The intertwining themes of Maundy Thursday

Three motifs run through the history of the chosen people. The first is Law. God made a contract with the people and the signature on that contract was the Law given to Moses. This same Moses also said that God would raise from among their number a prophet like himself. A millennium later, Jesus was anointed as this prophet. Just as Moses’ laws were intended to show our love for God, so Jesus gives us a law, a new commandment. We are to love one another as Jesus loves us. This new law has the same force as forbidding theft or murder or lying or idolatry. Jesus chose love as the key because scripture tells us that God him­self is love.

       Second, law always requires interpretation, so we need a barrister of the faith. Jesus was such a teacher; in Aramaic, he was a rabbi. Like all rabbis, Jesus had a close group of nomadic followers who followed everywhere. A Rabbi could ask his disciples to do anything. If they didn’t like it, they simply ‘tore up the contract’ and left. We see some of Jesus’ first disciples doing that when Jesus told them they must eat his flesh.

       The only thing a Jewish rabbi could not ask of his disciples was for them to wash his feet. Only a slave could be asked to do that. In context, then, the story of Jesus washing the feet of his own disciples is odd. The Bible tells us the disciples were confused. They knew Jesus was saying something radical. Some were either too afraid to face it, others too embarrassed at his unorthodox approach; maybe some did not understand.

       It’s obvious to us what Jesus was saying: love makes a servant everyone. Loving servant­hood is an central part of being a Christian and there is nothing that we cannot be asked to do.

       And there’s a third seam running through the granite of faith that underpins the history of the chosen people. We don’t know when it started, but there arose the idea of grapes, a vine­­yard and therefore wine. Jesus wanted to show that he was the next chapter of the story, so he took bread and wine, blessed them, ate and drank, and said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’.

       We immerse ourselves in our own Holy week and as we do so we see the outworking of these same ideas:

• We learn His New Commandment to love, and his invitation to use love as the sacred cement that binds us together.
• We learn that love is a form of servanthood to the extent that we are slaves to Him who was love.
• And, to prevent our forgetting the new commandment to love, we break bread and drink wine each day as a way of remembering the way that love became incarnate—God became a man to show us the outworkings of this love.

So let us return to Jerusalem, and see these things that happen — and observe the first Holy Week as the powers of good battle of love which is the only defence against the forces of evil.

John the Son of Zebedee speaks about the various names of Jesus

Many of us have remarked how some of us call Jesus ‘the Christ’, and some ‘the Word’, and others call Him ‘the Nazarene’, and still others ‘the Son of Man’. I tried to understand these names in the light that he gave to me. But none of them works well.

       To me he is the Jesus who loved. His every action was an act of love. Every word that slipped from his lip was a pearl of great price, a proclamation from God, a wooing. And as our God is a God of love, so his every word was motivated by love and was about love. His words were the product of a love to be shared with those who need love.

       I remember well that evening. It was a night of many candles, a night of tremendous joy. It was the night of the Passover celebration and a night of tremendous depth. It was also the last night of his mortal life. It was a night when he came together with his friends and shared the mystery of God in ways we would previously have thought unfathomable in their import and meaning. 

      It seems natural that we combined these themes of remembering and Passover, forgiveness and new life, remembering God and remembering Jesus with a meal underpinned with a command to love. But that’s the God we choose to serve. 

(with apologies to Kahlil Gibran, Jesus: The Son of Man)

Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles, speaks of seeing the risen Jesus

Jesus conquered death with his own death. He had already shown himself to be the incarnate love of God, so we expected him to reveal that love to the very end and beyond. He no longer lies in a cleft rock behind a great stone but lives and moves and loves and loves.

     He rose from the grave as a loving power animated by the Spirit of a loving God. His form was pure body. We who loved Him as a living man beheld Him with our eyes which He made for us to see; and we touched Him with these our hands with which he taught to reach forth. And we saw a man again.

     I would speak of His face but how can I? His mouth was clearly made to speak words of grace and solace. The shadows in His eyes were deep. He was gentle, like a man always mindful of his own great strength. I later dreamt of a scene in which all the kings of the earth stood in awe of His presence and bowed.

     The first time I came to his tomb after the Sabbath was like a night without darkness, and like a day without the noise of day. I saw the tomb and the discarded stone. I saw an emptiness and heard a quiet above me like a sky devoid of crows.

     I stood before Him and spoke to him. His face was powerful to behold, and He said to me, “What would you, Mary?”

     I could not answer Him, but my wings enfolded my secret and made me warm. And I swore that from that day I would always love as he loved and would always speak of him as an ever-present goodness. 

(With apologies to Kahlil Gibran, Jesus: The Son of Man)