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In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy
Ghost.
We hear week after week the Lord saying, ‘Do this in
remembrance of Me’, and we always apply these words, and rightly so, to
the celebration of the Last Supper, to the breaking of the bread, to the
sharing of the cup, to the holy meal which Christ had with His disciples.
And we are right to do so because it was the
prefiguration of the Banquet of the Lamb, of the great feast of eternity,
because all of us we have been created by God in order to be His
companions for eternity; and a companion is one who breaks the bread
with us, who is received at the host's table, who is made an equal to
his host by this law of hospitality and of love.
And the Last Supper was this; Christ broke the bread
and shared the cup, He made His disciples unto His companions and, as
this bread and wine were Him, He united His companions to Himself in an
unspeakable way to be one body and one life.
But the words which Christ told, ‘Do this in
remembrance of Me’ do not apply only to the last Supper, to the holy and
divine Liturgy which we celebrate. What He was doing in the Upper Room
was also an image of what His life and death were. The breaking of the
bread was the breaking of His body, the sharing of the cup was the
shading of His blood, and what was signified in the last Supper was the
Garden of Gethsemane with the anguish and the horror of the coming death
upon Him Who was free of evil and yet chose to share with us our destiny
of dereliction and mortality, and of Calvary, the actual dying for the
salvation of others, - more than this: the dying of their death so that
they should share and possess His life.
And if we are to take in earnest what we do here,
week after week, feast after feast, celebrating the Last Supper of the
Lord, breaking the bread together and sharing the cup, we must remember
that this act makes us one with each other, because we become so one
with Christ, but also that all that is true of the life and the
sacrificial death of Christ must become true for us and in us. We must
so live as Christ lived for others, we must so die as Christ died, that
others may live. We must so ascend from life into this sacrificial
generous life-giving death as Christ did, and this lays upon us a heavy,
a stern and glorious responsibility.
Let us take it earnestly, because otherwise our
celebration is empty of meaning. We cannot come day after day and ask
Christ to let us become partaker of what happens in the Upper Room if we
accept to be estranged, to be alien to what it stood for His life, His
incarnation, His teaching, His facing the coming death, His dying our
death that we may live.
Let us think about it and reconsider all our
relationships with others, rethink all our attitude to those who are
around us. Do we live for their sake? Is our life an offering? Are we
like the Apostles of whom Paul spoke in today's Epistle, like men sent
in the last times to bring a witness of love and pay the cost for it, so
that life should be theirs, should belong to those who surround us
whether they love or hate us, and death should be ours, the death of
Christ, sacrificial, holy, an offering of love, brought not only to God,
but to each person who needs it. Amen.
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