Category Archives: Maundy Thursday

Stripping away

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Photo by Martin Malina (Kalaloch Beach, WA, August 15, 2022)

At the end of the service tonight, we engage a ritual that has become a tradition in many churches on Maundy Thursday. We strip the altar.

We take away all the symbols, the candles, the silverware, the embroidery and fabric that are associated with our faith.

We do this in Holy Week – in the context of Jesus’ suffering and dying when everything he had was stripped away, not only his clothing, but his dignity as a human being. Maundy Thursday sets the stage in the grand narrative of Jesus’ Passion for Good Friday when he was nailed to the tree.

Theologian and American writer Brian McLaren writes about how one tree survives the hurricanes that seasonally batter his home state of Florida. “Many of our trees in Florida survive hurricanes by being flexible. They’re able to bend an amazing amount and spring back into shape. [But] One of my favourite trees,” he writes, “has a slightly different strategy.

“It’s called a ‘gumbo-limbo’ tree, and the way it survives a hurricane is that when the wind starts to blow, it just lets branches break off. It knows that if you can keep the trunk solid and stable, and you don’t get overturned by the wind, you can bounce back after the storm. And that’s what the gumbo-limbo tree does. It travels light through the storm. It lets go of everything that’s not essential to focus on for life” (McLaren, 2023).

If you keep the trunk solid and stable, you will find new life after the storm. What is that proverbial trunk in our lives? What was it, in Jesus’ life? What was that power that allowed him to let go of everything and be stripped of all his humanity?

The mandate to love sets the stage for this proverbial stripping. The mandate to love is the command of Jesus we hear on Maundy Thursday – the night he washed the feet of his disciples, shared the meal with them and led them to the garden to pray. This mandate to “love one another just as I have loved you” (John 13:34-35) is the fuel. It is the trunk of the tree: God’s eternal, unconditional, loving presence for all people. But it comes at a cost.

A quote I came across this past week has stuck, the wise saying of a desert mother from early Christianity. She said, “the hardest world you have leave behind is the one you carry right inside your heart” (Lane, 2024). What you carry inside your heart, it would seem to me, is precious. Whatever you hold in your heart is integral to what you perceive to be an important part of your identity. It defines who you are in the world.

This is important stuff. And it struck me that on Maundy Thursday as we strip away the paraments and silverware from the altar, we’re not talking about the knick-knacks, dusty boxes in basements and stuff we keep in storage rental units.

We’re talking about what we would consider the important, life-altering, life-defining stuff. But these are still the branches, not the trunk. You might say what the gumbo-limbo tree does in a hurricane is counter-intuitive, even unreasonable, impossible for us to do. Why would we let go of what we feel most attached to?

It’s significant that the Garden of Gethsemane was the last place to which Jesus led his disciples before he was arrested, before the dominos began to fall in the Passion narrative, a story that then escalates towards Jesus’ arrest, prosecution, persecution and execution.

Jesus led his disciples to the garden to pray. There is a form of prayer whose aim is finding inner peace and contentment in the storm.

Yet this peace cannot be experienced without a painful letting go. It’s a practice, you could say, of stripping away the non-essentials. Prayer is becoming aware of God’s grace and life of Christ with us and for us. And this prayer needs no words from us.

For the desert mothers and fathers, prayer was understood as practising a way of taming the ego’s desires for being front-row-and-centre in all things, including our conversation with God.

So, instead of doing all the talking in this relationship of prayer, we practice doing all the listening. Instead of trying to change God’s mind, prayer is about allowing God to transform the mind and heart of the one doing the praying. In this practice of letting go we allow God to change our mind about what is truly going on around us. We let God change our mind about the reality right in front of us, a reality which we usually dismiss, avoid or even distort.

In our prayer tonight and throughout these coming three holy days, may we practice letting go. In the way of Jesus, may we learn to be like the gumbo-limbo tree, especially during the storms of our lives. Because as long as the trunk remains stable and firmly planted in the ground, new life will surely find a way again.

“And now, faith, hope, and love remain … and the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).

References:

Lane, B. (2024). “The Desert Tradition,” The Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation. Center for Action and Contemplation. www.cac.org.

