coming up from Shiloah with pitchers of water. The two Disciples were to
follow the first one whom they saw before them. They did not know why
they were not to stop him instead of going after him to see where he
went in. His master, since he had a servant, certainly was not a poor
man, and in his house, as in all those of prosperous people, there would
certainly be a room suitable for serving a supper, and he would know at
least by hearsay who “the Master” was. In those days at Jerusalem there
was little talk of anything else. The request was one which could not be
refused. “The Master saith, My time is at hand.” The time which was
“His” was the hour of death. No one could shut out from his house a man
at the point of death, who wished to satisfy his hunger for the last
time. The Disciples set out, found the man with the pitcher, entered the
house, talked with the master, prepared there what was necessary for the
supper: lamb cooked on the spit, round loaves without leaven, bitter
herbs, red sauce, the wine of thanksgiving, and warm water. They set the
couches and pillows about the table and spread over it the white cloth.
On the cloth they set the few dishes, the candelabra, the pitcher full
of wine, and one cup, one cup only to which all were to set their lips.
They forgot nothing: both were experienced in this preparation. From
childhood up, in their home beside the lake, they had watched,
wide-eyed, the preparations for the most heart-warming feast of the
year. And it was not the first time since they had been with Him whom
they loved, that they had thus eaten all together of the feast of the
Passover. But for that last day—and perhaps their dull minds had at last
understood the dreadful truth that it was really the last—for this last
supper which all the thirteen were to have together, for this Passover
which was the last for Jesus and the last valid Passover for old Judaism
because a new covenant was about to begin for all countries and all
nations: for this festal banquet which was a memorial of life, and a
warning of death, the Disciples performed those humble menial tasks with
a new tenderness, with that pensive joy that almost brings tears.
With the setting of the sun, the other ten came with Jesus and placed
themselves around the table, now in readiness. All were silent as if
heavy-hearted with a presentiment which they were afraid to see
reflected in their companions’ eyes. They remembered the supper in
Simon’s house, almost funereal, the odor of the nard, the woman and her
endless weeping, and Christ’s words on that evening, and His words of
those last days; the repeated warnings of ignominy and of the end; the
signs of hatred increasing about them, and the indications, now very
plain, of the conspiracy, which with all its torches was about to come
out from the darkness.
But two of them—for opposite reasons—were more oppressed, more moved
than the others: the two for whom this was the last of their lives, the
two who were about to die: Christ and Judas, the one sold and the
seller; the Son of God and the abortion of Satan.
Judas had finished his bargain, he had the thirty pieces of silver on
his person wrapped tightly so that they would not clink. But he knew no
peace. The Enemy had entered into him, but perhaps the friend of Christ
was not yet dead in his heart. To see Him there in the midst of His
friends, calm but with the pensive expression of the man who is the only
one who knows a secret, who is aware of a crime, a betrayal; to see Him,
still at liberty in the company of those who loved Him, still alive, all
the blood still in His veins under the delicate protection of the
skin—and yet those bargainers who had paid the price refused to wait any
longer, the affair was arranged for that very night!—and they were only
waiting for Judas to act. But suppose Jesus, who must know all, had
denounced him to the eleven? And suppose they, to save their Master, had
thrown themselves on Judas to bind him, perhaps to kill him? Judas began
to feel that to betray Christ to His death was perhaps not enough to
save himself from the death, which he so greatly feared and yet which
was near upon him.
All these thoughts darkened his somber face, more and more blackly, and
at times terrified him. While the more active ones busied themselves
with the last arrangements for serving the supper, he looked furtively
at the eyes of Jesus—clear eyes scarcely veiled with the loving sadness
of parting—as if to read there the revocation of his fate, so close at
hand. Jesus broke the silence: “With desire I have desired to eat this
Passover with you before I suffer: For I say unto you, I will not any
more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”
Such great love had not up to that moment been expressed by any words of
Christ to His friends: such a longing for the day of perfect union, for
the feast, so ancient and destined to so great a sublimation. They knew
that He loved them; but until this evening their poor bruised hearts had
not felt how poignant His love was. He knew that this evening was the
last respite of rest and cheer before His death, and yet He had desired
it ardently as though it were a boon, with that fervor which is the mark
of passionate souls, souls on fire, loving souls, those who battle for
the love of victory, who endure all things for a high prize. He had
ardently desired to eat this Passover with them. He had eaten others: He
had eaten with them thousands of other times, seated in boats, in their
friends’ houses, in strangers’ houses, in rich men’s houses, or seated
beside the road, in mountain pastures, in the shadow of bushes on the
shore; and yet for so long He had ardently desired to eat with them this
supper which was the last! The blue skies of happy Galilee, the soft
winds of the spring just passed, the sun of the last Passover, the
waving branches of His triumphant entry, did He think of them now? Now
He saw only His first friends and His last friends, the little group
destined to be diminished by treachery, and dispersed by cowardice.
