Day: April 9, 2020

KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 9 April

Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.

Where is God? So some ask in relation to the Covid-19 crisis. The answer is right where God always is, namely in the midst of the world’s suffering and never more so than during Holy Week, the week of Christ’s Passion. The sufferings of Christ embrace the sufferings of our world. In a way, that is the point about suffering that belongs to the religious and spiritual perspective of many of the religions of the world. It is all about how we follow our Dharma in the face of conflict and suffering in the Hindu perspective, about how we face Dukka in the Buddhist view, about how it is far better to suffer wrong than to do wrong in the Greek ethical and philosophical traditions, about how we just might learn through suffering about the greater mercy and truth of God in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding.

Holy Week concentrates our minds on the sufferings of Christ for us, for our world and day. There is something that is learned in and through suffering but only because of the grace and goodness of God. That is the point of the Christian focus on Christ who feels our suffering more intensely, nore fully, than we can ever imagine. In our rather apocalyptic times, John Donne’s sonnet about “what if the present were the world’s last night” has an especial resonance. He bids us look within to “the picture of Christ crucified” and to ask “whether that countenance,” the face of the suffering Christ, “can thee afright,” frighten you, and “can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell/ which prayed forgiveness for his foes’ fierce spite?” He has in mind, I think, the images of the crucified Christ after the Black Death in the 14th century which decimated Europe, images which depict Christ’s sufferings in terms of the sufferings of the victims of that catastrophic pandemic. In so looking and listening, we discover a great good. What seems so ugly is really a “beauteous form” which “assures a piteous mind.”  Sin and love. We learn the latter through the former. Amazing grace is divine mercy.

Matthew and Mark give us the most agonizing and disturbing cry of Christ from the Cross. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is his cry of dereliction, of abandonment, and yet it is a prayer to God. It voices, as no other word from the cross does, the full meaning of sin and suffering. It is about alienation. It is about extreme isolation and separation. He voices the truth of human separation from one another and from God. But he voices it to God. It is prayer.

Thursday in Holy Week is known as Maundy Thursday. It comes from Christ’s words about a new commandment, novum mandatum in the Latin. What is that new commandment? That you love one another. The Passion of Christ shows us the love of God for us in and through the most extreme form of human suffering.

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Sermons

Sermon for Maundy Thursday

“Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit”

“A new commandment, I give unto you, that you love one another,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel. That new commandment is the novum mandatum in Latin; the word mandatum being then Englished to Maundy. Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Sacrum Triduum, the three great and high Holy Days of this Holy Week. We have emphasized that Holy Week is all about our participation in the Passion. Maundy Thursday brings that sense of participation to its highest expression. It is a day of many rituals and liturgies, all of which serve to underline two things: service and sacrifice.

Service to others is about the sacrifice of ourselves for others without which we are nothing and far less than the truth of ourselves. We really only live when we live for God and for one another; each is implicated in the other. To love God means to love one another. To love one another is to love God. It is almost as simple as that. And yet so difficult. Why? Because of sin.

The liturgies of Maundy Thursday are greatly circumscribed and reduced to a nullity this year owing to the Covid-19 outbreak and the fears thereof. All of the liturgies of the Church and especially in Holy Week and most especially on Maundy Thursday involve us with one another and significantly in bodily ways. There is, for instance, the service of the washing of the feet, recalling Jesus in the Upper Room bending down and washing the feet of the disciples. It recalls the Passion Sunday Gospel about Christ coming “not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many.” The ministers of the Church are called to serve.

That idea of service is sacrificial and as such sacramental which is why on Maundy Thursday we recall that “on this night,” the very night in which he was betrayed, Jesus provides us with the means of his being with us. Such is the institution of the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Mass, to use some of the names for this essential and defining liturgy of the Church. It is grounded in the Passion. “He took bread … he took the cup. Do this…. Drink this in remembrance of me.”We are apt to take someone’s last words rather seriously. Here are some of the last words and deeds of Christ and they are all about service and sacrifice, all about providing for us on the very eve of his going from us into the valley of the shadow of death, our death.

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Prayers and liturgy

Maundy Thursday

The collects for today, Thursday in Holy Week, commonly called Maundy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who, of thy tender love towards mankind, hast sent thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take upon him our flesh, and to suffer death upon the cross, that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant, that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also he made partakers of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

O GOD, who in a wonderful sacrament hast left unto us a memorial of thy passion: Grant us so to reverence the holy mysteries of thy Body and Blood, that we may ever know within ourselves the fruit of thy redemption; who livest and reignest with the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 Corinthians 11:23-29
The Continuation of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke
The Gospel: St. Luke 23:1-49

Tintoretto, Agony in the GardenArtwork: Tintoretto, The Agony in the Garden, 1578-81. Oil on canvas, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice.

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