Thursday, April 6, 2023
Holy Thursday
Andi’s birthday
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Moving into the darkness
On this same night I will go through Egypt, striking down every firstborn of the land. But the blood of the slaughtered lamb will mark your houses, and I will pass over you.
So begins the feast of Passover, as the Spirit of God passes over the houses of the slaves. I think of Andrew Jackson, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and other less presidential slaveowners, settling into their own gas-lit evenings, safe in the mansions their slaves have built, while the slaves themselves, having slaughtered the lamb and painted their sills with blood, wait for the darkness, for the screams of the well-born, for all that sound and fury.
Knowing he had come from God and was returning to God, Jesus rose from supper and took off his shirt. He took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet.
For years on Holy Thursday, Pope Francis has washed the feet of convicts in Rome’s prisons. Doing what Jesus did. Letting the least of them know that Jesus is within them and loves them. Francis can’t make them believe that with his words. But with his eyes, and his smile, and his hands? Does he see the blood of the lamb, painted on the sill of the prison’s door?
Jesus spent this week waiting, sometimes in agony. But, Henri Nouwen thinks, not just for death:
His agony is not simply the agony of approaching death. It is also the agony of being out of control and of having to wait. It is the agony of a God who depends on us to decide how to live out the divine presence among us. It is the agony of the God who, in a very mysterious way, allows us to decide how God will be God. Here we glimpse the mystery of God’s incarnation. God became human not only to act among us but also to be the recipient of our responses.
How will God be God in my life on this Holy Thursday? At the end of the evening service, everything is removed from the church. Christ’s statue is covered in black. There will be no music until the Gloria of the Easter Vigil. We are alone on the road. My God, my God why have you forsaken me?
This day shall be a memorial feast for you, which all your generations shall celebrate with pilgrimage to the Lord, as a perpetual institution.
And as this day ends, how shall we continue our pilgrimage, year by year, house by house, family by family, one by one? We are your children, Lord, make us a family and free us from selfishness once and for all forever.
This is my body, given for you. Do this to remember me. In the same way Jesus took the cup of wine, after supper, and he said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.
We will keep praying, and you will keep on listening, and the hope that comes only from you will never die.
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.
(Exodus 12, Psalm 116, 1 Corinthians 11, John 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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