Maundy Thursday

(Image by Patricia Smith)

The season of Lent ends at sundown today and we enter the Paschal Triduum, the three 'Great Days' which commemorate the Last Supper, Passion, and Death of Christ. These, together with Easter, are the most solemn and distinctive celebrations of the liturgical year.

The washing of feet and the sharing of a meal are the two transforming gestures of Maundy Thursday. The gestures are at once utterly simple and profound, speaking, as only gestures can, more eloquently than the most polished words. In the sharing of his final meal with the disciples, Jesus creates a new covenant community.   No one can be a Christian by himself or herself.  To eat this meal together is to meet at the level of our most basic human need which involves our need not just for nourishment but for each other.  This first gesture reveals our need for community, the second gesture reminds us of our need for love.

Washing the disciple's feet is a gesture of surprising reversal, and it jolts Peter and the others into thinking things out anew. The one to whom we tend to look for leadership and in whom we invest authority is seen kneeling and tenderly serving.  In John's account (John 13:1-16), Jesus is quite explicit about the gesture’s meaning.  This is a new command.  Love a new way.  Love by being available to one another.  Love by serving.  Love by literally putting our hands underneath one another’s feet, caring, helping, serving.  In this gesture, Jesus is telling us that love is demonstrated behaviorally and love is manifest when the importance of another's needs and desires rises to the level of our own.  We can “wash feet” in many simple ways, and Jesus tells us, that as we do, others will begin to recognize that we are his disciples — ordinary people seeking to live in a distinctively human way.  The gestures of Maundy Thursday remind us that the "church" is not something we go to, but something we are.

---