Sermon for Maundy Thursday
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”
Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great Holy days of Holy Week. It is a day of many events: Jesus washing of the feet of the disciples; the institution of the Holy Eucharist in the upper room; the later traditions of the King’s touch and gift of money to the afflicted; the stripping of the altar; the watching with Christ in Gethsemane; in short, a great cluster and confusion of events that belong to our participation in the Passion of Christ and to the ways in which we confront ourselves in our brokenness, on the one hand, and the ways in which we look upon Christ, on the other hand.
What unites all these events of Maundy Thursday? Simply the term which designates this day, maundy. It is the Englishing of the Latin term, mandatum, meaning commandment. “A new commandment, I give unto you,” Jesus says, “that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you love one another” (Jn. 13.34). That word is given by John in his account of the Last Supper which focuses on the washing of the feet of the disciples and the betrayal of Judas and not on the words of institution at all, an interesting point about the Gospel which is, in other respects, the most sacramental in its theology. But it is that concept of a new commandment that is most crucial for this day. For it highlights the theme of sacrificial service. That is the theme that unites all of the disparate elements of the liturgies of Maundy Thursday.
The idea of sacrificial service is profoundly counter-culture and constitutes a profound ethical rebuke to our contemporary culture which is really about the pretense to privilege, prestige, and prominence; in short, the idea of getting ahead in the world which is always about putting others down or at least using others as means to our own ends. Such is the dog-eat-dog world of endless conflict and destruction; the world of the dominance of the few at the expense of the many. What is lost is precisely this ethical sense of the common good. Maundy Thursday provides the most radical picture of the ethical teaching and meaning of sacrificial service. Such is the true worth and dignity of our humanity. It is not found in the pursuit of power and privilege but in the dignity of service. This was the point of the Passion Sunday Gospel. “Whosoever would be great among you let him be your minister. Whosoever would be great among you let him be your servant,” literally your slave. This brings out the meaning of the famous Master-Slave dialectic of Hegel. It is not simply that the Master discovers his dependence upon the Slave and thus a kind of role reversal, but rather the more profound realization of mutual interdependence and mutuality that is the deeper truth of all forms of ordered life.