Still, for a time they were there about Him in the same room, at the
same table, sharing with Him the same overwhelming grief, but sharing
also the light of a supernatural certainty.
Up to that day He had suffered, but not for Himself; He had suffered
because of His ardent desire for this nocturnal hour, when the air was
already heavy with the tragedy of farewells. And, when He had thus told
them how great was His love, Christ’s face, soon to be buffeted, shone
with that noble sadness which is so strangely like joy.
THE WASHING OF THE FEET
Now that He was on the point of being snatched from those whom He loved,
He wished to give them a supreme proof of this love. From the time they
had begun to share His life, He had always loved them, all of them, even
Judas: He always loved them with a love surpassing all other affections,
a love so bountiful that their narrow hearts could not always contain
it; but now about to leave them, knowing that He was to be with them
again only when transfigured after death, all His hitherto unexpressed
affection overflowed in a great wave of tender sadness.
Before beginning the supper where He was the head of the family, He
wished to be kinder than a Father, humbler than a servant. He was their
King, and He would humble Himself to the service performed by slaves: He
was their Master and He would put Himself below the level of His
disciples; He was the Son of God and He would accept a position despised
of men: He was the first and He would kneel before His inferiors as if
He had been the last. So many times, to rebuke their pride and jealousy,
He had told them that the Master must serve his servants, that the Son
of Man was come to serve, that the first must be last. But His words had
not yet been assimilated by those souls, since even up to the last, they
continued to quarrel for priority and precedence.
For raw, untrained minds, action has more meaning than words. Jesus
prepared Himself to repeat, with the symbolic aspect of a humiliating
service, one of His most important instructions. John tells us, “He
riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and
girded himself. After that he poureth water into a bason and began to
wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he
was girded.”
Only a mother or a slave would have done what Jesus did that evening.
The mother would have done it for her little children, but for no one
else: the slave for his masters, but for no others. The mother would
have served joyfully because of her love, the slave would have been
resigned through obedience. But the Twelve were neither Christ’s
children nor His masters. Son of Man and of God, His love was above that
of all earthly mothers,—King of a kingdom existing in the future, but
more legitimate than all existing monarchies, He was the unrecognized
Master of all masters.
And yet He was willing to wash and wipe those twenty-four callous and
sweaty feet, in order to engrave on those unwilling hearts, still
swollen with vanity, the truth which His lips had so long vainly
pronounced; “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he
that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”
So after He had washed their feet and taken His garments and was set
down again He said unto them, “Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call
me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord
and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s
feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done
to you. Verily, verily I say unto you, The servant is not greater than
his lord; neither is he that is sent greater than he that sent him. If
ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.”
Jesus had not only given them a memory of complete humility, but an
example of perfect love. “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye
love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends. Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you.”
But this action, with its deep meaning hidden under the appearance of
menial service, signifies purification as well as love. “He that is
washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and
ye are clean, but not all.”
The eleven, although not of lofty character, had some right to this
cleansing service from Jesus. For many months those feet had trodden the
dusty, muddy, filthy roads of Judea to follow Him who brought life; and
after His death, year by year, they were to tread longer and harder
roads in countries the very names of which they then did not know; and
foreign clay would soil the sandaled feet of those who were to go as
pilgrims and strangers to repeat the call of the Crucified One.
TAKE—EAT
These thirteen men had apparently come together to perform the old
social rite in memory of the liberation of their people from Egyptian
slavery. They seemed to be thirteen devout men of the people, waiting
about a white table redolent of roasted lamb and wine, for the signal to
begin an intimate and festal supper.
But this was only in appearance. In reality it was a vigil of
leave-taking and separation. Two of these thirteen, He into whom God had
entered and he into whom Satan had entered, were to die terrible deaths
before the next nightfall. The very next day the others were to be
dispersed, like reapers at the first downfall of hail.
But this supper which was the viaticum of an ending, was also a
wonderful beginning. In the midst of these thirteen Jews the observance
of the Jewish Passover was about to be transfigured into something
incomparably higher and more universal, into something unequaled and
ineffable; into the great Christian mystery. The simple eating of bread
was to become actual communion with God.
For the Jews, Easter is only the feast in memory of their flight from
Egypt. They never forgot their victorious escape from their slavery,
accompanied by so many prodigies, so manifestly under God’s protection,
although they were to bear on their necks the yokes of other
captivities, and to undergo the shame of other deportations. Exodus
prescribed an annual festivity which took the name of the Passover;
Pasch, the paschal feast. It was a sort of banquet intended to bring to
mind the hastily prepared food of the fugitives. A lamb or a goat should
be roasted over the fire, that is, cooked in the simplest and quickest
way; bread without leaven, because there was no time to let yeast rise.
