Sermon for Maundy Thursday
admin | 29 March 2018“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.
Sacrifice and service are the dominant features of the Maundy Thursday proliferation of rites: the foot-washing, the King’s ‘healing’ touch and alms to the poor and sick; the Last Supper itself; the Stripping of the Altar. Everything anticipates and yet participates in everything that will happen tomorrow. Here the events begin to unfold that give meaning to the term ‘passion.’ He wills to be acted upon, to be placed in our hands. Left to ourselves we learn what that means. Only then do we, perhaps, grasp the significance of the sacraments which he institutes for us; what he has provided for us in spite of ourselves. He carries himself in his own hands so that he may give himself for us and in us. The sacraments are the effective signs of grace; they are what they signify, “the powerful instruments of God to eternal life” (Hooker). They belong to the meaning of Maundy Thursday, the day of the mandatum, the new commandment.
And what is that new commandment? “That you love one another as I have loved you.” On Maundy Thursday, we see the love of Christ for us, anticipating his Passion and death and providing us with the continuing means of his being with us and our being with him. He who carries himself in his own hands in the bread and wine as his body and his blood carries us into himself.
No words, perhaps, are more compelling and defining for the Christian Church as the body of Christ than the words of sacramental institution, words which are repeated and commanded, words which effect what they signify in conjunction with the natural elements of bread and wine as Christ’s body and blood. “This is my body … this is my blood. Do this. Drink this.” These words that signify so much of the reality of Christ’s presence and sacrifice all belong to the commandment to love one another even as Christ has loved us. They are the very words of love made audible and visible in Word and Sacrament. They are words which define us.
“Be it unto me according to thy word”
Fr. David Curry
Maundy Thursday, 2018