A personal view of Maundy Thursday

Bear in mind that this post, like all the posts on this blog, has been supplied by one of the Ringwood Unitarians – and not necessarily always the same one.  It should not be assumed that any other Ringwood Unitarian, or any Unitarian from anywhere, thinks or feels the same as this. Or that the rest of our Ringwood group are even interested in this train of thought.  That’s the beauty of any Unitarian community – we worship and we connect, but we don’t expect each other to think about the same things or to think or feel in the same way.

It’s Maundy Thursday today.  That’s the name the Christians gave to this day when a significant event for them took place, during the Jewish festival of the Passover.  Christians commemorate that on this day Jesus of Galilee gave the mandate (the Maundy) to his followers and students to carry on his work and to love each other as he had loved them.

The teacher Jesus and his friends had gone to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, for the celebratory worship of the just and merciful God.  At the Passover, Jews commemorate that God allowed their ancestors, the Israelite slaves in Egypt, to escape the horrors inflicted that night on their unresponsive and cruel slave masters, the Egyptians.  The horrors the Egyptians experienced was the overnight death of every first-born.  With the Israelites following the instruction to mark their covenant with God on the doorways of their dwellings, God did God's part of the covenant by passing over the houses of the Israelites, without inflicting death.

It is the festival that recognises that God, or Life, will act kindly towards people who act in accordance with the edicts that God, or Life, demands.  This recognition is portable from Judaism right through all the faiths, right across the spectrum of faiths, even to an oriental belief system that shies a long way away from the Jewish idea of a “personal God”, by which I mean Taoism.  Passover, or pesach, is a festival for all those who have had a good experience of their faith.

So Jesus and his friends and family sat down to eat their evening meal, to quietly await the arrival of the next day, the commemoration of the day when Israelites woke up to find that God’s word had been carried out – and the Egyptians were shocked and frightened to find their first-borns had died – and the Israelites now had to get out of Egypt very quickly.

And during that evening meal, Jesus seemed to be very sure that his time was coming to an end.  Perhaps he too was shocked and frightened; or perhaps he thought that within a day or two it would be his followers who would be shocked and frightened.  You see, he had been in Jerusalem since the previous Sunday and he was aware that all sorts of people had all sorts of expectations of him that he would not necessarily fulfil.

Some people had been truly offended to the core by some of the teachings he had given, and wanted him to renounce some of the things he had said about his relationship to God.  Others wanted him to lead a zealous and possibly armed rebellion against the Roman occupying forces.  A few others seemed to think he was bigging up his part as a wise man with a following, at the cost of wasting money that could better have been spent on supporting the poor.  Jesus got the vibes.  He knew the show-down was coming.

So he spent some time that evening over the meal reflecting back to his followers what it was that he stood for, and asking them to remember his words always – by tying them inextricably with the bread and wine of the meal on this Passover festival, which he knew they would celebrate year after year, so they would have no excuse to forget them.

And in my reading of it, the message of Jesus was this.  We are in a covenant with God – which was an old Jewish message.  We are in a relationship, said Jesus, a relationship we cannot own or control – it’s a connection we can enter.  We are loved into being, we are all sustained by love throughout our lives, and we are received in love at our ending.  Jesus lived as if it were both task and gift to strive to echo that love, right up until his life's end. 

The kingdom of God, said Jesus, – this relationship – the way to lasting life lived true to our best selves – lies within, and it is accessible to all.  But to find that kingdom, to enter into that ultimate relationship with the just and loving God, you have to be prepared to let go of yourself and act in all humility.  As though you and your wants and desires were all just by-the-bye, scarcely relevant at all.  Jesus demonstrated that he thought everyone, including the most acclaimed ones amongst us, need to see ourselves as fit for the most unpleasant and menial jobs; like taking off the sandals and washing the dusty, smelly feet of our companions after a day on the Galilean plains; like taking without comment an unwarranted slap across the face; like carrying the load of someone who chose to press us into service against our plans and expectations – and not just the mile they demand of us, but an extra mile too.

My message, said Jesus, is that we have to try to mirror God – who is in all people, including the most disadvantaged and disregarded, the ones cast out by the establishment, and the ones who self-injure by getting knotted up in their pain and difficulty.  The kingdom really is there to be experienced, but you have to work very hard to put yourself last, to put yourself gracefully out of everyone else’s way, and to be prepared – despite your fear – to relinquish your own comfort and control over what is happening to you.  Look, said Jesus, what I mean is we have to give up our own safety and comfort even if, and while, doing that may lead us to the most painful and bitter end.  Right when it hurts most, right when we don’t think we can go on, we have to stand quietly in trust, and surrender ourselves in all humility to Life, to God – both in God's/Life's direct presence as we feel it, and as we feel it coming to us through other people.  You have to love the very people who cause you grief and pain because God/Life is in them too: because that’s the only way to be fully human.

I can’t imagine the power of the inspiration Jesus had experienced.  But I can see what a strong man he was.  What serenity and peace and fulfilment he found in his love for God and others.  How disregarding he was of himself.  And, though at the end even Jesus felt abandoned, I can see that that didn’t prevent him from offering himself to God.  What a model.

So this Maundy Thursday I celebrate the life and message of the teacher Jesus with some flatbread and a glass of wine as my evening meal.