Tonight is the night of the last supper. In all my years a Catholic, I have never had the opportunity to have my experience of this evening be informed by my experience of the Passover, till this year. Tonight, I went to the mass and I ate the “body of Christ”. I know that St Paul wrote the “But food does not bring us nearer to God; we are not worse if we do not eat it and no better if we do.” If I cannot come nearer to God by the eating of the unleavened bread – the body of Christ today or the matzah of the Passover, it can led me remember God.
Passing the matzah around the table, in pieces for each one to take, I partook in the Passover of the Jews. Though some of the guest in attendance at Lucy’s house told me “We are those other Jews” when I questioned whether my non-kosher Bulgarian stuffed cabbage leaves would be suitable, I found out that order of the meal – the seder – is ancient regardless of contemporary comprises and accommodations in other aspects of the Passover. We took the irregular shaped pieces of the thin crusty bread and added the bitter herb to remind us of the bitter times the slaves endured. There was also haroset , the mortar used for the bricks, as a reminder of the life draining labor that was enforced upon the Jews. I wish I could write “the labor that we endured”, but I was just an invited outsider. On the other hand, my Christian and Jewish brother in heaven – St Paul – wrote that we are “all grafted to one tree” through Jesus Christ destroying the “middle wall of separation” between Jew and Gentile. Nonetheless, I am unable to self identify with being enslaved in Egypt. My mind is instead wandering back forth from the image of a slave working under the whip and the flagellation of the Jew called “Jeshua”, apparently the name of Jesus in Hebrew (cf "Passion of the Christ").
When Jesus ate the Passover as described in the Gospel of the New Testament, how did he and his disciples eat it? I wonder whether that sacred passing of the bitter herb, haroset and matzah was observed. Sounds plausible. They probably had all been numerous seders in their lives and they probably ate according to the order that had now existed for probably over seven centuries, assuming Moses left roughly Egypt seven hundred and fifty years before that Passover meal, the so called “last supper”. And the Gospel speaks of the disciples and Jesus “reclining at table eating” (Mark 14:17), which is what happens at a seder, “you are supposed to actually lean on pillows” Lucy said explaining to those of us invited who are not Jewish and not familiar with this ritual. I can only imagine what Jesus though of during the dinner. The connection between himself, slavery in Egypt and the writings of Isaiah was perhaps on his mind. He knew that the servent of the Lord who Isaiah speaks about was ostracized and subjected to pain, like the Israelites in Egypt: “3He was despised by and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering.” Isaiah 53:3. Amidst the chatter at the table, much akin to the Passover I attended, speaking to Ari to my left and Elsita to my right, was Jesus withdrawn and solemn as he mediated on the writings of Isaiah: “Surely he took up our iniquities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53: 4-6. Indeed, this man was convinced he was the Messiah and his mission of bearing all of humanity’s iniquity – and all the wounds he would have afflicted on him. This drove him to pray at Mount of Olives where he was in such state of fear of his imminent death that he sweated blood and perhaps hallucinated seeing an Angel later the same evening. Even during the dinner, I would wager, fear may have welled up inside him and mingled with love for his disciples, which maybe led him to exclaim: “ Take it, this is my body!” (Mark 14:4) after he gave the thanks to God and broke it. Was this like when Lucy broke the Matzah and distributed it to all of us? Where did Jesus add his own wish for him to be eaten yet not cannibalized? It seems this happened during the heart of the meal, while I was adding the raddish and wasabi peas and haroset (one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi one -the thicker one) to my plate because the Gospel says “While they were eating, Jesus broke the bread and said… (Mark 14:22). But he could have done it at a later time, during the main meal, when we were gulping down the vegetarian lasagna made with matzah meal, ratatouille and my Bulgarian surmi. There were times when I was talking with either Matilde, a sprightly Colombian woman in front of me in Spanish, or chatting to Ari who graduated last year like myself or Louis, a young mid career international American about his work with special Olympics in Namibia or for Care International in Gaza as the only Jew to ever work for them, and imagine if during one of these moments, Lucy just interjected and broke the bread telling all of us to do something that had never been done before during a seder , but was nonetheless imbued with intent, not a mere game or the offering of an exotic dish. In the Gospel of Luke it says that Jesus told the disciples that “my body is given for you,” once again associating himself with the servant described by the prophet Isaiah. But he went a step further, instructing them to “do this in remembrance” of him and thereby adding something to the Passover. Adding extras to the Passover, like the conspicuous orange on our seder plate in solidarity for the Lesbian and gay men in the Jewish community as per the initiative of some Jewish feminists from the Hillel Organisation in the late 1970s, can be controversial and not everyone does it. In another vein, the remembrance of Holocaust victims at various places during the seder such as during the part about questions from the smart kid, the rude kid and the simple kid, where a child from the Holocaust asks a question to which there is only silence, are accepted universally. I wonder what Jesus was thinking when he said “do this in remembrance of me”. Instinctively, I believe he wanted to be remembered as a person who saw himself as the Lord’s servant and who did not want to die, whether or not he was a blasphemous phony messiah or the Christ for those who keep him in recollection.
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