If we had to choose one word to describe what tonight, Maundy Thursday, was about, I don’t think we could choose a better word than ‘life’. Because if we think about what we remember and celebrate tonight, the institution of the Eucharist, of Holy Communion, our Lord’s washing of his disciple’s feet, and his agony in Gethsemane, all these things are about the life that Christians are called to live; a life lived in communion with one another, a life of service of one another, and a life of self-sacrificial love for one another.
Our Gospel reading tonight marks the start of a section in St John’s Gospel that’s known as the Farewell Discourse, the final teaching and instruction that Jesus gave to his disciples before his Passion, his arrest, trial and execution. Later in the Farewell Discourse, we find Jesus’ great prayer for unity amongst his disciples as he prays to the Father that his disciples, both those present with him and all those who will come to believe in him through them,
“… may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”
It’s a great prayer for Church unity, a prayer offered by our Lord himself on the night of his arrest, that his Church, his disciples, may be one, and a great symbol of that unity is the Eucharist which our Lord instituted on that night.
We call the Eucharist by many names, but Holy Communion is perhaps the one that best expresses what it should signify for us. It’s where we come together in communion, in fellowship, to share the communal meal our Lord gave us, and where, through our sharing in the bread and wine, which is Christ’s Body and Blood, we come to share in his life.
Unfortunately, as we’re all only too well aware of, the Church is not one, and one of the main causes of our disunity is our disagreements about the Eucharist. The fact that the Church has ignored Christ’s prayer for unity is the greatest tragedy, and I would say the greatest sin, of the Church. And perhaps the most tragic thing about it, is that our disagreements about the Eucharist have made the very thing which is supposed to unite us, and should unite us, one of the things which most divides us.
I’m not going to go into the various understandings and disagreements about the Eucharist, I’m simply going to say this. In the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke, the word we translate as ‘body’ is the equivalent of a personal pronoun, in the case of the speaker, ‘me’. And in the Old Testament, blood is explicitly equated with life. So in the Jewish understanding of Jesus’ day, blood is life. And our word ‘remembrance’ , meaning a mental recollection, doesn’t have the same meaning that a ritual remembrance such as Jesus’ command to “Do this in remembrance of me” had for those he first said those words to. For Jews to this day, for example, the ritual recounting at Passover, of the story of the first Passover, makes that first Passover real, present and active for them in the here and now. So regardless of our disagreements and divisions about exactly how Christ is present in the bread and the wine of the Eucharist, in their original language and context, what Jesus’ words mean is that, when we celebrate the Eucharist, when we receive Holy Communion, he is here with us, now, and we are with him at supper on that first Maundy Thursday. And what we receive and share in, when we receive Holy Communion, is nothing other than Jesus himself and his life. But what does it mean to share in Jesus’ life?
Our Gospel reading tonight tells us that sharing in Jesus’ life is sharing in a life of service towards each other, and we see that in his example of washing the feet of his disciples. But, whilst we may be perfectly happy to receive and share in Jesus’ life in and through the sacrament of Holy Communion, how willing are we to share in his life of service?
One of the great traditions of our Maundy Thursday liturgy is the Washing of Feet, that time during the liturgy when people come forward to have their feet washed by a priest. But if we think about Jesus’ words when he did this for his disciples, I think we have to question whether we’ve actually got this right. After washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus said,
“If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you.”
Despite what Jesus himself did, he didn’t set an example that one person should wash everyone else’s feet, but that we should all, each and every one of us, wash one another’s feet. And yet when I’ve put this to the test, which I have done on a few occasions in different churches, it seems that this is an example of service that hardly anyone is willing to follow. In the past, in different churches, when I’ve asked for volunteers for the Washing of Feet, hands have shot up all over the church. But when I’ve said that instead of me washing everyone’s feet, I will wash the first person’s feet, who will then wash the second person’s feet, who will then wash the third person’s feet, and so on along the line, the hands have gone down. And when I’ve asked again for volunteers for the Washing of Feet, very few hands have gone up, and on more than one occasion, no hands have gone up at all. And yet this is surely more in keeping with the example to “wash one another’s feet” that our Lord set for his disciples than the way we usually do the Washing of Feet in our Maundy Thursday liturgy. So it seems that for many people, their willingness to share in the life of Christ is limited by the extent to which they’re willing to serve and by what kind of service they’re willing to give to one another. Washing feet, for example, isn’t a pleasant job, it’s probably seen as a menial job, and it seems that many people, whilst they’re quite happy to let someone else wash their feet, aren’t prepared to serve others in the same way.
This willingness to do the difficult and unpleasant for the sake of others is, of course, what our Lord’s earthly life was, ultimately, all about because it’s this self-sacrificial love of others that led him to his Passion and Cross. And tonight we remember the start of Jesus’ Passion; his agony in Gethsemane, and his betrayal and arrest.
One thing we always have to remember about Jesus’ Passion and Cross is that it’s something he didn’t have to go through. It’s something he chose to do out of love for others, including for you and for me. Jesus may have been called to drink from this cup, as he put it, but he was just as human as everyone else and so he had a choice. He had a choice to either follow this calling or not to follow it. He had a choice about whether to go to Gethsemane, a place it was his custom to go, as St Luke tells us in his Gospel account of this night, and so a place where he knew he’d be found by those looking to arrest him, or not to go there. He had a choice about whether to stay there and pray, knowing Judas and his cohorts were on their way to arrest him, or to leave and go where he wouldn’t be found. But Jesus chose to go to Gethsemane and wait for what he knew was inevitable in the circumstances he’d chosen to put himself in, to happen, because this was the life he’d been called to live and chose to live.
We know from his agony, his agonising over the choice he had to make, that it’s something he really didn’t want to do; we see that in his prayer;
“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
It’s very, very unlikely that any of us will ever have to make such a life and death decision on account of our faith but, nevertheless, we are called to show that same self-sacrificial love in our lives that Jesus showed in his. Jesus showed that love most clearly as he allowed himself to be arrested in Gethsemane, knowing that it would lead to his death. He showed it by being faced with something he really didn’t want to do but doing it, willingly, for the sake and good of others. How we might show that same kind of self-sacrificial love will depend on what we’re faced with in our own lives. Whether we do show that love will depend on whether we can face up to what we’d rather not do, and do it willingly, for the sake and good of others just as Jesus did. And if we can’t do that, then we can’t fully share in Jesus’ life.
Tonight is about life; Jesus’ life and our life. It’s about giving thanks for our Lord’s institution of the Eucharist and of the receiving and sharing in his life that Holy Communion allows us. It’s about giving thanks for the life of service and self-sacrificial love that Jesus led for our sake. And it’s about committing ourselves to following that life after his example. We know that we can receive and share in Jesus’ life through our receiving and sharing in the bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Christ, in Holy Communion. But the extent to which we can truly share in his life will depend on how closely we can follow his example in our own lives. It depends on whether we, when we’re faced with things we’d rather not do, but as disciples of Christ know we should, can say, as he did,
“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”
Amen.
Propers for Maundy Thursday can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 