1st April 2010 - "Let your lamps be lit"

Stephen Fielding - St Mary's
Maundy Thursday

Tucked away in the Gospel of Luke is a short but very significant parable told by Jesus. It is the story of a master going to a wedding banquet who tells his servants to be ready for his return. ‘Let your loins be girt and your lamps be lit’.  Later, the master slips away from the wedding banquet and, when he gets back, sits his servants down to dinner and proceeds to wait on them. We can imagine that the master has brought a tray of food back with him from the wedding banquet, and wants his servants to share it. So the master becomes a servant and waits on his staff. It is a tremendous reversal of roles, unimaginable to the servants, unthinkable in the Middle Eastern world in which it is set.

I wonder if you see in this little parable - a parable told in no more than three verses of Luke’s Gospel - a picture and a prediction of what Jesus will do at the Last Supper. Because here at the Last Supper, as we have just heard, the master reverses the roles and begins to wait on his disciples by washing their feet. Here is Jesus the master saying to his disciples, ‘This must be your experience of me. I am serving you. I know it seems to be the wrong way round, but you've to accept this service. And having accepted it, you are to do this kind of service to each other’. This is what we observe at the Last Supper, is it not? And uncomfortable though it is, this is the experience that the disciples have of Jesus their master. He is their servant; and this is the way God works.

And the little parable from Luke also anticipates the other great action of Jesus at the Last Supper - the action by which Jesus inaugurates what we know as the Holy Communion. Here is the master feeding his disciples - and feeding them with the bread of life. Every time the disciples make their Communion together, they are to recall the self-giving act of Jesus, by which his body is broken and his blood is shed. And when they do it they are to remember Jesus in their midst, the master who humbled himself for their salvation.

The bread of life yes - but surely, too, the bread of Heaven - food from the heavenly banquet which is another way of reading the little parable from Luke. The master will one day return, and when he returns the food that he will bring will be the life of Heaven itself.

Meanwhile, as we've seen throughout Lent in our Sunday readings and in our groups, all our attempts at loving are but a reflection of the prior love of God. ‘We love, because he loved us first’. Here it is shown again at the Last Supper, in the feet washing and in the institution of the Holy Communion. And so Jesus says: ‘Do this in remembrance of me’.

Amen