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If you knew today would be your last day of life, what would you do? Who would you speak to? Where would you want to be?

For some people with a terminal diagnosis, they’ve decided to have what’s called a ‘living funeral’. An idea first created in Japan in the 1990s, for some people who know that death is not far away, a living funeral has become a poignant and meaningful way to face the end. A party where you gather the people you love and celebrate life with them.

Today is Maundy Thursday; when Christians mark the night before Jesus died. And he had a party with his friends. In the gospels we will hear tonight that there was singing, there were Passover prayers, there was honesty too: one of you, he said, will betray me. And even though all of them denied it, one did leave and went out into the night.

Tomorrow in the heat and dust Jesus will be executed publicly and mercilessly by an occupying state afraid of the people. But tonight He chooses to start something new: something the church now calls the Eucharist or Holy Communion. Sharing bread and wine at the altar of God, believing that it is in this eating and drinking together, the chasm fixed between eternity and time is collapsed in the body of Christ broken for the life of the world. Today, the Eucharist, (a Greek word that just means giving thanks), is celebrated every day from hospital bedsides to huge cathedrals, on battlefields, in care homes and churches: Buzz Aldrin even took Communion to the moon.

It's anything but a closed churchy ritual for the initiated, although we church people sometimes try to make it that way. The Eucharist is both cosmic and domestic, beautiful and brutal, given what happened next. But most of all it’s not a closed memorial service, imagining a man in a sheet with a beard and a wan smile. It’s a sacrament of serious and collective intent: that insists the world as God made it is good. By gathering at the altar, the assembly imagines together a new future where all are welcome, all are fed, where there is no whisper of injustice, no hint of violent exclusion. And crucially, as the first time, this is done while all of that violence, agony and injustice remains. It’s a moment when together human beings are invited to say: nevertheless. Death is real today. Suffering is acute today. All of us are capable of betraying the call to peace and equity. Yes of course. Nevertheless, we dare to gather on the crossroads between eternity and time tonight, staking ourselves on the hope for a better world, and a fairer one.

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