McLaren, B. (2024). 2024 Daily meditations: Radical resilience [Video]. Center for Action and Contemplation.  https://cac.org/daily-meditations/2024-daily-meditations-theme-radical-resilience/

Wagamese, R. (2021). Richard Wagamese selected: What comes from spirit.

Broken and beautiful

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Tonight is not just about the meal. Yes, we strip the altar at the close of the service, so our attention is naturally focused on the Last Supper.

However, the Gospel of John is not overly concentrated on details of the Last Supper when compared to the other Gospel writers. A mere four verses describe the meal itself (John 13:1-4). So, John is obviously trying to emphasize another overriding theme in the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection through the events of Holy Week.

You may have noticed that the baptismal font has lurked inconspicuously in the chancel area throughout Lent. In some churches it is completely removed. But it has stayed with us, this Lent. For a reason.

The Gospel of John which we read during Holy Week and the upcoming Easter season was originally used for baptism and preparing candidates for a life in Christ (Shaia & Gaugy, 2021). The Passion of our Lord is presented in John as a graphic picture of the baptismal movement down into the water and rising up out of it (Philippians 2:5-11).

Of course, Christian baptism uses water to express the elements of death and rebirth. “In the early church, deacons performing baptism were instructed to grasp the candidate around the chest from the back, lowering the individual under the water in such a way that a ‘startle response’ was triggered, thereby providing an experience of near death” (Shaia & Gaugy, 20221, p. 242). It was a visceral reminder of this spiritual movement.

Arising out of the water, the baptized was then blessed and announced to the community as moving forward into new life with Jesus.

It’s the dying and the rising that John is interested in keeping together — that pattern is indivisible in a life of faith. You can’t stay under the water forever; eventually you have to come up. Conversely when you are in the water you can’t keep your body above the water; eventually you immerse yourself in it.

As people who have and are travelling this journey of faith today, how do we move from the old into the new? How do we resurrect into new balance and move forward in Christ? Those are the questions John wants us to ask.

In the Gospel for tonight, Jesus demonstrates the inner posture out of which authentic service happens. Not from a place of dominance, self-righteousness or privilege. But, rather, from a servant posture of humility in the presence of another.

So, and notice the baptismal imagery employed by John, Jesus after supper “poured water into a basin …” (John 13:5). Imagine now the reversal, the paradigm shift: The divine presence strips down practically naked and presents himself to his disciples in a way that would have been appropriate only for marriage partners or a servant before their master. And Jesus washes their feet! “There could have been no more perfect exemplar of both the intimacy and selflessness of Spirit in service” (Shaia & Gaugy, 2021, p. 243).

Intimacy means vulnerability. Being exposed for all our weaknesses. And accepting them. Loving even the fact that we are fragile, insecure human beings. True service comes from that heart-place of letting go of our ego pretensions.

It strikes me that when we wonder how to love others who do not accept our efforts to love them, when we wonder how to be faithful servants of Christ in the world today with those whom we are called to reach, when we wonder how to serve others in Jesus’ name, when we wonder how to move from the old to the new, we need to start by allowing our vulnerability to show.

We receive Communion tonight. From a cup. Maybe the cup you use at home for Communion has a chip in it, or a crack or has some history. Maybe tonight is the night to use that cup with the chip or crack in it.

Listen to this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer who illustrates the divine beauty expressed in and from a broken cup. It’s called, “What’s in a Broken Cup” (Wahtola Trommer, 2022):                

Not everything broken need be fixed. Even the loveliest cup, the one that seemed perfection, the one that fit just right in the hand and held the favorite wine, even that cup is only a cup, and, being fashioned out of breakable clay, it was, we could say, made to be broken. The fact it was fragile was always a part of its value. In shattered fragments, the cup is no less treasured–perhaps even more treasured now that its wholeness isn’t taken for granted. There are some who would throw the pieces away. There are some who would mend them with glue or even with gold in an effort to repair. But there are some who will cherish what is broken, hold it even more tenderly now, trusting its use– though different– is no less valuable. Trusting a fragment is sometimes more than enough. Trusting in every end is a beginning, and we might now sip our wine straight from the Source.

References:

Shaia, A. J. & Gaugy, M. L. (2021). Heart and Mind: The Four-Gospel Journey for Radical Transformation. Quadratos LLC.

Wahtola Trommer, R. (2022). What’s in a broken cup. https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2022/01/10/whats-in-a-broken-cup/