Sermon for Maundy Thursday
admin | 9 April 2020“Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit”
“A new commandment, I give unto you, that you love one another,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel. That new commandment is the novum mandatum in Latin; the word mandatum being then Englished to Maundy. Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great and high Holy Days of this Holy Week. We have emphasized that Holy Week is all about our participation in the Passion. Maundy Thursday brings that sense of participation to its highest expression. It is a day of many rituals and liturgies, all of which serve to underline two things: service and sacrifice.
Service to others is about the sacrifice of ourselves for others without which we are nothing and far less than the truth of ourselves. We really only live when we live for God and for one another; each is implicated in the other. To love God means to love one another. To love one another is to love God. It is almost as simple as that. And yet so difficult. Why? Because of sin.
The liturgies of Maundy Thursday are greatly circumscribed and reduced to a nullity this year owing to the Covid-19 outbreak and the fears thereof. All of the liturgies of the Church and especially in Holy Week and most especially on Maundy Thursday involve us with one another and significantly in bodily ways. There is, for instance, the service of the washing of the feet, recalling Jesus in the Upper Room bending down and washing the feet of the disciples. It recalls the Passion Sunday Gospel about Christ coming “not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many.” The ministers of the Church are called to serve.
That idea of service is sacrificial and as such sacramental which is why on Maundy Thursday we recall that “on this night,” the very night in which he was betrayed, Jesus provides us with the means of his being with us. Such is the institution of the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Mass, to use some of the names for this essential and defining liturgy of the Church. It is grounded in the Passion. “He took bread … he took the cup. Do this…. Drink this in remembrance of me.”We are apt to take someone’s last words rather seriously. Here are some of the last words and deeds of Christ and they are all about service and sacrifice, all about providing for us on the very eve of his going from us into the valley of the shadow of death, our death.
“He carried himself in his own hands,”Augustine observes about the institution of the Holy Eucharist. “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit,” Jesus says in the last word of the Cross, a word from Luke. Everything is being stripped away from him; all of the disciples will desert him this night even after their time of fellowship. And so on this night, we strip the altar and empty the sanctuary of all its finery. Everything is stripped away. Christ then goes to Gethsemane to pray. We try to watch with him at least one hour. From Gethsemane he is hauled before Pilate and ultimately crucified. It is a story of the miscarriage of human justice and a telling indictment of human sin and wickedness. It is also the story of divine love and mercy. All because he carries himself and us in his hands, carrying us into the love of the Father. Here is “the bread of wisdom” for us on this night.
“Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit”
Fr. David Curry
Maundy Thursday, April 9th, 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak