A Homily for Holy Thursday
Readings: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 John 13:1-15
If irony is the opposite of what one might expect, then nothing is more ironic than God. Indeed, the only surety on this topic is that whatever God might be, God is not who we are. Nothing can be more other than we are than God, who is the purest of mysteries.
If irony also means using words to convey the opposite of what they normally mean, then the language of faith is deeply ironic. When we talk of God, even in the language of revelation, we use words to speak of what we cannot know apart from God’s revelation. So, our words of faith are always elusive, even ironic. Coming from God, they convey more meaning than we can grasp.
Even if judged apart from faith, the Last Supper is the most ironic event in human history. And within faith, we can say that the very meaning of history comes clothed in irony on this night. Here’s why.
If irony is the opposite of what one might expect, then nothing is more ironic than God.
The Christian tradition has always insisted that Jesus willingly went to his death. He was not seized by events. Rather, he piloted his way through them to a determined end.
This makes the Last Supper the most paradoxical of meals. Knowing that he would die the next day, Jesus still chose to celebrate Israel’s great act of thanksgiving. The evangelists do not agree whether Jesus ate a meal on the Feast of Passover itself, but they are united in their insistence that the meaning Christ gave to the meal was drawn entirely from the Passover event.
The outline of a Passover meal is clearly impressed into the Gospel narratives of that night. Indeed, if the evangelists can disagree on the date yet maintain unanimity on the meaning, it is because the Lord Jesus himself, the night before he died, gave this meal its most ironic significance.
Two features are essential to the meal. The senior man opens the ritual by breaking and sharing bread. He ends the same by sharing a cup of wine. The meal itself is Israel’s great act of thanksgiving for the Exodus, for the law, for the land and for the Kingdom of David, all of which is spelled out in the pronouncement of the prayers.
The first humanly unfathomable irony is that, even knowing that he is about to suffer the most heinous of deaths, Jesus still offers thanks to the God of Israel, the one whom he addresses as Father.
The first humanly unfathomable irony is that, even knowing that he is about to suffer the most heinous of deaths, Jesus still offers thanks to the God of Israel, the one whom he addresses as Father.
This is irony on an exalted, but perhaps still human level. For example, Socrates instructed Crito, his protegee, to offer a sacrifice after his death to Asclepius, the god of healing. With a bit of irony, he thus presented death itself as a cure for the vicissitudes of life as we know it.
Is Jesus doing the same? Giving thanks to the God of Israel for his coming death because it will still the sorrows of this life? That cannot be. Part of what brought him to this night was his insistence that, contrary to what Israel once expected, death was more than an entry into Sheol, the land of shadows.
No, if our Christian understanding of Christ is correct, on this night Jesus thanks his Father for his upcoming entrance into resurrection, into what he called the land of the living (Mk 12:27).
But even as the human irony dissipates, one nothing less than divine takes its place. If Jesus did express thanks for the Exodus, the law, the land and the Davidic kingdom, we have no record of it. What we have, in the Aramaic that underlies the Greek text, is Jesus taking a piece of bread and saying, in effect, “This is me…for you.”
And at the end of the meal, Christ hurls the cup of blessing back through history until it again evokes the blood of the sacrificial, slaughtered lamb. St. Paul offers our oldest text of what was said:
This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
Do this, as often as you drink it,
in remembrance of me (1 Cor 11:25).
All this irony is ignored by those who suggest that Christ never claimed to be divine, that he thought of himself as a teacher or at best a prophet. C. S. Lewis effectively dismissed this approach, noting that the Gospels consistently contradict such an assertion. The Christ they present is either crazy, cunningly evil or, as Lewis put it, exactly who he says he is, the Son of God.
We know that death deprives us of those whom we love. Yet Jesus says that he dies for those whom he loves. “This is me…for you” in death, in the only way that I can be fully me for you.
The Last Supper is an excellent illustration. In his last meal on earth, Jesus presents his own self—this is me…for you—as a gift greater than the exodus, the law, the possession of the land and the Davidic kingdom! This cannot be the act of a sage who simply wants us to profit from his insights.
To claim that his blood initiates a new and everlasting covenant between heaven and earth is astounding. Indeed, had his accusers known what he said that night, it surely would have been their prime piece of evidence on the charge of blasphemy.
No! This night is steeped in deep divine irony! And as such it remains an eternal paradox. It cannot be subsequently unraveled in quiet, even prayerful, study.
We know that death deprives us of those whom we love. Yet Jesus says that he dies for those whom he loves. “This is me…for you” in death, in the only way that I can be fully me for you.
The old covenant insured that whenever, and however imperfectly, the people returned to the Passover, they would find an ever-faithful, unchanging partner in God of Israel. And ironically, the eternal was sealed with the most ephemeral, the blood of a lamb.
Now we are told to drink the Lamb’s blood, to accept his fate before the God of Israel as our own. Ironically, as horrible as the next day—his or ours—will be, the Lamb’s fate is ultimately, in the resurrection, one of unending life, of unfathomable love.
