Maundy Thursday Reflection

This month marks the end of our first full year with our church. (Before that, I had been doing an admirable job of staying away from church altogether.) This is our first holy week with them. I thank God just about every day that he brought me to them. They nourish my soul, and my brain, and my spirit.

Bullets of powerful moments from tonight's Maundy Thursday service:

• “Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. ...he riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.” (St. John 13)
  o It fascinates me that the sign of his loving them to the very end was that he humbled himself and washed their feet. For some reason, the clause "he loved them unto the end" stands out to me in way it has never done before.
  
  
• “So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.” (St. John 13)
  o I am reminded – as I read this, as I behold our own priest on his knees and washing the feet of the priests and deacons and acolytes tonight, as I read Antigone with my students in school – that leaders are servants, and leaders who refuse to serve are poor leaders indeed. (Lord, help thou my stubbornness, my recalcitrance, my sometime unwillingness to give.)
  
  
• “Save me from the lion’s mouth; thou has heard me also from among the horns of the unicorns.” (Psalm 22:21)
  o Does anyone else trip out that the Bible talks about unicorns? OK, so I don’t know what it was in the original Hebrew, but King James’s staff translated it as unicorns, and I cannot tell you how uplifting that is to my soul. It always makes me think of Madeleine, who understood the deeply spiritual and pure and holy nature of the unicorn (cf. Many Waters, for one).
  
  
• Our service booklet for this evening noted that the stripping of the altar (and everything near it) was to signify the disciples’ abandonment of Jesus in his hour of need. “Could you not watch with me one hour?” he asked them after they fell asleep as he prayed. “The spirit truly is ready, but the flesh is weak” (St. Mark 14).
  o I am acutely aware of my own weakness, of my frequent abandonment of what is important for the sake of what is convenient.
  
  
• “Mercifully grant, that we may…follow the example of his patience” (Collect for Palm Sunday).
  o May it be so. My fuse and temper are generally short these days. In addition to balance, patience is on my eternal quest list. (Lord, help thou my impatience and my exceedingly foul mouth.)