Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’”
NL Daily Devotion for Thursday, March 28, 2024
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Jesus’s promise to us in the Last Supper means something because it is a promise, embodied.
So often, we read Jesus as a wise, all-knowing kind of character. Especially in passages like this one from the Gospel of Mark, where he is laying out future events and leading not only the conversation with his disciples, but also their journey, it’s easy to lean into the divine side of Jesus’s “divine and human” nature. To see him as God walking among people instead of a God person walking among people.
But everything else in this story points to the most fundamentally human things imaginable. Food. Drink. Blood. Sleep. It’s clear that the Holy Spirit is pulling us back to center and asking us to consider the human side of Jesus’s “divine and human” nature.
So, what if we bend the way we normally read Jesus here? What if Jesus’s tone is more anxious than it is omniscient? What if he is projecting instead of predicting? He might have felt paranoid around the disciples. He might have been preempting some of their behavior and trying to get out ahead of it because he was on edge. The text tells us that Jesus grows agitated and distressed as he and his disciples get closer to the cross. It also tells us that Jesus has a sense of what is coming his way—death. What if something about Jesus’s divine/human essence kept him from knowing exactly how things were going to unfold? Wouldn’t that be terrifying?
Jesus did something that no one else in history has ever done before. No one could have understood his mission or his fate during his lifetime, because it had never been conceived of or modeled. It would make sense if Jesus was fully human that he had moments where he didn’t understand his mission or his fate. It would make sense if Jesus was fully human that he couldn’t conceive of either one—at least not in full.
It is so much more precious and so much more meaningful to have a savior who can empathize with us than one who remains detached; a savior who knows our hearts because he has our heart instead of a savior who isn’t in any way human. When we feel anxious; when we feel confused or misunderstood or lonely or isolated or so, so scared—we can draw a deep and holy comfort remembering that Jesus has been there. That Jesus sits with usthere. That Jesus made us a promise there—a new covenant in his blood. The “Last Supper Jesus” could very well have been an anxious Jesus. And that only makes his promise more powerful for us today.
