supper, and the institution of what we call Holy Communion. The meal the disciples shared with Jesus is presented in Matthew, Mark, and Luke as a Passover meal. Consisting of foods rich with symbolism, it was a meal that looked back to their ancestors’ liberation by God from enslavement in Egypt. 

As Jesus and his disciples dined, a new layer of meaning was added. On the very night when he himself would be handed over, Jesus handed over himself to his friends. This is my body, he said, passing the bread around the table. This is my blood, he said, doing the same with the cup. Do this, again and again. Do it to remember; do it to be transported back here, to be joined again to me.

Later, Paul handed on to another community, in another setting, what someone else had passed along to him. In his letter, Paul invited the members of the church in the city of Corinth to honor the unity and promises of that meal when they shared it with one another. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup,” he tells them, “you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes." 

We, too, have had this meal handed on to us. Each time we share it, we remember Jesus’ words, that the bread and wine are his body and blood, given for you. Each time we share it, we receive again Jesus’ promises of salvation, and forgiveness, and new life with and in Christ, made possible through his life, death, and resurrection; made possible through love. Each time we share it, we look back to the meal Jesus shared with his friends, and also look ahead to the meal we will share - the heavenly feast, in the presence of God, accompanied by the saints of all times and places. 

The meal we share when we gather together as the people of God is more than some symbol or rote action. It is history, and family, and memories, and, most of all, love. It is a meal of remembrance of the past, a meal of hope for the future, and a meal of grace for right here and now.