“A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another”
The love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit is the moving force in the Passion of Jesus Christ. This divine love is the action which underlies the Passion of the whole life of Jesus Christ. John Donne reminds us:
The whole life of Christ was a continuall Passion, his birth and his death were but a continuall Act and his Christmas-day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day.
The whole life of Christ is concentrated in the Passion. The Passion manifests the deep love of God – the love of God in himself and his love for us. Over and against this is our hatred and envy at the goodness of God and at God himself. For the Passion equally manifests the potentialities and actualities for evil in our hearts. We are on display in this week, too. Only the love of God makes it possible for us to contemplate this darkness within us and not be destroyed by what we see.
Were we to despair of the love of God, then we would be like Judas, whose remorse is not repentance and whose death, as a consequence, is simply the further denial of the love of God. We deny the truth that the love of God is greater than our hearts. But “if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts.” It is the lesson of this night. The new commandment to love one another is only made possible by the love of God moving in us despite our betrayals of that love. His love alone can set our loves in order.
Maundy Thursday is the night of fellowship betrayed. The last supper is the scene of Jesus giving us this new commandment, “mandatum” in the Latin, hence “Maundy” Thursday. “In the same night that he was betrayed,” Jesus gives himself to us. This night shows us what God wants for us and what we do. What God wants is our fellowship with him. What we do is betray the fellowship.
But God is greater than our hearts of betrayal. God’s love brings out what he wants for us through what we do. The Son of God establishes the means of our fellowship with him through our rejection of him.
“Do this in remembrance of me,” he says. It, too, is a command. It belongs to the commandment of love. His love for us reaches out through his Passion and death to provide for us the means of our fellowship with him. He carries himself this night in his own hands, as it were, but with the knowledge that tomorrow he will be in our hands and we shall do with him what we will. What we will and what we will do is betrayal and crucifixion.
In anticipation of his Passion, he takes bread and wine, at once the simple elements of our daily life and the elements which have their place in the Passover remembrance of Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian bondage. He identifies himself with them as the effective signs of his body broken and his blood outpoured, the effective signs of his Passion, even more, the effective signs that the love of God is greater than the hearts which crucify him. They effect what they signify – his grace is given to be received in us. “Do this in remembrance of me.”
The remembrance of him is the remembrance of his Passion. But the remembrance of him also conveys the awareness of our betrayals. We are at once convicted and convinced; convicted of our sinfulness and convinced of the greater love of God for us. In the knowledge of that love lies the mystery of our fellowship with God. “We enter into the inner being of God through the wounded side of the Father’s Son and Word” (Hans Urs Von Balthasar). His love is greater than the treacheries of our deceitful and selfish hearts. He provides for us out his Passion, out of what he wills to undergo at our hands.
Such are the greater sacraments of Baptism and the holy Communion. We are joined to Jesus through his death and resurrection. His death and resurrection becomes the pattern of our lives in him. An inward and spiritual grace is conveyed through the outward and visible signs of water and of bread and wine. The grace is the love of God who is greater than our hearts of dis-ease and disorder, our hearts of incomplete love, our hearts of folly and wickedness, our hearts of despair and anxiety, our hearts of condemnation.
Maundy Thursday is a day of many ceremonies, such as the foot-washing, the stripping of the altar and the going to the Garden of Gethesmane. But all the events of this night have their meaning in the new commandment which he gives to us “in the same night that he was betrayed.” He commands us to love one another out of the love with which he loves us. He shows us that love and he provides the holy means of our abiding in his love. Such are the great lessons of Holy Week, the lessons especially of this night and the three great holy days which we enter into through this night. They are the lessons of sin and love.
“A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, 2010