by CCW | 18 April 2019 22:00
You may be forgiven for wondering, ‘which service?’ For Maundy Thursday is really a great jumble of services, a collection of rituals. There is the rite of the washing of the feet; there is the rite of the royal mandatum, a gift of money to the poor; there is the Judas Cup ceremony at Durham Cathedral; there is the institution of the Holy Eucharist in the Upper Room with his disciples “on the night,” this very night, “in which he was betrayed”; there is the stripping of the altar; there is the watch in remembrance of Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane. “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” “What mean ye by these services?”we have to ask.
And yet the connecting thread of meaning is clear. It has altogether to do with the power of the concept of sacrifice, a concept so much misunderstood that it now belongs less to its profound religious and spiritual sensibilities and more to the pathologies of the therapeutic culture. Sacrifice here is not about calling attention to oneself, about victimhood; it is entirely about the giving of oneself for the sake of others. Such is love. Such is true agency. Such is true love. Love is not love if it is not sacrificial love. It is entirely about putting oneself freely and utterly on the line, not counting the cost. It is love without calculation. It is simply love.
“What mean ye by this service?” This is our text throughout Holy Week. It concentrates for us the purpose of our rather intense and demanding Holy Week observances. Nothing could be more counter-culture. The places are few and far between that undertake such a demanding regime. And yet, it really all begins with Maundy Thursday, the day of the new commandment, novum mandatum. Maundy is simply the englishing of the Latin word, mandatum, which means commandment. A new commandment. That is the unifying theme. The new commandment is “that you love one another as I have loved you.” That is our vocation and challenge: that our loves should be nothing less and nothing more than God’s love moving in us. That new commandment is simply service as sacrifice. And that is what unites the diverse services of this holy day.
All of the services have a sacramental aspect to them. They are all about making visible what is invisible, about Word and Sacrament, if you will, about the harmony of intellect and sense. Sacrifice is not a negative. The radical transformation of thought, to which the New Testament, especially in the Holy Week readings, makes clear, is about the ways in which we are drawn into the divine life. The services of this day are all about the forms of sacrifice.
And nowhere more so than in the gathering in the Upper Room. There Christ takes bread and identifies it with his body; there he takes wine and identifies it with his blood. He does so in anticipation of his Passion and in provision for our constant living from him in his death and resurrection for us as sacramentally remembered by us.
The intensity of the Passion is the meaning of Holy Week. Here that intensity has an undeniable sacramental emphasis. Here, as Augustine wonderfully puts it, “Christ carries himself in his own hands.” He does so to provide us with the means of our constant participation in his redemptive work. He does so to put himself into our hands. The key word is sacrifice. Service is sacrifice in Christ and Christ’s sacrifice in us, “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, “ as our liturgy so beautifully and powerfully puts it.
With Maundy Thursday, the events of Holy Week mount up to a crescendo of intensity. We are drawn more and more fully into the details of the Passion and more and more into the idea of service and sacrifice. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” This is our prayer and our cry. We are to find ourselves completely in the drama of the dogma of salvation.
The Judas Cup ceremony of the medieval monks of Durham cathedral illumines something of the radical nature of service and sacrifice. It has entirely with how we see ourselves, on the one hand, and what we see in ourselves, on the other hand, and all through how Christ sees us revealed in the accounts of the Passion. In the Judas Cup ceremony the monks of the cathedral drink from a mazer – a kind of bowl – only to see themselves in the face of Judas engraven in the bottom of the mazer. Holy Week is not about facing the sins of others; it is about facing our own sins and our own betrayals of the divine love. It is that kind of looking that convicts us and convinces us about service and sacrifice. Such is our life in the meaning of Holy Week.
Fr. David Curry,
Maundy Thursday, 2019
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2019/04/18/sermon-for-maundy-thursday-11/
Copyright ©2026 Christ Church unless otherwise noted.