“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.
Maundy Thursday counters then the destructive tendencies of our contemporary world. How? By humbling us through the humility of Christ. Instead of power and prestige, we learn the dignity of service. At the heart of that is the awareness of our broken-heartedness. As our liturgy wonderfully reminds us in the Prayer of Humble Access, “We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, Trusting in our own righteousness, But in thy manifold and great mercies” (BCP, p, 83). We only have access to those “manifold and great mercies” through the awareness of our brokenness. “The sacrifices of God are”, indeed, “a broken spirit.”
I have in previous years had occasion to remark upon a remarkable medieval Maundy Thursday rite inaugurated at Durham Cathedral and recently revived, known as the Judas Cup Ceremony. It offers a stark and compelling image of the theme of betrayal and thus what it means to be broken-hearted. Following Holy Communion, a large cup or bowl called a mazer was placed before the monks in which the face of Judas is engraved in the bowl. In drinking from the mazer the monks could see the face of Judas staring at them and thus seeing their own faces in the image of Judas’ face.
We contemplate Judas in each of ourselves but we do so in the light of the love of Christ who loves us and commands us to love him and one another, even and, perhaps especially, in the face of our betrayals of his love. We are only able to love him through his love for us; such is, we might say, the greater friendship of Christ learned in and through our being broken-hearted in the realization of our betrayals of his love. Thus Maundy Thursday inaugurates the intensity of the Passion in its fullness as well as signalling the forms of our participation in that Passion. It is sacrificial service.
That is only possible through our discovery of our betrayal and the consequence of being broken-hearted. Thus, the liturgies of Maundy Thursday add to the intensity of the Psalmist insight that “a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” by setting our betrayals of God’s love before us.
As the Durham liturgy notes, the Judas Cup ceremony serves “as a way of reminding us of the necessity for humility as we recall the ambiguities of our own discipleship.”
“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God,
thou wilt not despise”
Fr. David Curry
Maundy Thursday, 2021