Remembrance Is Real Presence
A Sermon by Seminarian Paddy Cavanaugh on Maundy Thursday (C), April 14, 2022.
I want you to remember someone you love who has died. Remember what it was like to be with them. Remember what it was about them that made you love them, their way of being around you, the way that they spoke to you, the way that they smelled, their mannerisms, and the way they showed their love for you. Remember their presence, for a moment.
What are the things that cause you to remember them? For me it’s often smells. It only takes a slight whiff of lavender or lemon balm to transport me to a childhood morning lounging in grandmother’s bed as she got ready for the day. Sometimes memory returns in song. When Marvin Gaye comes on the radio I can’t help but be snatched into the passenger seat of my grandmother’s little silver car as we drive to the ocean along a sunny highway in Eastern North Carolina. We could probably all spend hours together sharing the little triggers of the senses that cause us to remember the people that you are holding in your hearts right now. This connection between sense and memory is not just an uncanny coincidence, it’s biological.
Sensory information, like tastes, smells, sounds, and physical sensations, are processed through the hippocampus, which is the same part of the brain that is responsible for memory recall. Hear a particular birdsong or see the sunlight falling through a window in a familiar way, and a memory is summoned from the vault of the mind. That is to say that we are hardwired to remember through our bodies in the way we interact with the world through our senses. Remembrance is a physical act. Remembrance is presence. That’s part of why we do liturgy. The repetition of specific gestures, songs, words, smells, and images physically helps us to recall the presence of something that is deeply precious to us.
On this day, Maundy Thursday, we remember both the Last Supper which Jesus shared with his disciples before being handed over to death on the cross, and Jesus’ tender act of washing his disciples’ feet. In the first instance of the Last Supper, Jesus instituted for us a way of remembering him, which we carry on when we celebrate the Holy Eucharist. The original meal, which he shared with his disciples, was itself an act of remembrance – a Passover meal which our Jewish brothers and sisters continue to this day, according to God’s command heard in today’s reading from Exodus: “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”
During the Passover meal, known as a Seder, specific foods are eaten in recollection of God’s mighty act of delivering the Israelites from bondage in Egypt. Unleavened bread for the haste with which the Israelites fled from their homes, unable to wait for yeast to make the dough rise, bitter herbs for the bitterness of captivity, and a lamb shank bone for the sacrifices offered at the Temple in Jerusalem.
So too is remembrance central to our own Eucharistic feast. At this Passover of the Last Supper Jesus instituted a new ordinance to his followers – to remember him and therefore God’s ongoing work of deliverance and restoration – when we gather to partake of the bread and wine which is transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Not symbolically, not metaphorically, but Christ being really, truly present. In our act of remembrance in the Holy Eucharist, God, through the Holy Spirit, condescends, he comes down, and becomes truly present to us in the physical matter of bread and wine, making them for us the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Now how Christ’s Real Presence is manifest in the elements of bread and wine, our Anglican tradition is less concerned with explaining. Most of us do not hold close to doctrinal explanations of the Real Presence like transubstantiation or consubstantiation or transignification, I’ll stop the list there but I promise there are more. Instead of the how, it’s the that which is important to us – that Christ is truly present with us and in us as a transfiguring promise of God’s sacrificial love for us when we gather as one body to remember and receive the one body offered up for the world’s salvation. In the memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection in the Eucharist it is as if time and space are compressed and Jesus is as much with us in our Eucharist as he was with the disciples at that very first Eucharist. Again, remembrance is a physical act. Remembrance is presence.
But to what end? Why do we remember? For what purpose does Christ become sacramentally present with us? Friends we welcome Christ’s presence in the Eucharist to remember towards something. The Eucharist is a type of remembering which demands something of us, it is a mandate. Maundy Thursday, from the Latin mandatum – mandate. So what is the mandate? It is the mandate to do that which love requires of us, and that is to love one another as Christ loved us. “By this,” Jesus says, “everyone will know that you are my disciples.”
And this is where the foot washing comes in. Jesus came to us to deliver us from sin and to teach us how to love. He did this in death by his world-redeeming sacrifice on the cross and he did it in life as he knelt down to tenderly wash the feet of his disciples.
When we take the transfigured bread and wine into our bodies we are united, all of us, together with Christ’s own body and transfigured more into his likeness. The Eucharist transforms us to become more Christlike. It inspires our own acts of sacrificial service as co-conspirators with God for the redemption of the world. The Eucharist is both our comfort and our command. One of our Eucharistic prayers explicitly reminds us of this by saying “deliver us from the presumption of coming to this table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.”
So be warned, St. George’s, of what you are becoming, of what you commit yourself to by partaking in the Blessed Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. You may find yourself on your knees, like Jesus, washing the feet of your friends and neighbors. You may find yourself on your knees, washing the feet of a weary, weary world, and the world has some very muddy feet.
And you may find yourself remembering that remembrance is a physical act. Remembrance is real presence.
Amen.