And they were to eat of it with their loins girded, their staves in
their hands, eating in haste, like people about to set out upon a
journey. The bitter herbs were the poor wild grasses snatched up as they
went along by the fugitives, to dull the hunger of their interminable
wanderings. The red sauce, where the bread was dipped, was in memory of
the bricks which the Jewish slaves were obliged to bake for the
Pharaohs. The wine was something added: the joy of escape, the hope of
the land of promise, the exaltation of thanksgiving to the Eternal.
Jesus changed nothing in the order of this ancient feast. After the
prayer He had them pass from hand to hand the cup of wine, calling on
God’s name. Then He gave the bitter herbs to each one and filled a
second time the cup which was to be passed around the table for each to
sip.
What taste did that wine have in the mouth of the traitor, when Jesus in
that deep silence pronounced those words of longing and hope which were
not for Judas, but only for those who could ascend to the eternal
banquet of the Father: Take this and divide it among yourselves, “but I
say unto you I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine,
until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”
A sad farewell; but nevertheless the confirming of a solemn promise.
Perhaps they felt only the promise, and perhaps there flashed before
their poor men’s eyes a vision of the great Heavenly feast. They did not
believe that they would have a long time to mourn: after that other
vintage-time, after the fruit of the vine had fermented, and the sweet
wine had been poured into the flasks, the Master would return, as He had
promised, to summon them to the great wedding of Heaven and Earth, to
the everlasting banquet. They must have thought, “We are men growing
old, elderly men, more than mature, within sight of old age; if the
Bridegroom tarries too long He will not find us among the living, and
those who have believed Him will be mocked at.”
Comforted by the certainty of an early and glorious reunion, they
chanted together, as the custom was, the Psalm of the first
Thanksgiving, a chant of praise to the Father from Him who served Him.
“Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of
the God of Jacob; which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint
into a fountain of waters.—He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and
lifteth the needy out of the dung-hill; that he may set him with
princes, even with the princes of his people.”
These old words, colored at that moment with a new meaning, were sung
with a joyful conviction of their truth. They, too, the Disciples, were
poor men and they would be raised out of the dust of poverty by the
intercession of the Son of God: they too were poor men and He would soon
raise them out of the misery of their beggary, to make them masters of
inconsumable wealth.
Then Jesus, who saw how insufficiently they understood, took the loaves,
blessed them, broke them and, as He gave them each a piece, set the
dreadful truth before their eyes. “Take, eat; This is my body which is
given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”
So He was not to return as quickly as they thought! After His brief stay
during the Resurrection, His second coming was to be delayed, so long
that it might be possible to forget Him and His death.
“This do in remembrance of me.” The breaking of bread at the common
table among those who await Him shall be the signal of a new
brotherhood. Every time that you break bread, I will not only be present
among you, but by that means you will be intimately united with me.
Because, as this bread is broken in my hands, my body will be broken by
my enemies. As this bread eaten to-night will be your food until
to-morrow, my body which I will offer in death to all men shall satisfy
the hunger of those who believe in me, until the day when the great
granaries of the Kingdom shall be open to all, when you shall be angels
in the presence of your Father whom you shall have found again. I will
leave you therefore not merely a memory; I will be present with a mystic
but real presence in every particle of bread consecrated to me and this
bread shall be a living necessary food for souls, and my promise to be
with you shall be fulfilled till time shall be no more.
In the meantime, this evening, eat this unleavened bread, this bread
made by the hand of man, made of water and grain, these loaves which
have felt the heat of the oven and which my hands, not yet cold in
death, have divided amongst you—and which my love has changed into my
flesh so that it may be your everlasting food. It is sweet to the heart
of a friend to see his friends eating bread at his table, bread born of
the earth, bread which was green blades with flowering lilies among
them, and then the ripe ear bending down the tall stalk with its golden
weight. You know how many efforts, how much anxiety, how much trouble,
are contained in a piece of bread; how the great oxen cultivated the
earth, how the countrymen threw great handfuls of the grain into the
fallow land in winter, how the first blade softly penetrated the damp
darkness of the earth, how the reapers all day long cut down the ripened
stalks, and then the sheaves were bound, and carried to the threshing
floor and beaten so that the ears let fall the grain. The workers must
wait for a little wind, neither too gentle nor too violent, to winnow
out the good grain from the chaff. Then they grind it, sift out the bran
from it, make a dough with warm water, heat the oven with dry grass or
twigs. All this must be done with love and patience before the father
may break a piece with his children, the friend with his friends, the
host with strangers. Plowers, sowers, reapers, winnowers, millers and
bakers sweat in the heat of the sun, in the heat of the oven, before the
golden wheat can be transformed into well-baked golden bread for our
table.
