Sermon for Maundy Thursday
“One thing is needful”
Luke’s story about the encounter between Jesus and Mary and Martha in their house in Bethany seems to privilege contemplation and to discount active service. Maundy Thursday would seem to counter and contradict that story. For Maundy Thursday not only marks the beginning of the three great Holy Days of the Passion, the Triduum Sacrum but also sets before us the themes of service and sacrifice and the means of those concepts living in us. It might seem that the better part is the part of service as illustrated in the figure of Martha in total contrast to the idle leisure of Mary, sitting and listening and therefore doing nothing.
We are apt in our world and day to compliment Martha and condemn Mary. She is after all just sitting there, doing nothing, we might say. And yet, the one thing needful on Maundy Thursday is to attend in a thoughtful and prayerful way to the nature and purpose of the various activities in which we are involved. In other words, Mary’s contemplation is key to the redemption of Martha’s activity, to the entire task and business of commending everything into the hands of the Father, the very last word of Christ in Luke’s account of the crucifixion.
Maundy Thursday is an intensely busy day, liturgically and scripturally. There is, well, such a jumble of things all vying for our attention. It is easy to become distracted and to lose sight of the one thing needful. The one thing needful is to attend to the proper forms of our service and sacrifice. That means attending prayerfully in a Marian fashion to what Jesus says and does. It is a day of many ceremonies. It is called Maundy Thursday, the word “Maundy” being the englishing of the Latin mandatum, meaning a command, a reference to Christ’s powerful words of commandment to us, words which we hear tonight at the Offertory. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another”. Something of the nature of that love is seen in the various forms of service and sacrifice that belongs to Maundy Thursday.
There is the liturgical rite of the washing of the feet. There is the royal ritual of the almsgiving to the poor. There is the institution of the ritual and rite of the Holy Communion, the Holy Eucharist, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper, all terms referring to Christ’s act in the Upper Room on the very night that he was betrayed which however understood constitute the central act of Christian worship. There is the custom and practice of stripping the altar and watching with Christ in Gethsemane. What, then, in all this busyness of service and sacrifice is the one thing needful? It is to attend to the radical meaning of these events on this evening.
