In Remembrance of Me

He told the disciples in the upper room to take the cup and the bread in remembrance of him. But what he was asking them to remember hadn't happened yet.

Maybe they thought it had. If we could have probed each one's mind at that moment, we might have come up with a list of things, even a long list.

Was it their initial calling, immediate and irresistible in each case, changing their lives? Many of us could say the same, and the memory of that could well be involved in our taking of communion.

Or the disciples might have been thinking of his miracles. There had been so many. That first one still likely stood out, as first impressions do, so unexpected and “incidental,” that jug of water becoming wedding feast wine. But why? A simple need? A mother's vague request? Yes, but more, so his new followers would put their trust in him.

Perhaps they were to remember the words he spoke on so many occasions, so often surprising, always cutting straight to the real heart of the matter? “Certainly,” as the awed soldier said, “No man has spoken like this.”

Or they could have recalled Jesus' very recent courage—verging, they thought, on foolhardiness—after being threatened with stoning in one place, moving away to a safer one, then right back again to danger where he had an appointment to raise his friend from the dead. That was Lazarus and, if they knew, a precursor to his own death and resurrection.

How could it have been clear to them yet? Within hours it would begin, the steam roller of events culminating in the greatest tragedy ever seen—in earth and heaven—with the disciples helpless but to watch, and that from a distance.

It was that event that Jesus was instructing his followers to recall, them, and all of us ever after.