Maundy Thursday | The Last Supper

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JESUS  & Pees be both be day and nyght Untill this house and till all that is here. Here will I holde as I have hight The feeste of Paas with frendis in feere.

This is the opening of the York Last Supper play (performed, appropriately enough, by the York Baker's guild). Unfortunately, though the beginning and ending of the play survive intact, the manuscript page containing the central episode (where Christ says of the bread "This is My body," and of the wine, "This is My Blood") has mysteriously disappeared, presumably removed at the Reformation for adhering too closely to traditional Catholic doctrine. 

Probably this occurred in the early sixteenth century - the whole cycle of mystery plays was finally banned in 1569, but before this happened there were several years of 'tinkering' with the individual pageants to tone down more overtly Catholic aspects (this happened with several of the plays dealing with the Virgin Mary as well as with the Last Supper). 

With the page gone, there is of course no way of saying with certainty what it contained. But, given the closeness with which the other mystery plays follow their scriptural and liturgical counterparts, it is highly likely that the missing page, which occurs precisely where we would expect Christ’s performance of the transubstantiation to occur in the sequence of the play, ran along the lines of:

... this is My Body which shall be delivered for you; this do for the commemoration of Me... This chalice is the new testament in My blood; this do ye, as often as you shall drink, for the commemoration of Me. For as often as you shall eat this bread, and drink this chalice, you shall show the death of the Lord until He come. Therefore whosoever shall eat this bread, or drink of the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord...

which are the words of the Epistle for the Corpus Christi feast. The same words appear, with slight variations, in the Epistle for Maundy Thursday, and of course in the Canon of every Mass.