The Last Supper Mark 14: 12, 22-25

Special days are rarely celebrated without seasons of preparation. We celebrate the birth of a child after nine months of gestation. We celebrate the wedding of dear loved ones and friends, after a period of courtship and engagement. We celebrate anniversaries after we have made it through a year after an event, so we can commemorate it and how we have grown. We celebrate graduations after all of the hard work to took for a period of years. The same is true in the Christian church - celebrations are not divorced from periods of preparation. The two most notable seasons in the church calendar are Advent, which leads up to the celebration of the birth of the Christ child, and Lent, which leads us up to the empty tomb and resurrection of our Lord on Easter Sunday.

Lent is to be a time for us to become prepared spiritually for all that Easter means to us. For some people this looks like giving things up - such as a favorite food or fasting during the 40 days prior to Easter. For others it means adding a different spiritual practice to enhance their devotional life. And for others it may mean giving up a portion of money for the poor in the community. But whatever you choose to do during Lent it is all to the honor and glory of God.

Lent is not alone in being a forty day journey. Many people from the Bible who sought to hear God speak to them or experience God in a new way undertook such spiritual journeys. Elijah spent forty days seeking God on Mount Horeb. Moses was gone for forty days and nights when he received the law of God to give to the Israelites. Noah was on the ark for forty days and forty nights, wondering if he and his family would survive. Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness, praying, at the beginning of his ministry. And so we step into this tradition of setting ourselves apart, doing life a little differently, to prepare for the gift God wants to give us on Easter with the empty cross and tomb.

In addition to preparing ourselves as individuals, we prepare ourselves as the body of Christ, the church. We provide new opportunities to explore our spirituality. Our beautiful curtains have been put away and replaced with burlap, a fabric that represents penitence. And we explore together scriptures that have significance for us corporately as we are on this Lenten journey together. This year we will be focusing on the the last 24 hours of Jesus’ life on earth - the 24 hours that the gospel writers believed changed the world, so much so that they disproportionally focused on it in their writings. At the heart of our gospel message, the message that has been carried down through the ages by the Church, is that Jesus took on our sin, underwent the crucifixion, died, and was buried, all before he was gloriously raised from the dead. Our Lenten preparations, and our focus on these final 24 hours, remind us that the grave could not be conquered, if Jesus did not first die.

How appropriate that we start our Lenten journey together through this series at the table. Or rather at the preparation for a meal. It was time for the celebration to top all celebrations in the Jewish year - Passover, a time when tens of thousands of Jews gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate that God had delivered them from slavery to Egypt. A time when both those who made it to the holy city and those who celebrate in their homes from a distance, were connected by their common heritage and religious story. Jesus and his disciples were amongst the crowds arriving in Jerusalem. In fact, they had arrived a few days early to the accolades of people shouting “Hosanna, Son of David” as Jesus came through the city gates. But Jesus had come to not only celebrate, but to die. Over the next few days his teachings and actions were heightened by his knowledge of what was to come. He became angry at the court of the Gentiles in the temple, a place of prayer for all nations, being converted into the marketplace for buying and selling goods for Passover preparations. He even overturned the money changers table, making the religious leaders angry. He taught about religious reform, challenging the leaders to the point where they plotted against him for his life.

Then on the day of the Passover celebration he sent John and Peter to prepare the Seder meal. They gathered the necessary produce - bitter herbs, wine, salt water, apples, the unleavened bread, the lamb. They followed Jesus instructions and found a man carrying water, an abnormality as it was a job for women, and followed him home to a large home, finding the place where they could all meet together and set the table. At three o’clock they joined the line at the temple to have their lamb slaughtered. The priest would take each lamb and slit its throat, collecting the blood in a bowl to be poured at the base of the alter table. The priest would butcher the lamb and give it to back to the person bringing the offering. They would have cooked the lamb for three to four hours, before everyone gathered for the dinner at seven o’clock to remember the story of how God rescued the Israelites from the oppressive hand of Egypt.

The story goes that Moses had tried time and time again to convince Pharaoh to let Gods people go. Each time, after being struck by some sort of plague, he would agree only to relent later. So God brought forth one last plague, killing the first born of every Egyptian household. The night this was to take place, the Israelites were instructed to sacrifice a lamb to God and put its blood above their door post as a reminder to God to pass over their house leaving it unharmed. The lamb was then cooked and eaten as one final meal before their journey.

Because God did such a great act in rescuing the people of God, Passover was (and still is) to be a time of celebration. A time to remember in order to look forward to the future. But Jesus changed the tone of the evening when he interrupted with the disciples knew, all of the ritual they had experienced since they were children, by taking the unleavened bread and breaking it. Then taking one of the cups of wine and saying it would be a sign of the new covenant. The disciples were probably confused. And to make things even more tense Jesus said that one of them would betray him.

Jesus’ ministry up to this point had been marked by parables that confused the disciples, but now Jesus was giving them something tangible, not simply a teaching. The bread stood for his body, the wine his blood that would be shed. Jesus was giving them one last thing to remember him by.

Even more confusing, Jesus told them that this symbolized the new covenant. As Jewish meant they would have understood covenant, for this Passover meal celebrated the acts of their covenantal God. But Jesus was telling them that the blood of the Lamb that had been sacrificed earlier that day as a sign of the covenant would be replaced by his blood, shed for all people. Later we would understand that these words and this act were part of our life story - the story of human beings brokeness and need to be liberated from sin and death through the new beginning that Jesus offered through his sacrifice.

This meal began the last 24 hours of Jesus life that tell the story of a God of boundless love, whose love could not be confined. In fact, it is a love so profound that Jesus, God’s son, was sent to lay down his life for all humanity. And this is what we now celebrate each and every time we come to the communion table, that God’s love is big enough to deliver us from sin and death. We come together and remember who we are defined through Jesus’ sacrifice. We remember who we were, who we are, and who we will be. And we come together to celebrate it as a community, not alone.

See, when Jesus celebrated this part of the Passover meal he did it with his friends. He ate with the people he was closest too in this earthly life. The people he choose to be with in this moment. If you knew you were going to have one final meal before you died, who would you want to be with you? What faces to do you see around the table? Jesus choose to gather with his spiritual friends, and we need spiritual friends as well. Those deep relationships where we encourage one another in the faith. Those relationships that you cannot possibly have with everyone in a church, but you can have in a small group. This is why small group ministry is so vital, it provides us a place to love one another and enter each others spiritual journeys in a profound way. That is why we are offering two different small groups as a church this Lenten season. Not only because their content is important, but because our lives matter to one another and we need others to walk this faith journey with us. We need a community marked by the communion meal.

No meal is more important to our faith then this last supper of Jesus. For those of you who have lost a loved one, think of their favorite meal. Do you still cook it? What memories do you have of that person when you eat it? My mom likes to cook Macarroni Salad. Every major dinner it seems to be on the table. But I don’t like it. My brothers don’t like it. My dad only eats very little of it. But she still cooks it because it was one of my grandma’s favorite dishes. So it is present, because it reminds my mom of her mom.

What memories do we have of Jesus, as we gather around the communion table? And who are the people who can help you celebrate the importance of Jesus life, this meal, and the last 24 hours of his life? May we seek those people out and be in a community with them this Lenten season and beyond, as we journey to the cross. Amen.