Maundy Thursday 2009                                                Christ Church , York                                                     

In the end, it’s personal, so very, very personal. It begins with a Passover meal more than two thousand years ago, where a teaching master sits at table surrounded by a group of his friends and disciples. But this is not just any dinner group, anymore than this would be just another Passover. For surrounding the Master are the ones who have followed Him from the beginning, the ones who have put up with so much and the ones who have pledged to follow Him to the end. Looking around the room, Jesus sees them not as a group but rather as individuals that He loved. There was Peter, course and vulgar but filled with passion. There were James and John, the Zebedee brothers, egotistical to be sure, but special to Him nevertheless. There was Thomas, whom Jesus knew was still filled with so much skepticism that not even His own powerful charisma could shake it. There was Matthew the Levite, whose mind was set in that rigid, sterile tradition in which he had been raised, but for which Jesus loved him nonetheless. And there were all the others. As Jesus looked at them, He sees not simply a group of disciples but a gathering of individuals, each one with their gifts and graces and their own faults and their failings. And there was no doubt that He loved each one of them personally. This was a personal relationship that He had with each one of them, a personal relationship that bound them to Him in a very special way. And even as He looks at Judas, as their eyes locked, He realizes just how intensely personal it had all become.

As we enter into these holiest of days and prepare to celebrate the mysteries of our faith, we come face to face with the reality that what is about to happen is personal, even intensely personal. To understand how personal is to probe and be probed by what difference it will make to each of us as we come forward to receive the bread and wine tonight. It is to determine what it will mean for us to stand before the cross on Good Friday tomorrow. It is to determine what it will mean for us to stand before the new fire and the baptismal font at the great Vigil on Saturday night. For in these events we come to understand just how personal this is for us and to see the difference these events will make in our lives.

For whatever happened in that Upper Room “on the night before He died;” whatever else happened on that hill of Calvary and whatever else happened in that tomb, it was all an action by a person for other persons. What was done for those disciples on that night of the meal, what was done for each of us individually in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus, was done by an individual for an individual and that individual is each of us. And it is this personal aspect which is so important for us to grasp, for it lies at the heart of what our Christian faith proclaims. For we proclaim something personal, that Jesus came into this world for you and for me, that He died for your and for me and that He rose for you and for me.

It all starts with that person called Jesus, for our faith in Christ is not rooted in the abstract nor in some amorphous power which is totally transcendent to us as it is in some of the so-called modern religions. Rather our faith is intensely personal. It is rooted in an historical person named Jesus of Nazareth who, though God in the full essence of the Trinity chose to enter the historical process and into the lives of the people He had created. We proclaim a God who became fully human and who then gathered other people about Him, thereby creating a community of persons who in turn then reached out personally share with other individuals, the story of this Jesus.

That’s what Paul reminds us of this night as we hear him say those words written to the church at Corinth , “I pass onto you what was passed onto me…” I personally pass on to you what was personally passed onto me. And in turn, Paul reminds us, you should personally pass this on to someone else. For the whole life-liberating, community-creating, hope-giving experience we call faith, is rooted in a person named Jesus and everything about our faith is centered on that person. That’s why it is intensely personal as Jesus turns to His disciples and says, “This is my body given for you” and “my blood shed for you.” Or as Paul goes on to remind us, “We proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes again.”

Personal is the operative word. It is the operative word for you and for me. It is the operative word for the whole of humanity. This is more than a loaf and a cup, more than a cross or tomb. This is hope and promise for each and every one of us, personally, in this time and in this place. It is our hope and promise for liberation from bondage and sin. It is liberation from all those things that we are slaves to – our busy schedules; those stock accounts that we had hoped would one day give us some sense of security; those jobs which were supposed to give us status in our lives. Deep down we know that these things will never satisfy us or fulfill us, that we are still bound to the culture of this world. But Christ has come to bring us a hopeful word of liberation, for the issue is not what you are or who you are, but whose you are! And we are individuals that Christ Himself has come to liberate from our dead lives, so that we might find our ultimate worth in the eyes of God. It is a liberation and deliverance from our estrangement from God and from each other. It is deliverance from all the hurt we have caused and the unloving lives we have lived.

Christ holds out to each and every one of us personally a hope and a promise for the future. Unchained from our past, delivered from the bondage to self, Christ holds before us the hope and the promise of a life which finds meaning through love being shared; a life that is constantly renewed through the unlimited grace of God; a life lived in community – with God and with others. There is hope for us, hope for each other, hope for this desperate world. In this bread and in this wine, in this cross and in that tomb, there is hope – hope for every person, hope for every weary heart and even hope for those who have lost hope.

And as this hope has been given to each of us, so now we reach out personally to pass it on to others. Indeed when we touch another with the Good News, that life is changed…personally. When we reach out to grasp another’s hand that life is also changed….personally. Personally, therefore, it makes a difference what we do with the hope we will be offered this night in bread and wine and the hope we will be offered over the next few days in cross and tomb. For when it comes down to it, a person named Jesus delivered the hope and the promise which He had been given by the Father. It was Jesus who reached out and passed that hope and promise onto Peter, who passed it on to James and John, who passed it on down the line until it reached Paul, who passed it on to someone at the church at Corinth, who passed it on and on until it came here to us, personally, tonight. Now we who have received that gift are called to pass it on and when we do so, remembering becomes doing, loss becomes gain, death becomes life and the hope of salvation in that person named Jesus is placed in someone’s hand and heart. “For I pass onto you what was passed onto me…” In the end it is personal, so very, very personal. Amen.