by CCW | 28 March 2024 22:00
“He carried himself in his own hands.” Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the most intense part of the Passion, the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days. Maundy comes from the Latin mandatum meaning commandment and refers to Christ’s repeated statement in John’s Gospel, “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another.” And as we have seen in the Office readings from St. John that commandment turns upon our keeping his words and abiding in his love. That love is the love of the Trinity.
But “a new commandment”? In what sense is it a new commandment? Do we not find the commandment to love God with the whole of our being in the Torah of the Jewish Scriptures as well as to love our neighbour? Yes, to be sure. Yet in the intensity of Holy Week and, especially on this holy night, those two commandments are uniquely concentrated for us in the figure of Jesus Christ. They are not just what we ought to do (but which of course we fail to do). They are radically fulfilled in Christ’s words and actions on this night understood precisely in anticipation of his Passion. What makes the new commandment new is the Cross in which God in Christ gives his life to us, for us, and in us. His sacrifice is his love lifted up before us already even before his being lifted up on the Cross. Hence the wonder of Augustine’s remark that “he carried himself in his own hands” in reference to the one of the central features of this day of many moving parts, the scene of Christ with the disciples in the Upper Room at the supper of the Passover. Take, eat; drink. This is my body; this is my blood.
The symbolism becomes increasingly clear. It is captured in Paul’s great statement that we proclaim in joy at Easter: “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us.” Christ is the Passover, the Paschal Lamb who gives his life for us. The new commandment is his sacrificial love at work and moving in us. Such is service and sacrifice which Maundy Thursday illustrates in its various moments: the institution of the Eucharist, the washing of the disciples’ feet, the agony in Gethsemane, as well as the other events such as the liturgical stripping of the altar, the King’s touch, and the Royal Maundy or giving of alms. They all belong to the Passion and to the forms of our participation in his Passion. They are all about sacrifice and service.
Christ lifts himself up in his hands in the bread that is, he says, his body and in the lifting up of the cup which is, he says, his blood. Such is the divine love already lifted before us by Christ himself in anticipation of his being lifted up by us in our sinfulness. The two great themes of Holy Week, sin and love, are wonderfully concentrated for us on this holy night. Sin and love, as the poet and priest George Herbert astutely notes, are the “two vast, spacious things” that it most behooves us to learn and know. But how do we learn such momentous truths? Herbert puts it this way.
Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.
Sin and love all concentrated before us. The sufferings of Christ in his Passion show us his love but we cannot even begin to comprehend his love without contemplating the vast emptiness and nothingness of human sin. Sin and love are inescapably connected. God uses human sin to teach us divine love.
At the Cathedral in Durham, England, a 14th century medieval ceremony by the monks of the monastery, recently revived, captures the necessary interplay of sin and love on this holy night. It is known as the Judas Cup. The face of Judas was engraved in a large cup or bowl called a mazur which is set before the monks following communion from which they then drink. In so doing they contemplate themselves in the face of Judas, the symbol of our human betrayal of God’s love. Christ lifts up himself in the sacrament that we might behold his love even through our sins. For it is in this night, this very “same night that he was betrayed,” that Christ lifts himself up in his hands and gives himself to us even as he will be lifted up on the Cross. We contemplate his love through our sins.
Fr. David Curry
Maundy Thursday, 2024
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