Sermon for Maundy Thursday
admin | 28 March 2013“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”
It has been our mantra, the interpretative text for our Holy Week meditations. It speaks profoundly to this day, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great Holy Days of Christ’s Passion. In our Anglican tradition, we immerse ourselves in the reading of all of the accounts of the Passion. Luke’s Passion is read on the Wednesday and the Thursday of Holy Week. It is from Luke that we get this defining word of betrayal.
Maundy Thursday is a day of complexity and confusion. Maundy is the Englishing of the Latin mandatum, meaning commandment. The novum mandatum, the new commandment, is Jesus’ word to us at the Last Supper, on the night in which he was betrayed. What is the new commandment? That we should love one another as he has loved us. The Passion of Christ signals to us exactly what that means. It means sacrifice and service.
Those two concepts mark the solemn ceremonies of this day. Christ institutes the Holy Communion, identifying himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover celebration and thereby inaugurating the new covenant that will be realized through his death and resurrection. He inaugurates this new reality in the face of our betrayals and he also insists on washing the feet of the disciples. It signals the servant ministry of the Gospel. “I am among you as one that serves.”
Sacrifice and service. And yet, betrayals.
The betrayals of Maundy Thursday are the great betrayals, the betrayal of fellowship and the betrayal of friendship. “Behold,” he says, “the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table.” He says this immediately after instituting the new covenant in his body and blood; it is the further expression of the new covenant to love as he has loved us, which is about the giving of ourselves even as he has given himself to us. It is done in the face of our betrayals. Take and eat, Drink this. These, too, are the dominical commandments, the commandments which give further meaning to the commandment to love, precisely because they are about the sacramental form of divine love which is to live in us. It is altogether about our being with him and he with us, about him being in us and we in him, to make the point even more emphatically.
This is what gives heightened poignancy to Judas’ betrayal and to that betrayal in all of us. The Psalmist puts it this way. The sin and evil which we confront does not come from our enemies or from strangers; they come from within the fellowship of friends. In words that can be applied to the events of this night, he says, “For it is not an open enemy that hath done me this dishonor; / for then I could have borne it; /Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me;/for then I would have hid myself from him./But it was even thou, my companion,/my guide, and mine own familiar friend” (Ps. 55). In words which must surely move us to tears, he goes on to say, “we took sweet counsel together,/ and walked in the house of God as friends.”
The very intimacy and special wonder of friendship and fellowship is betrayed. It is this which breaks our hearts, or should. We are convicted of our betrayal of those who have trusted us. In a way, it is the deepest betrayal and anticipates the most exquisite yet most heart-rending form of that betrayal in the actual kiss of Judas in the garden of Gethsemane.
We are with Jesus tonight in all of the events of the Passion, at least that is the spiritual intent and meaning of Holy Week and, especially, of the Triduum Sacrum. And so we are with him in the strange wonder of the Passover celebration when he gives himself to us, body and blood, in the bread and wine, establishing the sacramental union of himself with us for all time. Not only does his action anticipate and transcend his impending crucifixion and death, he also provides for us, his life continuing in us through his passion, death, and resurrection. What he does here in instituting the Holy Communion belongs to the meaning of the novum mandatum, the new commandment which inaugurates the new covenant. And it is done in the face of our unfaithfulness, in the face of our betrayals of his love.
At every service of the Holy Communion, we are recalled to the actions of this night in the Upper Room, how “in the same night that he was betrayed, [he] took Bread; and when he had given thanks, he brake it; and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take, eat; this is my Body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Take, eat; do this. These are his commandments in virtue of which his new commandment to love can begin to be realized in us, for it is entirely about his sacrifice in us. His sacrifice is about nothing less than his living for the Father in the bond of the Spirit and that sacrifice is given to live in us. It is ultimately “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving,” our praise and thanksgiving for the one who gives himself so completely and entirely to us. And “likewise after supper he took the Cup and when, he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all, of this; for this is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins: Do this, as oft as ye shall drink it, in remembrance of me.” Drink ye all, of this, Do this … in remembrance of me.
Love has its way even in the face of our betrayals. That is what we contemplate most forcibly this night in the narrative of love and the betrayals of love. Perhaps nowhere is this dramatic narrative better captured than in Tilman Riemenschneider’s Altarpiece of the Holy Blood in St. Jacobskirche, Rothenburg-on-the-Tauber, executed sometime in the early years of the sixteenth century. It is a visual narrative of the Passion with Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and his Agony in the Garden depicted on the two wings or flügel which frame the central theme of the Last Supper. What makes this work so striking is the way the carved work comes alive through the passage of light in the course of the day. In the morning light, faces of the figures in the front row of the scene of the Last Supper are illuminated except for Judas. As the sun moves on through the course of the day, Judas becomes more and more the solitary centre of the event. In the late afternoon light, the figures in the back row are seen in silhouette while Judas is illuminated. The interplay between the face and hands of Christ and the face and figure of Judas offer a moving tableau of the narrative of love and betrayal.
The betrayal of fellowship and friendship is fully on display in the events of Maundy Thursday. We betray our own familiar friend who in the face of our betrayals gives himself for us and provides for his love to live in us. He makes something out of our betrayals but only if we find ourselves in this story and turn to him for forgiveness.
“Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?”
Fr. David Curry
Maundy Thursday, 2013