The Thursday before Easter is known as Maundy Thursday, the day set aside on the Church calendar to remember the Last Supper. The word \u201cmaundy\u201d comes from the Latin word for \u201cmandate,\u201d or \u201ccommand.\u201d At this first celebration of communion, Jesus gave His disciples what He called \u201ca new command\u201d to love and serve one another. And He demonstrated what He meant by washing their very dirty feet.<\/p>\n
Now to fully appreciate this command, we have to remember that at this supper Jesus and the disciples were obeying God\u2019s command to remember the Passover. The Passover meal celebrated God rescuing His people from Egypt, as described in Exodus. For Jesus to have the audacity to offer a \u201cnew\u201d command when the old one was such an important part of Israel\u2019s history is astounding enough. But Jesus went even further. Rather than remembering the redemption of their forefathers from Egyptian tyranny and the way the angel of death \u201cpassed over\u201d the homes with lamb\u2019s blood on their doorposts, they were now to remember His broken body and His shed blood. In Christ\u2019s death, death itself is not just avoided; it is defeated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Thursday before Easter is known as Maundy Thursday, the day set aside on the Church calendar to remember the Last Supper. The word \u201cmaundy\u201d comes from the Latin word for \u201cmandate,\u201d or \u201ccommand.\u201d At this first celebration of communion, Jesus gave His disciples what He called \u201ca new command\u201d to love and serve one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[136,4347,137,3606,3610],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}