Not Missing the Point of Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday, April 17, 2025
Ex. 12:1-14a Ps. 78:14-20, 23-25
1 Cor 11:23-32 John 13:1-15

Lectionary Link

What is the Maundy Thursday liturgy?  It is in Holy Week, a part of the Triduum.  Sometimes we make the readings from Scriptures mainly about our religious practices.  We need to have origin explanations to certify and legitimize why we practice religion in the way that we do.

The Bible can be a book about religion and about why we do religion the way that we do religion.  And when we make God and the Bible mainly about our group identity in our religious setting, we can miss the connection with the big issues of life.

Is the Passover meal just to be an annual family meal to renew Jewish community identity, or is it to be a universal message about the degradation of slavery, and how every person who gains freedom from any kind of slavery is worth a celebration?

Is Maundy Thursday about the origin of the Christian community meal that we call the Eucharist.  It quite amazing that the Eucharist has become quite a legislative event about who can or who cannot participates, even to create the oxymoron, "closed communion."

Some groups suggest that foot-washing like the Eucharist should be a regular community religious practice, as if foot washing today is still connected with ordinary hygienic practice of people today who have regular means of keeping their feet clean.

What are the big issues of Maundy Thursday, which should relate it to the entire world?

Everyone needs to eat, and the survival of community requires service.  If we divorce Eucharist and foot-washing on Maundy Thursday from world hunger and the requirement of service for the survival of the world, then we are but a church of clanging brass, announcing that we are here but with unneeded noise.

Maundy Thursday should remind us that everyone needs to eat.  Eucharist is a strategy of open eating because in the gathering, we are to verify that everyone has enough to eat.  If we lose this connection between the Eucharist as a meal and the need for the hungry to eat, then we remove the important sign values of Maundy Thursday.

The foot-washing of Jesus exemplified service as the mode of expressing the power of our lives.  Basic service in our world includes making sure that everyone has enough to eat, wear, and a place to live.  And if that is not happening within families, there has to be people who are accountable to make those things happen.

Eucharist and foot-washing has not yet successfully converted our world, since there remains so many people still in need.  

Let us not get so hung up on just doing the liturgy and forget its connection with the great mission in our world to see that everyone has enough to eat and that we embrace the service mission to make that happen.

Let us be reminded again tonight about the mission requirements of the Maundy Thursday liturgy; feeding the people of the world through service.  Without this connection, we become but a cloistered private club with arcane and esoteric ceremonies.

Let us go forth to advocate for feeding the world through service for the truly common good.  Is there anything more Christ-like?  Amen.