by CCW | 17 April 2014 21:03
Holy Week reaches a crescendo of intensity in the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of the Passion: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Out of that disturbing and passionate intensity comes the radical reality of new life, the life of the Resurrection. We cannot think the one without the other. And we cannot think about either without hanging upon the words of Christ, especially in the pageant of his Passion.
The words par excellence, perhaps, that the Christian Church hangs upon, and certainly most frequently, are the words of the institution of Holy Communion, the words of Christ in the Upper Room on the night that he was betrayed, this night, this very night. “Take eat, this is my Body which is given for you”; “Drink ye all, of this; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant.” These words so familiar to us from the service of Holy Communion are at the heart of the Passion and derive from the accounts of the Passion and from Paul. They are the words of Christ to the disciples on the eve of his Passion; words which signify so much of the Passion and its deeper meaning and which signal the form of our continuing and constant participation in his Passion and Resurrection.
The Church has hung on these words because they define the being of the Church as the body of Christ. They express the meaning of our incorporation into the life of Christ, the Christ whose sacrifice is the radical overcoming of sin and death, the Christ who gathers us into his eternal thanksgiving to the Father in the bond of the Spirit. “A new commandment, I give unto you,” Jesus says, the phrase defines the meaning of this day, Maundy Thursday. Maundy derives from the Latin, mandatum, which means commandment. The Passion is about the love of God for us, the love which commands us to love as he has loved, and provides for us the means of our living in his love. Only so can his love begin to be realised in our lives.
Sin and love are the great lessons of Holy Week, to be sure, but it is through the sacramental life of the Church that we constantly participate in the life of God, in his constant triumph over sin and death, and in the constant reality of his love in itself and for us.
Maundy Thursday presents a great number of ceremonies: the foot-washing as a sign and symbol of service; the institution of the new Passover, Holy Communion; the agony of Gethsemane; the stripping of the Altar; the silence of watching and waiting. All belong to the sacrifice of Christ and to the ways in which we hang upon the words of the one who goes to hang on the Cross for us.
There is something quite wonderful in reading The Passion according to St. Luke on the Wednesday and Thursday of Holy Week. It complements and informs the liturgical patterns and traditions of this day. A sacrament, as you know from the catechism, is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” Through Luke especially we are given a window into the soul of Christ; we are allowed to glimpse something of the dynamic of redemption that underlies the Passion of Christ. Luke shows us the inner struggle of the humanity of Christ in the agony of Gethsemane; “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” And as if to drive the point of the intensity of this inner struggle home, Luke describes Christ as “being in an agony,” and “pray[ing] more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.”
The words are exquisite and powerful, all the more so for following upon the events of the Passover meal in the Upper Room and the words of Christ to us about his body and his blood identified now with the bread and the wine of the sacred banquet of the altar. Even more so, too, by the realization that those words are spoken in the knowledge of betrayal and in anticipation of his crucifixion. There is a symbolic force and reality to the words of the institution of the sacrament. Notice that Luke does not say that his sweat is blood falling down to the ground but “as it were” great drops of blood. The image helps us to visualise the inner struggle, to make us feel something of what Christ feels in his sacrifice for us; his body broken and his blood outpoured.
We hang upon these words in the central liturgy which defines the life and being of the Church. For these words always take us to the intensity of the Passion of Christ and its meaning for us in our lives. Always. It is the purpose of this night, “the same night that he was betrayed,” to remind us how these words define us, if we will hang upon them and let their force and meaning govern our souls.
Fr. David Curry
Maundy Thursday, 2014
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