Sermon for Maundy Thursday
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
“Whatsoever he tells you, do it.” This, too, is Mary’s word, and not altogether unlike her word of response to God at her Annunciation, but it is her word to us at the Wedding Feast in Cana of Galilee. A direction and a command, it follows upon her assessment of the human condition, “they have no wine,” she says. But Christ will provide for us, turning the water into wine, but not before his strange and disturbing word to Mary. “O woman, what is that to you and to me. Mine hour has not yet come.” And not before her direction and command, “whatsoever he tells you, do it.” It is, we might say, but a further extension of her word of response to God, “be it unto me according to thy word.” And as with her so with the Church, and so with us, especially in the week of Christ’s Passion.
Tonight, we meet in the Upper Room with the disciples and Jesus. It, too, is a celebratory event, a celebration of the Passover, a celebration with bread and wine in honour of God’s deliverance of Ancient Israel from slavery in Egypt, a defining event in the culture of the religion of Judaism. But what strange and disturbing things are heard and seen in this Upper Room! “Do this”, Jesus says, to us in the Upper Room; “do this in remembrance of me.” Defining words for Christians.
“He carried himself in his own hands,” Augustine notes, calling attention to the strange marvel of Maundy Thursday, reminding us of the strange wonder of Christ’s words in the Upper Room. He identifies himself with the elements of the Passover Feast; the bread and the wine of the celebration of the Passover are spoken of here as his body and his blood, the bread and wine of liberation and salvation. What kind of provision is this and how shall we understand it?
