Sermon for Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday 2025: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Maundy Thursday marks the beginning of the Triduum Sacrum and signals the beginning of the intensity of the Passion in all its fullness. The readings from the Lamentations of Jeremiah at Matins and Vespers today provide a graphic complement to the continuation of the Passion According to St. Luke and anticipate the Solemn Reproaches on Good Friday.
“Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow … [for] the Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand.” Lamentations begins with the sense of desolation and loneliness that our sins occasion. “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath;” we hear in the evening lesson, “he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.” And yet in the desolations of Holy Week, what is remembered and called to mind is that “the steadfast love of the Lord never faileth, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.”
With Luke’s Passion, we have three of the seven last words from the Cross and in the late 17th century ordering of the seven last words by the native Peruvian priest Fr. Alonso Messio de Bedoya, Luke provides the first and last word, bracketing in a way our reflections upon the cross by gathering them into the motion of the Son’s twofold prayer to the Father: The first word is “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” and the last word is “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
In one way, Maundy Thursday is a great and complex melange of liturgies and rites, ranging from the King’s touch and the washing of the disciples’ feet to the institution of the Holy Eucharist at the Last Supper, the stripping of the Altar, and the Agony of Gethsemane, among others. Yet, in another way, everything focuses on the Last Supper. Redemption and salvation are concentrated for us in the Eucharist as the place where Christ gives himself to us sacramentally on the very night in which he was betrayed.
Passion and Eucharist are simply inseparable. “Jesus Christ take[s] our nature upon him, and suffer[s] death upon the Cross for our redemption,” as the Communion Prayer states. We are gathered into the embrace of the Trinity as the high priestly prayer of Jesus in the second lesson at Matins from John makes clear even as the second lesson this evening points us as well to the examples of sacrifice and service that belong to the drama and the wonder of human redemption.