Truly it is sweet to eat good wholesome bread with friends: the soft
white crumb, covered with the crisp crust. So many times with me you
have begged bread in poor men’s houses; and all your lives you are to
beg it in my name: you will have the moldy hard crusts which dogs
refuse, the dry bits left at the bottom of the dish, the crusts gnawed
by children and old people which they have let fall upon the hearth. But
you know want, and nights of fasting and the pale face of poverty. But
you are strong; you have the powerful jaws of those who eat hard bread.
You will not lose courage, if no place is made for you at the tables of
the well-to-do.
But verily it is infinitely sweeter for Him who loves you to transform
the bread which comes from the hard earth and from hard labor into the
Body which will be eternally offered for you, into the Body which every
day will come down from Heaven as the visible means of grace.
Remember the prayer which I taught you: “Give us this day our daily
bread—” For to-day and for always your bread is this bread, my Body. He
shall never know hunger who shall eat my Body, which every morning
throughout endless centuries shall be changed into endless morsels of
transubstantiated bread. But whosoever shall refuse it, shall be
anhungered to all eternity.
WINE AND BLOOD
As soon as they had eaten the lamb with the bread and the bitter herb,
Jesus filled the common cup for the third time and gave it to the
Apostle nearest Him, “Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the
new testament, which is shed for many.”
His blood, mixed with sweat, had not yet fallen on the ground, under the
olives, and had not yet dropped from the nails upon Golgotha. But His
desire to give life with His life, to redeem with His suffering all the
sorrows of the world, to transmit at least a part of His substance to
His immediate heirs; this desire to give Himself up wholly for those
whom He loves is so great that from this moment on, He feels the
immolation complete and the gift possible. If bread is the body, blood
is in a certain sense the soul. The Lord said to Noah: “But flesh with
the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.” With
blood as visibly representing life, the God of Abraham and of Jacob had
established the covenant with His own people. When Moses had received
the law, he had sacrificed oxen, took half of the blood and put it in
basins, and half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar: “And Moses took
the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and said, Behold the blood of
the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these
words.”
But after a trial of many centuries, God had announced by the voice of
the prophets that the Old Covenant was obliterated and abrogated, and
that another was henceforth necessary. The blood of animals sprinkled
upon stubborn heads and upon blaspheming faces had lost its virtue;
another Blood, purer and more precious, was needed for the New Covenant,
for the Last Covenant of the Father with His perjured children. In many
ways He had already tried to lead His first-born towards the narrow door
of salvation; the rain of fire on Sodom, the washings of the waters of
the flood, the Egyptian slavery, hunger in the desert, had terrified
them without reforming them.
And now there had come a Liberator at once more divine and more human
than the old Captain of Exodus. Moses also saved a people, spoke upon a
mountain, announced a promised land. But Jesus saves not only His
people, but all peoples; writes His laws not upon stone, but upon human
hearts; and His promised land is not a country of rich grazing-land and
vineyards, with great clusters of grapes, but a Kingdom of holiness and
eternal joy. Moses had killed a man, and Jesus brought the dead to life;
Moses changed water into blood and Jesus, after having changed water
into wine at the wedding banquet, changed wine into blood, into His own
blood, at the melancholy last supper of His marriage with death. Moses
died full of years and honors on a solitary mountain top, glorified by
his people; and Jesus was to die among the insults of those whom He
loved.
The blood of oxen, the impure blood of earthly animals, involuntary and
inferior victims, is no longer sufficient. The New Covenant was
established that night with the words of Christ, who under the
appearance of wine shed His own blood and His own soul: “This cup is the
new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”
It was shed not merely for the Twelve who were there; they represent in
His eyes all of humanity alive at that time and all those to be born
thereafter. The blood which was to be shed the next day, on Golgotha,
was real blood, actual, warm blood congealing on the cross in clots
which all the tears shed by Christians can never wash away. But the
blood of the Last Supper symbolizes a soul which gave itself up to make
over into His own likeness, the souls shut up in the bodies of men:
which was given to those who asked for it and to those who fled away
from it, which had suffered for the sake of those who had received it
and for those who had blasphemed it. This baptism of blood which came
after the baptism of water by John, after the baptism of tears by the
women of Bethany, after the baptism of spitting by the Jews and by the
Romans, this baptism of blood, red as the baptism of fire announced by
the prophet of fire, and mixed with the tears shed by women over His
blood-stained body, this is the greatest sacrament, revealed to His
betrayers, by Him who was betrayed.
I have broken bread for you, daily bread for which you pray every day to
the Father, as my body will be broken to-morrow, and I offer you now my
blood in this wine which I drink for the last time on earth. If you
always do this in memory of me, you will feel no hunger, no thirst.
There is no food better than wheat-bread, and no drink better than wine,
but the bread and wine which I have given you to-night will feed you and
quench your thirst for all your lives, by virtue of my sacrifice and of
that love which makes me seek for death and which reigns beyond death.