by CCW | 21 April 2011 23:00
Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the most intense part of the Passion of Christ. It is the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days which concentrate our attention on the Passion of Christ and on the forms of our participation in his Passion.
The word “maundy” is the englishing of the Latin mandatum, meaning commandment. It refers explicitly to Christ’s words in John’s Gospel, “a new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another.” A new commandment? How so? Because of what transpires in this week of the Passover. Christ unites the love of God and the love of one another. That is the love that is on display in the Passion of Christ. And that is the love which is set before us on this night, this “very night that he was betrayed.”
“What mean ye by this service?” Maundy Thursday is especially the night of services. There is the ritual of the pedilavium in which Christ washes the feet of his disciples. It is the powerful illustration of service that dovetails with the theme of sacrifice. That is the actual occasion for Christ’s new commandment to “love one another, even as I have loved you.” There are the customs and traditions of royal offerings, called Maundy purses or Maundy coins, given as a form of charity. There is the tradition of stripping the altar, an image of the desolation of Christ as a result of human sin. But at the heart of it all is the institution of the Holy Communion at the Last Supper.
The poignancy and irony of this should not be lost on us. Christ has entered Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover meal with his friends and followers. It is an intimate scene. And yet, it is the scene of betrayal, the betrayal of friendship and fellowship. Yet, that is the context for the most extraordinary thing. Christ identifies himself with the Passover. He identifies himself with the unleavened bread and the wine-cup of thanksgiving which are part of the ancient rituals of the Passover. The connection is blindingly clear. Christ is our Passover. As Paul will note, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” It will actually become part of our Easter proclamation. Here in the context of the Passover meal, Christ establishes the means of his being with us even as our betrayals signify his forthcoming passion and death.
On the very eve of his crucifixion and death, Christ provides the love-tokens of his “full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world.” We are unable to contemplate this without reference to the cross and passion of Christ. In a way, the Passion of Christ concentrates for us the special nature of this service. It gives added poignancy to the meaning of Holy Communion. It helps us to appreciate the wonder and the mystery of his body broken and his blood out-poured, the very things which transpire on the Cross.
Christ’s love and our betrayals of that love. There, in a nutshell, we have the meaning of Holy Week. Our regular liturgy, of course, constantly reminds us of these two things. Our sinfulness is made the occasion of Christ’s redemptive love. His love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes for all things, endures all things,” as Paul suggests, for “love never fails.” Here is the deep love of God which wills to bear all our sins and in so doing makes them visible to us and overcomes them. Love is something, indeed, love is everything; sin is nothing.
But to embrace the new commandment to love one another means to contemplate our own sinfulness in the figure of the Crucified. Tonight we discover just how fickle and inconstant our affections really are. We discover how in our own sins we are all Judas. We betray him with a kiss. We betray him in our betrayals of one another.
At Durham Cathedral in the north of England, there is another ritual on Maundy Thursday. It is the ceremony of the Judas cup. A special mazer bowl is used from which to drink the sacrament of the new covenant, the consecrated wine. At the bottom of the bowl is an image of Judas. We are meant to see ourselves mirrored in the figure of Judas. We are meant to see how our sins betray the truth of God revealed in Jesus Christ. We are meant to see and to be convicted in our own hearts about our betrayals of God. We, too, are Judas.
Betrayed at the table of fellowship, betrayed by his friends, Christ goes to his passion. We are meant to go with him to Gethsemane; we are meant to go with him to his trial and crucifixion; we are meant to go with him to his death and grave. We contemplate all that belongs to our unloveliness, to be sure. But it is only his love that makes it possible and necessary for us to go with him. Out of the hell of our refusals of God’s love, God makes the heaven of our redemption. Such is the power of the divine love, the love which sustains us in the meaning of his passion through the sacrament.
The Christ who carries himself in his own hands this night places himself in our hands to do with him what we will. It is not a pretty picture. At every service of holy Communion, too, he is placed in our hands. How will we receive him? With grateful hearts of faith? At once convicted of our unworthiness and convinced of the greater power of his love, I hope. For then, and only then, shall we have learned something about the question: “What mean ye by this service?”
Fr. David Curry
Maundy Thursday, 2001
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