Sermon for Maundy Thursday
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
And so it begins. The Triduum Sacrum are the three great holy days of the Passion in which we seek to immerse ourselves or be immersed in the Passion of Christ; in short, to be defined by the word of God. That has meant confronting all of our words of disarray, our words of sin and evil, in the words of Christ, especially the words of Christ crucified. Luke gives us three of those words: Christ’s first word from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do;” Christ’s response to the penitent thief that “today shalt thou be with me in paradise;” and, what is taken as the last word from the Cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” With Luke we have the first and last word of the crucified, a beginning and an ending with a prayer to the Father. Such is the wonderful intimacy of Luke’s Gospel. He is, as Dante understood so well, scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ.
Maundy Thursday is a day rich in ceremonial and symbolism. We recall tonight not just The Passion According to St. Luke but the Last Supper of Christ with his disciples and with all of its gentle intensity. “He carried himself in his own hands,” Augustine wonderfully suggests. Christ puts himself into our hands and we are left to our own devices. We betray him and crucify him. But he carries himself in his own hands and provides another way for us to be with him and for him to be with us. He provides the way in which his sacrifice on Calvary will both be remembered and participated in through the sacraments.
Baptism and the Eucharist are the two dominical sacraments. Out of the wounded side of the crucified Christ flow the sacraments of the Church, as the Fathers often said; water and blood, baptism and communion, respectively. It requires a holy remembering on our part, a sacramentum memoriae that connects the sacrament with its meaning. It is both sign and thing signified. “This is my body … This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” “Go forth and baptise.” These are not maybe’s but must be’s. It is what is required of the Church.
