Maundy Thursday

The Thursday of Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, is called Maundy Thursday. The name comes from the Latin word “mandatum” which means “commandment.” The word appears in the Latin translation of John 13:34, where Jesus said to his disciples: “A new commandment (mandatum) I give you: Love one another.”

While Jesus truly did give his followers that great command on the night before Good Friday, Maundy Thursday is perhaps most memorable for is its “suppers.”

Almost everyone is familiar with Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper. In that work of art, Da Vinci portrays the Lord Jesus gathered with his disciples to celebrate the Passover. The Passover meal was an annual festival in Israel held to commemorate how God at the time of Moses delivered Israel from slavery in Egypt.

Exodus 12 tells how God, to protect his people from death in Egypt, instructed every Israelite household to take an unblemished year-old male lamb and slaughter it. The Israelites were to paint the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of their homes, and roast the lamb whole and eat it. God promised that when he saw the blood of lambs marking the homes of the Israelites he would “pass over” their homes and spare them from the death coming upon Egypt.

The Passover meal foreshadowed a far greater deliverance from a far worse slavery through a much better lamb. Just as God saw the people of Israel living as slaves in Egypt and doomed to die there, so he saw all people living as slaves to sin and doomed to die in that slavery eternally.

But God had a plan to deliver his people.

That plan also focused on a lamb, but not one from the flocks of Israel. This Lamb was God’s own Lamb, his own dear Son Jesus Christ. This Lamb would deliver a world of sinners from their slavery to sin and death by dying on the cross.

Because the true Passover Lamb had now come to take away the sins of the world, the Passover that Jesus ate with his disciples on Maundy Thursday was indeed the “last supper” of its kind. During that meal, the Lord instituted a new supper to replace the Passover. That new supper is the sacrament of Holy Communion, or as it is often called, “the Lord’s Supper.”

The Bible tells us that Jesus took some of the bread from the Passover meal, gave thanks and gave it to his disciples saying, “This is my body, which is given for you.” He also took a cup of the wine that was used for the Passover and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Drink from it all of you. This is my blood which is poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins.” Jesus made it clear that he wanted his disciples to continue to celebrate this Supper until he returns and brings the world to an end.

Each time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, our Savior gives us his very body that bore our sins to eat. He gives the blood that washed away our guilt to drink. Our Lord does this so that we will believe and rejoice to know that the death in hell we deserved has passed over us; now we are free from sin and death. And one day, our Lord will invite us to another supper, a wonderful, eternal supper, a supper that the Bible in Revelation 19 calls “the wedding supper” of the Lamb.

Jesus had pointed his disciples to this supper, “the Lamb’s supper,” on Maundy Thursday: he spoke of his glorious return, and he promised that his faithful disciples will “eat and drink at my table in my kingdom” (Luke 22:30). The Lamb’s supper will take place when Jesus returns in glory to claim the people he redeemed by his death on the cross and bring them home to heaven. Jesus was looking to that day when he promised his disciples: “In my Father’s house are many rooms…I am going to prepare a place for you.

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