Sermons on Subjects of the Day n. 3: “Our Lord’s Last Supper and His First”

A common human intuition tells us that departure from friends warrants a “farewell party.” Going away begs a bittersweet celebration of past friendship and an anticipation of a new chapter unfolding. When St. John Henry Newman was composing his sermon “Our Lord’s Last Supper and His First,” he was likely contemplating the pain of goodbyes as a real possibility in his future. He wrote this sermon on Quinquagesima, the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday, February 26th, 1843. On September 25th of that same year, he would preach his famous sermon “Parting of Friends” immediately before stepping down as an Anglican rector due to his conscientious investigation of the claims of Roman Catholicism. Both the Lenten season and Newman’s departure from the Anglican communion were looming. His keen sense of the pain of human departures highlights fresh aspects of Our Lord’s Last Supper that can help us find new beginnings in painful endings, and encouragement in our Lenten disciplines.

Clearly, Newman admits, there is something definitively “supernatural” taking place in the Last Supper. Christ washes his disciples’ feet, supplying what Newman calls the “great note of the Church,” charity and humble service, while also instituting its sacramental means: the priesthood and the Eucharist. Yet Newman also sees the Last Supper in a simple human sense: Christ and his disciples must bid each other farewell for a time, and their relationship will never be the same. It is Christ’s farewell party before his passion, death, and resurrection. Since God’s grace elevates, and does not supplant, our human nature, this basic human element is richly significant. The Last Supper indicates a “mingling” of human and divine affections, in which Christ elevates the human instinct for a farewell-gathering into something “sacramental.”

Newman finds powerful parallels between two important moments of farewell in Christ’s life: the miracle of wine at the Wedding in Cana, and the Last Supper. When Mary told Christ that the wine had run out, he replies, “What is this between me and you? My hour has not yet come.” The “hour” of Christ points to his passion. There is a mysterious link between Cana and Calvary. On both occasions Mary is submissive to Christ’s will: “do whatever he tells you.” Newman highlights how Christ implies that Mary will have to endure separation from him as he begins his public ministry of miracles, but that it is not “for good, but for a season.” Newman sees the same element in the Last Supper with the disciples: the “hour” of his “separation” will not be forever, but that “when [Christ’s] hour was come, then He would have to do with [them] as before.” The “hour” of his passion begins a work when these separations would end. These farewells, then, are really the beginnings of an even greater return.

The miraculous wine at Cana points to what Christ establishes at the Last Supper: his departure includes leaving his real presence hidden in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Christ held the Last Supper “when the hour was come,” the time of offering Himself. His sacrifice on the cross is substantially linked to the spiritual nourishment in the Eucharist, wherein members of his true body participate in his sacrifice by consuming his very body, blood, soul and divinity (Jn. 6:55, 1 Cor. 10:16). The feast of departure is, then, an anticipation of an even greater return—his apparent absence is actually a hidden and more intimate presence. The Last Supper is a “feast of valediction, a sort of sober carnival, before He entered upon His trial.” Taking leave from his disciples and from this life inaugurated a greater miracle of his abiding presence:

In the gifts then promised to the Apostles after the resurrection, we may learn the present influence and power of the Mother of God… For what was that first miracle by which he manifested his glory in the former, but the strange and awful change of the element of water into wine? And what did He in the latter, but change the Paschal supper and the typical lamb into the sacrament of his atoning sacrifice, and the creatures of bread and wine into the verities of his most precious Body and Blood? He began his ministry with a miracle; He ended it with a greater.

This should give us deep and lasting confidence in all of our own experiences of loss, separation, and departure, big and small: a father leaving for work while his children cling about his knees begging for the weekend; bereavement over the death of loved ones; lawful pleasures which we deny ourselves during Lent; the sorrows of war, displacement and migration; passage into the next life. God Himself did not spurn or despise the human heartache of leave-taking, but elevated it into the sacrament by which He is mysteriously, even in this life, most intimately present to us, and by which we can hope for an even greater intimacy in the next. This affords us great faith and hope in the midst of trials. Newman offers a stirring summary of how these themes can direct our Lenten disciplines:

We shall be called, as it were, out of sight; for though our worldly duties will remain and must be done, and our bodily presence is in the world as it was, yet for a season we must be, more or less, cut off from the intercourse, the fellowship, the enjoyment of each other, and be thrown upon the thought of ourselves and of our God. Earth must fade away from our eyes, and we must anticipate that great and solemn truth, which we shall not fully understand until we stand before God in judgment, that to us there are but two beings in the whole world, God and ourselves.

In denying ourselves during Lent, “we leave the goods of earth before they leave us,” practicing the moderation that will help us to love God above all. May we cling more closely to Christ in the Eucharist, and beg his Mother to help us do whatever he tells us. By the boundless mercy of God, may we bravely endure all things, until we come at last to the unending feast of heaven, from which there will be no separation, departure, or farewell.