“All the people hung upon his words”
Luke gives us three of the seven last words from the Cross. In some sense they shape the drama of salvation with a certain kind of intensity and poignancy. They are words which reveal us to ourselves as sinners at the same time as they reveal the deep love of God. That dialectic of sin and love is the drama of Maundy Thursday, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum.
We are meant to hang upon the words of Christ in the intimacy of the Last Supper as we heard last night at Tenebrae. One of the important features of Maundy Thursday is that it connects powerfully and essentially the Passion and the Eucharist, the celebration of the Christian Passover, if you will. In both we confront the spectacle of our betrayals of ourselves and God. As Christopher Lasch puts it, “the spiritual discipline against self-righteousness is the very essence of religion.” Nothing could be more self-critical than Holy Week. “The nature of religion,” he notes, is “to console, but, first of all, to challenge and confront.” We have forgotten this in what has become for our culture and our churches ‘the triumph of the therapeutic’ and now ‘the tyranny of the therapeutic’, as if our self-esteem were the highest good.
Holy Week and Maundy Thursday challenges that sense of the self in a way that is profoundly counter-culture. It is not about ourselves as the victims but as the victimizers because of sin and evil. We confront our betrayals of Christ and thus of ourselves in the scene at the Last Supper which Maundy Thursday reminds us about by way of the epistle reading from 1st Corinthians (as well as the Evensong second lesson from John 13). It is the betrayal of the fellowship of friends. We cannot celebrate the Eucharist without recalling our betrayals of that fellowship. “In the same night that he was betrayed,” the eucharistic prayer says; that same night is this night. Every Eucharist places us in the upper room where Christ carries himself in his hands and gives himself to us who are his betrayers.
This kind of self-criticism belongs to the good of the Passion. It is through confronting the limitations of our humanity in all the forms of our fallenness and sin that we learn the greater love of God for our humanity. It is all about confronting ourselves and being challenged by the words of Christ. That and that alone is our comfort. Our good intentions are not enough whether it is in the garden of Gethsemane or in the high priest’s house of the temple precincts. We may want to watch with him in companionship but are too weak. We may want to bear witness to him but betray him like Peter. We confront ourselves in these scenes in the hopes that the look of Christ upon us as upon Peter may move us to contrition and sorrow.
The continuation of the Passion according to St. Luke is not a pretty picture. It reveals the all too common acquiescence of authority to the power of emotions in the figure of Pilate, a miscarriage of justice par excellence, since, as he says, both he and Herod “have found nothing worthy of death hath been done by him.” We fear the power of the mob seemingly unaware of our own acquiescence to the mob in ourselves. Simon, a Cyrenian, is compelled as Matthew and Mark put it, forced as Luke suggests, to carry Jesus’ cross to Calvary. It is not about our willingness to bear the Cross and yet bearing the Cross becomes the essence of our Christian vocation. It means that we are meant to share in Christ’s passion, to suffer with him who suffers for us.
What makes this possible is not anything in ourselves for that would be the folly of self-righteousness. What makes this possible are the words upon which we are meant to hang on this very night, the words which Luke gives us in his account of the Passion. They are the words of the most compelling yet gentle rebuke, the words of our redemption. With Luke’s three words of Christ from the Cross we are gathered dramatically and intimately into the endless life of God. His words begin and end with an address to the Father.
“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” is the first word. The whole spectacle of betrayals is about a kind of ignorance. Sin is disobedience, yes, but it is also our ignorance in denying what we have been given to know, a betrayal of ourselves as made in God’s image as rational and spiritual creatures. God seeks our good and we negate it in all of the forms of sin which Holy Week reveals to us.
Yet this day is called Maundy Thursday. Maundy is the englishing of mandatum meaning commandment. “A new commandment, I give unto you, that you love one another”, Jesus says. How exactly is it new? Because in Christ the love of God and the love of one another is perfectly united. His loving service and sacrifice which counters the culture of death and domination. Only in confronting the limitations of our fallen humanity can we begin to learn the radical love of Christ who calls us to service and sacrifice not on the basis of any principle of self-sufficiency or self-righteousness in ourselves but through his grace at work in us.
The second word is also from Luke. “Today,” Jesus says to the penitent thief who has asked Jesus to remember him, “thou shalt be with me in paradise.” Paradise here is not a return to the garden in the manner of Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock because we can’t get back to the garden. This is the greater paradise of human redemption, not an earthly paradise but the paradise of God’s presence in our lives, he in us and we in him. Remember me, the thief says. We seek God’s mindfulness of us through our being mindful and attentive to his words. Hanging on his words is about that kind of attention and mindfulness. It is also about self-criticism, an awareness of our sins. The penitent thief doesn’t presume any innocence or righteousness or privilege on his part. He simply seeks the mercy of God in Christ and his grace.
Maundy Thursday presents a complex cluster of liturgies from the washing of the feet of the disciples to the agony in Gethsemane. They all relate to the forms of service and sacrifice through our prayers and praises. At the heart of it is the connection between the Passion and the Eucharist understood as our being gathered into the love of God. “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” It is the last word of Christ from the Cross. In every way, we are gathered into God’s love for our wounded and broken humanity. We are challenged by the words of Christ and so confront ourselves.
“All the people hung upon his words”
Fr. David Curry,
Maundy Thursday, 2023