Sermon for Maundy Thursday
“Turn unto the Lord your God”
“Rend your hearts,” the prophet Joel bids us, “and not your garments and turn unto the Lord your God.” Nowhere is that turning more concentrated for us than in the three great holy days of Holy Week, the Triduum Sacrum of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Yet our turning to God is really only the effect of God turning to us.
“Turn thou us, O good Lord, and so shall we be turned” as the prayer in the Penitential Service in the Prayer Book puts it, a prayer shaped by Joel’s words. Redire ad principia, as Lancelot Andrewes remarks, a kind of circling, repentance is really about our turning back to him from whom we have turned away. How we have turned away is seen and made visible in the hideous spectacle of the Passion where we confront all of the various forms of the disorder and disarray of human hearts and our human world. But that turning is because there is a principle to which we can return, an active principle. Such is the will of God made visible in the events of these days especially.
“A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another even as I have loved you.” This conveys the meaning of this day called Maundy Thursday. Mandatum is the Latin for commandment englished as Maundy. The events of this night concentrate for us the paradox of the double turning, God’s turning to us and our turning to God.
“He carried himself in his own hands”. In such a phrase, St. Augustine captures the paradox and the poignancy of the passion of Christ on this night, this very night.
“He carried himself in his own hands” who is delivered into the hands of his betrayers on this night, this very night.
“He carried himself in his own hands” who is delivered into the hands of his enemies on this night, this very night.
“He carried himself in his own hands” who is delivered into our hands on this night, this very night.
