Thursday of Holy Week
A Bible full of holes
Thursday of Holy Week—A Bible full of holes
On Thursday of Holy Week, Jesus shares a final meal with his disciples in an upper room. Two striking aspects emerge from this Last Supper.
The first is the profound Jewishness of Jesus’ life—his context, his teaching, his imagery, and even his final meal, a Passover meal remembering Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian captivity. (Matthew, Mark, and Luke all describe this meal as a Passover Seder, while John, interpreting Jesus as the Passover lamb, sets the meal the day before, on the Jewish Feast of Preparation.)
Jesus was a Hebrew rabbi. His disciples—as well as the Gospel writers and Paul—were all Jewish. Simply put: there are no Christians in the Bible. Understanding Jesus’ teachings and actions apart from this Jewish context is impossible. Knowing that Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey means little without understanding Zechariah’s prophecy about the kind of king he would be. Similarly, without an awareness of the political significance of waving palm branches and cloaks spread on the road, the meaning of the procession is lost.
The second key aspect of this meal is the radical new commandment Jesus gives his disciples. He declares, ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’ (John 13:34). Later in the same meal, he reiterates, ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you’ (John 15:12). This day is frequently called Maundy Thursday, from the Latin mandatum (mandate, commandment), the first word of John 13:34 in Latin.
Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus teaches about the two greatest commandments: Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39; Mark 12:29-31; Luke 10:27). These commandments, of course, are deeply rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures—Deuteronomy 6:5 (Devarim) and Leviticus 19:18 (Vayikra).
But during the Last Supper, at the culmination of his life and ministry, Jesus raises the bar. No longer is ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ the highest standard. Instead, Jesus sets himself as the new measure of love: ‘Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’ (John 13:34). This moment prioritizes what is truly important in scripture, placing Jesus’ own life and mission at the center of how self-sacrificial love is understood and practiced.
A consultant friend often says, ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.’ For Jesus, the main thing is the Kingdom of God—a vision of the world not as it is, but as God desires it to be. The most well-known prayer in the church, the Lord’s Prayer, expresses this hope: ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’
What is the main thing for Jesus? Consider where he spends his time and with whom: with outcasts, deviants, the sick, the poor, lepers, and prostitutes. Consider the conflict that dominates the last week of his life—his direct challenge to the unjust socioeconomic and political structure of the Temple. Consider how he inaugurates his ministry from the very beginning—by reading from the scroll of Isaiah. In the synagogue, Jesus unrolls the scroll and declares: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the oppressed…’ (Luke 4:18; Isaiah 61:1).
For Jesus, the main thing is justice. As Jim Wallis points out, justice is mentioned twice as often as ‘love’ or ‘heaven’—and seven times more often than ‘hell.’ Wallis, author and editor of Sojourners magazine, often tells the story of a group of seminarians who take a Bible and a pair of scissors and cut out every verse about poverty, wealth and injustice in order to illustrate what a dominant theme it is in the scriptures. They removed several thousand verses because verses about money, wealth and poverty is second only to idolatry in the Bible (and those are often interrelated). When they finished, what remained was a Bible full of holes. This is exactly why Jesus comes to Jerusalem - to ensure that scripture is not left full of holes. The Temple elites have heard enough of Jesus. They now know where Jesus will be that night and, under cover of darkness, will make their next move.