A personal reflection on Maundy Thursday 2023

Bear in mind, dear reader, 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 day of the Jewish Passover.  In the story of Jesus, the teacher Jesus and his students have gone to Jerusalem for the Passover festival.  This is a joyful and celebratory worship of the just and merciful God, who allowed the ancestors – Hebrew slaves in Egypt – to escape the deaths overnight of the first-born, which God inflicted on the then unresponsive, cruel slave-masters, the Egyptians.  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.  The Egyptians were given their chances to comply, and chose not to.  So they suffered the loss of the first born of every female, human and other mammals.

This recognition – that Life acts kindly towards people who acknowledge its edicts – is found not only in Judaism but right through all the faiths, right across the spectrum of faiths, even in 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 everyone who has had a good experience of their faith.

So Jesus and his students, friends and family sit down to the Passover meal, the seder meal, to quietly await the arrival of the next day, the commemoration of the day when Hebrews woke up to find that God’s word had been carried out.  The morn when, of course, the Egyptians were shocked and frightened to find their first-borns had died, so before they retaliated in anger God warned the Hebrews to get out of Egypt very quickly.

Over that seder meal Jesus seems to be very sure that his time was coming to an end.  Perhaps he too is shocked and frightened; or perhaps he thinks that within a day or two it will be his followers who will be shocked and frightened.  You see, he has been in Jerusalem since the previous Sunday and he is aware that all sorts of people have all sorts of expectations of him that he will not necessarily fulfil. 

Some people want him to renounce some of the things he had said about relating to God.  Others want him to lead a zealous and possibly armed rebellion against the Roman occupying forces.  A few others seem to think he is bigging up his part as a wise man with a following, at the cost of wasting money that could better be spent on supporting the poor.  Jesus gets the vibes.  He knows the show-down is coming.  So he spends some time that evening over the meal reflecting back to his followers what it is that he stands for, and asking them to remember his words always – by tying them inextricably with the bread and wine of the seder meal, which he knows they will celebrate year after year, so they will have no occasion to forget them.

And in my reading of it, the message of Jesus is this.  We are in a covenant with God – which is 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 lives as if it were both task and gift to strive to echo that love, right up until his life's end. And he refers to the relationship as 'the kingdom of God' (Mark 1:15, Luke 11:20, Luke 17:21, Gospel of Thomas 11).

The kingdom of God, says 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 open your eyes to it, 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 demonstrates that he thinks 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, says 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 out of your own view, 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, says Jesus, I mean we have to relinquish our own safety and comfort right up 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 direct presence as we feel it, and as we feel it coming to us through other people.  Love the very people who cause you grief and pain, because God is in them too – it’s the only way to be fully human.

Despite the power of this mythic narrative, I can’t imagine the inspiration Jesus experiences.  But I can see what a strong man is being spoken of.  What serenity and peace and fulfilment he finds in his love for God and others.  How he disregards himself.  And, though at the end even Jesus feels abandoned, I can see that that doesn't prevent him from offering himself to God.  What a model.

So this Maundy Thursday I celebrate the life and message of the rabbi Jesus with the unleavened bread and the wine of the thanksgiving meal.