In the past few weeks I have been asked by a variety of people what is Maundy Thursday? What happens on this day set apart from others?

While Jesus was no stranger to eating with people this was a special meal. From personal experience I have noticed that something happens when you share a meal with someone, you aren't just nutritionally strengthened and nourished but often the relationship is as well. It is over pot lucks, soup suppers and coffee that I have gotten to know people and it is in the sharing of a meal I have been invited into people’s lives.

This last supper is unique as it unites those at the table into one community. “On the last super before his death, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul all say that he established the meal of bread and wine as permanent signs of the covenant God made with us through Christ. The meal makes Christ present, and throughout the ages his followers could receive the benefits of his suffering, death, and resurrection in their sharing of the meal.”[1] In other words Christ’s death and resurrection comes with God’s promise of salvation, forgiveness and being restored to a right relationship with God , this is all made real and tangible as we take part in sharing the bread and wine.

In Matthew, Mark and Luke the last supper also takes place at the same time as the Passover meal. The gospels may be trying to make the connection to the long celebrated festival of unleavened bread, aka Passover, in which the people of God remember being liberated from Egypt. In the Passover, “the lamb signified God’s covenant of life, and the unleavened bread recalled ‘the bread of affliction’ of their sufferings during slavery. For the Christian community, the lamb is Christ himself. The bread of affliction is the body of Christ, and the blood on our doorposts the sign of God’s salvation.”[2] 

It is in the sharing of the meal, coming to the table that we become united in the body of Christ. John however adds an extra element, foot washing. Jesus performs the task of a house servant as he washes the feet of the disciples. Personally, I am not a fan of feet. To me they are really strange limbs. I also don’t want anyone to touch my feet unless they are giving me a pedicure or I have recently had a pedicure. I believe in today’s society it is a vulnerable thing to let people that close to your toes when you are not even in a sandal wearing season. Yet Jesus humbles himself to wash the disciples feet and in doing so establishes the kind of relationship Christ has to all people and the kind of relationship we are to have with one another, a relationship of humble service. Jesus also provides the greatest commandment in which we are to love one another.

So what sets this day apart, the meal and the command which in Latin means Maundy. It is a day of which we gather as a community, share in the meal and promise of God’s love and forgiveness not just for us the individual but for all who come to the table. It is a day to remember how Jesus humbly served by washing feet and through his death on a cross.  It is a day to remember that we too are asked to love as he did. 


[1] Keeping Time: Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Augsburg Fortress. 2009, (98)
[2] ibid 98.

This post is an excerpt from the book Keeping Time: Evangelical Lutheran Worship pages 93-94. The book itself looks at the different festivals and season of the church. I was hoping to write a post with a bit of background on Holy Week and realized in the process of researching, Keeping Time says it best.



Passover: 
The promise of spring and the remembrance of the Israelites' liberation

“In the ancient Mediterranean world, the spring equinox was celebrated as a central religious event. Winter and its threat of starvation were over; plants were coming back to life; night and day were equal. Most religions attest that there is no birth without pain, no meal without the death of animals and plants. So some nomadic peoples took the occasion of the hinge between winter and summer to offer to the deities a lamb from their flock. With this perennial gesture of a burnt offering, they expressed their joy at having survived another winter and their hopes for the life of the earth and their own flocks and herds. The Canaanites celebrated an agricultural springtime festival at the time of the barley harvest, the new crop of food symbolizing the fruitfulness of the new year.”

“The Bible describes Passover as the way the Israelites kept the spring equinox. On the first full moon after the spring equinox, each household was to slaughter a lamb and share a festival meal. By this domestic ritual they recalled that God had saved them, not from winter of starvation but from slavery in Egypt. Memory has been layered on top of cosmology. As well, for a week in spring only, bread baked from the new barley was eaten, and no leaven left over from previous year was used. All was new.”

“The Bible says that Jesus was executed at Passover and rose from the dead on the Sunday after the Passover. By the middle of the second century, some Christians had layered onto the Jewish Passover the primary celebration of their identity, which was rooted in the death and resurrection of Christ. The word Pascha, actually relating to the Hebrew Pesach, meaning Passover, was thought to connect with th passion.’ Jesus, the lamb sacrificed for the life of the world, replaced the paschal lamb described in Exodus 12. This Christian observance, observed on the Jewish Passover, might fall on any day of the week.”

Early Churches’ Holy Week Tradition

“In the late second and third centuries, the festival evolved into an annual celebration of Christ’s resurrection and the primary occasion for baptisms. The word pascha became connected with the idea of passage through the sea, for through Christ’s resurrection all the baptized are brought through the waters into the new life of the Spirit. The narrative of the crossing the sea in Exodus 14-15 became central to the celebration. Since Sunday is always the day of the resurrection, Christian Pascha came to be scheduled on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Because Christian ritual took place in the assembly rather than in the family, the domestic Passover meal had been replaced with a celebrative sharing of the bread and wine within the whole community of the baptized. Thus had the Jewish seder evolved into the Christian vigil of Easter.”

“By the fourth century this annual festival of the resurrection was spread out over the Three Days all through the Mediterranean world. In part, Christians are commemorating the events in the life of Jesus by meeting on the dates of his last supper and foot washing, his death, and his resurrection. However, since each of these separate events finds its meaning only by attending to the three together, the rituals of the Three Days were the culmination of the catechumens’’ preparation for baptism, and the baptisms were an essential part of the Easter Vigil. Augustine, whose writings became so important throughout Christian history and especially to Martin Luther, was baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387.”

Since then...
Over the centuries and as Christianity spread the tradition of remembering the Three days of Holy Week – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter – was lost and new traditions began like the Tenebrae and focusing on the Station of the Cross.  Within the 20th century many have begun to reclaim the Three Days of Holy Week.