Maundy Thursday

“Will you not watch with me one hour?”

In the mid-1600s England was plunged into Civil War: a war fought between Parliamentarians or Roundheads, who were Puritans that wished to do away with the Monarchy and would eventually, lamentably, and briefly succeed when they beheaded the martyr King, King Charles I. They fought against the Royalists – the Cavaliers - those loyal to the Crown and the idea of the Monarch, and of a church in which Bishops held authority, something that their Presbyterian enemies wished to see done away with.

In 1642, at the first significant battle of the War when the Royalist forces were marching upon London against the Parliamentarians and Puritans, the leader of the Royalists, Lord Jacob Astley, an ardent supporter of Charles I, prayed before entering the field of combat.

Astley’s prayer was recorded and is thankfully not lost to time. Astley prayed, “Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget thee, do not forget me.” A simple prayer that speaks very deeply to what is happening tonight, and to the coming three days.

Tonight is a night of remembering and forgetting.

It is a night that is about our remembrance and our forgetfulness of God. But it is also, fundamentally, about God’s remembrance of us.

So much of our faith is about remembrance. Not an inert, inactive reminiscing, but a remembering that brings to life eternal things once more. We remember Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet and the new commandment he gives them – his mandatum, where we get Maundy – that we love others as he loves us. We remember the last supper, the very first Holy Eucharist, the sacred meal given to us to celebrate through all time, through which we can receive Jesus in body and in blood, really, spiritually, not just in our reminiscing.

But what we will discover by this evening’s end - what we know to be true already - is that remembering God and remembering to love each other as he loves us – is not nearly as easy as it sounds.

Tonight is also largely about friendship.

In chapter 15 of John’s Gospel Jesus says to his disciples that there is no greater love that a person can show towards another than that they lay down their life for their friend, and he goes on to say that his disciples are no longer servants, but ones whom he calls friend.

I think often when we think about Jesus we think about those otherworldly or transcendent aspects of his identity: we think about his transfiguration on the mountain, his ascension into heaven, we think about him being the Son of God, of Righteousness, of Man, because it’s hard for us to see him as the disciples saw him – as a close and good friend.

But that is what he is. In the end it is salvation he offers us, but each and every day it is friendship that he gives. He doesn’t call us servants, or subjects, he doesn’t call us inferiors or subordinates, he calls us friends.

There are many we call friends in our lives, but if we dig deep and really think about it, I imagine there are many whom we call friends who we’ve also betrayed by times. Not in big ways, maybe, like selling their lives for a bit of silver, but in lots of little ways, times we failed them in how we love them, or help them, when we should have been there for them but weren’t, when we spoke behind their backs or thought ill of them. Death by a thousand papercuts.

And this kind of forgetfulness is what we’ll see tonight as the disciples forget Jesus’ friendship and love and sleep instead of staying awake and praying with their friend who is about to be betrayed and killed. He washes their feet tonight as a token of his friendship, just as he will give his body and blood in the Last Supper, and tomorrow die on a cross as their friend – but they will abandon him. Forgetting his friendship, his love.

One Theologian I read recently said that so often we talk about the movement in Holy Week as being the movement of us towards Jesus and his crucifixion. That is, we often talk about Holy Week in terms of us “journeying with Jesus” towards Jerusalem, towards the cross, and towards the empty grave.

But perhaps, this Theologian surmised, perhaps the movement of Holy Week is actually better thought of in terms of the movement of Jesus towards us. That is, Jesus, the Son of God, left the right hand of the Father and took on our flesh to be humiliated, tortured and killed in a most shameful way on our behalf and in our place, so that we can have the opportunity to be taken up to the Father’s presence.

            And this is the good news of tonight. This is the good news of his friendship, that

            Despite our betrayal.

            Despite our apathy.

            Despite our indifference.

            Despite murdering Him.        

            Despite being actually quite poor friends to him, the kind that most earthly friends would give up on

He, in love and in friendship, remembering us and our weakness, goes to die for us.

And not only that, but on this night especially we remember that great gift that he left us. A table at which, despite our unworthiness, despite our repeated failures to love Him and our neighbour as we ought, there is always a place prepared for us. A table at which we are welcome to receive into ourselves the body and bloody of him who gave his body and blood for us on the cross.

We remember Him tonight. And we have an opportunity after this service to sit in stillness and silence and commune with him, our dearest friend, here in the Garden, as he prepares for his death. Yet, we will go home tonight and wake up tomorrow, next week, next month and fail him in love. And so we, with Lord Astley, pray that when we fail to remember him, he will not fail to remember us.

Amen.