“They shall look on him whom they pierced”
Maundy Thursday is a day of richness, complexity and confusion. The Continuation of the Passion According to St. Luke is complemented by the events of the Last Supper in the Upper Room with the institution of the Holy Eucharist and by the images of service captured in Christ’s washing the feet of his disciples. Something of the meaning of the Passion is already signified in the powerful scene when Jesus gathers with his disciples in the Upper Room. In Luke’s account as we heard yesterday, Christ celebrates the Passover with his disciples. The symbolism becomes clear; He is himself the sacrifice as Paul will proclaim. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast” (1 Corinthians 5.6).
Everything about the Passion comes down to the three great holy days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday without which there can be no Easter. It begins with Christ in the Upper Room with the disciples and in this amazing moment when he identifies himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover celebration, a celebration of Israel’s deliverance from Egyptian domination, a remembrance that what defines Israel as the people of God is God’s liberating action. As Paul tells us, having learned this from the other disciples in the early Christian Community because he was not there himself nor were we at the original event, Jesus says “take eat, this is my body” and “this cup is the new covenant in my blood”. These are astounding claims. We are to eat and drink “in remembrance of me,” he says. Given in anticipation of his Passion – body broken and blood outpoured – it becomes the ordained means of our participation in his Passion and in its redemptive truth and power. What is transacted in the Upper Room already signals what is transacted upon the Cross and provides for us the means of our participation in its deeper meaning. What is that?
Simply our participation in the Son’s thanksgiving to the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. The true meaning of Communion is Eucharist or thanksgiving. We are gathered into the Son’s love for the Father which is the true meaning of his death on the Cross. That event is ultimately about the prayer of the Son to the Father having taken into himself all that belongs to the truth and untruth of our humanity. Our sins are our untruth; the capacity for love, though not the actuality of love because of sin’s disarray, is the truth of our humanity. We are made for love and so love restores us to love and to the fellowship of love.
This is made clear in Luke’s account of the Passion for Luke gives us three of the seven last words of Christ from the Cross, the first and the last word and the second word. The words from the Cross begin and end with prayer to the Father and signal how that fundamental orientation is the promise of paradise. “Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise,” Jesus says to the one penitent thief crucified with him, the one who looks upon him, we might say, knowing his own sins and yet seeing something more in Jesus whom he asks by name, “Jesus, remember me when thou comest in thy kingdom.” Apart from the superscription over the Cross in Matthew and John’s account of the Passion, this is the only time Jesus is named or addressed. The thief calls him Jesus, saviour. Only sinners can really know love, it seems.
The first word is the word of forgiveness, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” The last word is “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.” They signal the ways in which sinners are redeemed and drawn into the communion of love.
The lessons from Lamentations focus on the Passion of Christ in terms of human betrayal and divine love. Once again we are bidden to look and ask “if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.” We are challenged to hear Christ in the words of Lamentations convicting us of our indifference. “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see.” The focus is on “the man of affliction,” the man who bears the wrath of God for “man’s disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” as Milton puts it.
The second lesson at Morning Prayer is the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel, Christ’s high priestly prayer to the Father that provides perhaps some of the profoundest meditations upon the meaning of the Incarnation and the Passion. Everything is gathered into the relationship of the Trinity even as through the institution of the sacrament of Holy Communion or the Eucharist we are provided with the means of our communion with God. But the second lesson at Evening Prayer on Maundy Thursday is taken from the thirteenth chapter of John’s Gospel which presents a full account of the Christ with his disciples where he washes their feet and speaks about his betrayal. In John’s account this is before the feast of the Passover but is seen in the theological terms of the underlying principle of his going to the Father, “having loved his own who were in the world,” and “loving them to the end.”
The lesson from John 13 intensifies our understanding of the Passion and the meaning of our participation in it sacramentally. Service and sacrifice are concentrated for us in the knowledge that “this is the night,” the very night “in which Christ was betrayed.” All of the rituals of Maundy Thursday emphasize those themes of service and sacrifice but only as aspects of something else. What is that? The novum mandatum, the new commandment. What is that new commandment? “That ye love one another even as I have loved you.”
For this is what the Passion is really all about. Sin and love, yes, but, above all, love. We can really only enter into the Passion of Christ because of God’s love moving our loves into union with him. Nothing could be more astounding. But is it about our looking too? Yes. It is all about our looking upon Christ crucified and upon the Christ who gives himself for us body broken and blood outpoured in the sacrament of the altar on this night when he identifies himself with the bread and the wine of the Passover. Here is the great provision which God makes for us in the wilderness of our lives. He feeds us.
The Gospel for The Fourth Sunday in Lent anticipates Maundy Thursday. There the story of Christ feeding the five thousand is about his giving thanks. It is out of the thanksgiving of the Son to the Father that we are fed with “the holy Bread of eternal life” and drink “the Cup of everlasting salvation.” We do so because it belongs to the new commandment of love which is accomplished and only accomplished in the Passion of Christ. Here is “the memorial which he hath commanded.” In the logic of Holy Week, Maundy Thursday at once anticipates the Passion but also provides us with the continuing means of our participation in its meaning, that we all “may be one, as the Father is in me,” Jesus says “and I in [the Father], that they- we – also may be in us.” Powerful teachings that can only be realized in us if we behold and see “if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow” but even more if there be any love like the love which God shows us in the Passion of Christ.
“They shall look on him whom they pierced”
Fr. David Curry
Maundy Thursday, 2015