The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
March 28, 2002

The Most Obeyed Commandment
Luke 22:14-30

On the night before he was handed over to suffering and death, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread; and when he had given thanks to you he broke it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, “Take eat: This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me.”

After supper he took the cup of wine; and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and said, “Drink this all of you: This is my Blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me.”

These words should sound familiar. They are, of course, not my words. Nor are they exactly, word for word the words from our Gospel reading for this evening, though they are close. These words are the words of institution from Eucharistic Prayer A, the communion service we use more often than not here at King of Peace.  

Words of institution—that means they are the words Jesus said at The Last Supper that instituted, started, began, required, commanded, however you want to put it, the celebration of Holy Communion among Christians through the ages and around the world. 

Jesus says, “Do this for remembrance of me.” He also said, “Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me.” It is worth considering, “Do what in remembrance of you Lord?” or “Whenever we drink what, we are to do what in your remembrance Lord?” 

Jesus does not exactly speak volumes here. Yes, he does institute the great sacrament of Holy Communion, but not in detail. There are no directions on what the priests are to wear and how they are to hold their hands. Jesus, heaven forbid, does not even mention priests. He just tells his friends, his twelve close disciples, Judas included, that they are to do something in remembrance of him. 

One possible answer is that we are to turn all eating of bread and drinking of wine into an occasion to remember Jesus. Not a bad idea. It is not all that far from the way Jesus lived his life. Jesus turned many, many meals into an occasion for teaching, a chance to share a deeper fellowship with people. Jesus was not as picky as some folks would have liked him to be with his fellowship either. Jesus had the annoying habit of eating with notorious sinners. He refused to act like a respectable Rabbi in that regard. 

Jesus broke bread in the households of the tax collectors Levi and Zaccheaus. These scoundrels were both notable bad guys in their towns before Jesus sauntered through. Jesus also broke bread with people by the thousands on a hillside overlooking the Sea of Galilee.  

In our days of fast food, meals on the run, and families who hardly ever sit down to break bread together, it is sometimes hard to remember that all meals were once considered to be more than a biological necessity. Meal times were occasions for really sharing fellowship. They offered a chance to talk in a relaxed setting. You get to know people better through sharing a meal with them.  

Perhaps this is why our word companion is created from the roots for “with” and “bread.” A companion is someone with whom you share bread. 

So, if we decided that all occasions of breaking bread and sharing wine are to be occasions for remembering our Lord, then we are not too far off track. Regaining the sanctity of mealtimes and the chance for fellowship they offer would greatly help our over busy culture. That is why I am proud when I have heard King of Peace described as an “eating church.” We rarely miss a good chance to break bread together. 

But Luke wants to make it clear that the occasion for The Last Supper is quite specific. Luke tells us that Jesus had eagerly longed to share this Passover with his disciples. Then he proceeds to bless and share wine and bread with them. It is the Passover bread and the Passover wine which become Jesus’ body and blood. It is new Passover meal, which the disciples are to do in remembrance of him.  

The old Passover is not forgotten. The Passover gets new layers of meaning added to it. Not only do we remember the way that God brought the people of Israel out of slavery to the Egyptians into the freedom of the Promised Land, but we also remember the way that through Jesus all creation is redeemed from slavery to death. The whole world is offered new life in Jesus Christ. 

 Jesus took the ritual meal of Passover and expanded its meaning. His disciples began to meet for meals after his death, resurrection, and ascension. They took Jesus words at The Last Supper to heart. When the new Christian community would gather, they shared a meal, and in breaking the bread and sharing the wine, they remembered Jesus. 

The remembrance was not a simple, “You remember the time that Jesus ate that last meal with us…” You see “remember” has a deeper meaning. The Greek word used is “anamnesis.” To re-member is to assemble the members again. It can also be translated as to re-present, or to make present once again. Jesus is not just remembered as someone who has died, he becomes present to believers anew in Communion. That is what the disciples taught the earliest Christians. 

The Apostle Paul, who was not on the guest list for The Last Supper, wrote about it in his letter to the Corinthians. This is rare indeed as Paul almost never writes anything about what Jesus did in his lifetime. Paul said, “I was handed over from the Lord, what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night he was handed over took a loaf of bread…” He goes on to tell the story of the institution of the Lord’s Supper in the longest passage Paul ever devotes to an event in Jesus’ lifetime. Paul wrote this in the year 51 and by then, the early church had already ritualized the words of The Last Supper.  

Following their Lord’s instructions as best they knew how, the disciples created a ritual meal, following the pattern of breaking bread and sharing wine as Jesus had told them to do. They found through their own experience and that of other believers that when they did this, when they shared the bread and wine, Jesus was remembered, represented, their Lord was again present in a way hard to describe, but hard not to notice. 

For two thousand years since that night, we Christians have continued this ritual of celebrating communion for we have found in it spiritual sustenance for our lives. In taking communion, we stop merely listening to a story. We get a chance to enter the story. We do not merely hear how Jesus did this or that. We hear Jesus say, “Take, eat, this is my Body which is given for you” and “Drink this all of you: This is my Blood of the new covenant which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”  

Then we notice that the words are not just the words Jesus once said to his disciples. Jesus is saying those same words to us. We are to take and eat for his Body has been given for us. We are to drink, for the Blood of the new covenant was shed for us and for many. Then we do get up and we take and eat and we drink. We enter into the story and in so doing we enter into God’s very presence. 

In the final chapter of the book The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix offers a moving meditation on the obedience involved in celebrating the Eucharist. I want to close with his description of how Jesus’ simple words have become the most obeyed commandment in a marvelous way: 

At the heart of it all is the eucharistic action, a thing of an absolute simplicity—the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as they were first done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His friends on the night before he died.   . . .He had told his friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning “for the [remembrance] of Him,” and they have done it always since.  

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth.  

Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for a famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren women; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of Saint Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them.  

And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancti Dei--the holy common people of God. 

Amen.