Maundy Thursday Chrism Mass |
Beloved in Christ, how good it is that we should meet together on this day when the scriptures speak of anointing and servanthood; the day on which the friends of Jesus gathered and he washed their feet.
For Peter it was all too personal. It offended his sense of propriety. The master on his knees, the towel the basin and then the feet, which are rarely our most attractive feature. He protested. Well thank God we are sincere at least in our egotism.
I remember that the introduction of the handshake of peace in the parish where I was a curate had a positively explosive power. One of the clergy used to disappear into the organ loft saying that he “did not want to be mauled or dragged into a dance or anything”.
It soon became ritualised and unthreatening - alas. Just as ritual footwashing in the 1950s was distracted by the suggestion in one book of ritual notes that the Anglican lavabo towel should always be longer than the RC lavabo towels.
But the gospel retains its power to disturb and transform. For a time we may think that we have it clear and defined but then we are made aware that what has in fact happened is that the living word of God has been translated by us into inoffensive rituals; or worse, anodyne metaphorical descriptions of inner spiritual or emotional states. Gospels of this kind become the content of what we describe as “my ministry” and can keep us going for a while but after a time the spiritual exhaustion becomes obvious.
At this point anger often rises and we start to blame one another. If only we thought alike then we and the Church would be in a better place than we are.
All is not lost, however, if we are a little quieter and observe with a beginner’s mind the work of God in the events of this week, without working ourselves up into any kind of exalted spiritual state.
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
The Son gives himself to the Father, and the Father is the Father because the Son, who has answered his call, has given him his name. The Spirit enables creation to participate in this dynamic of giving and receiving.
This is the Trinitarian way of being - calling, responding, participating.
Humanity is one of the languages which the persons of the Trinity use in communicating with one another and by initiating us into this Trinitarian life we are taught how to grow into our full humanity.
See him coming as a servant and see him stooping to wash the feet of his disciples. We are to regard one another as our work of art, as Hildegard of Bingen once said.
Luke’s gospel speaks of our calling as servants, and when we think of masters and servants, and contracts of employment, sometimes the idiom of the Roman court room has too much influence on our idea of how we are indebted to one another. It can conceal the truth that we are called to enter the life of the Holy Trinity and to grow as persons who only attain their full stature when they have a mutually constitutive relationship with one another – which is Hildegard’s perspective.
Social science is in this respect also misleading since it tends to present human beings as first individuals with choices to make and only secondarily as having social relations
The community of the Church is the work of God addressed to building the full stature of humanity. If we do not obediently together with God constitute one another, then much of each one of us remains missing and never comes to be. We are all in debt to one another and each other is precisely what we owe. What we owe is measured by what God intends each one of us to be. Each of us is commissioned to speak the other into being. In the Trinity humanity is one of the modes in which the Father and the Son speak divinity to one another in the Spirit.
As yet we speak humanity very badly. It is a language and a life we are scarcely acquainted with.
It is said that man is born free, yet everywhere is in chains – as if we begin in possession of our full humanity only to be corrupted by social life. Yet in God’s sight human beings are born in chains and God is labouring to offer them the gift of freedom.
The world for whom we are called to be priests is not at all secular and disenchanted. It is dominated by hidden persuaders, the elemental spirits in Paul’s language. We are born into this world of smoke and mirrors and full humanity is not our beginning but our end and goal.
God holds out the gift to us of life with him and he has started the work of building a holy people.
The Eucharist is not something that we do as an audio visual aid to what has happened once and for all but is also a gift of a medium in which we are initiated into a fuller humanity as each awakes in each what else would never be. Our celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice should ache with the longing for his coming again in full power and glory.
Sacrifice was described by Karl Barth as “a form which is now rather remote from us” and so spends little time in exploring this aspect of the work of Christ. Again perhaps we are misled by the court room context which Western thought builds around the notion of sacrifice. In reality it is the induction into a new medium, a new way of human relating and account giving – an induction into the life of the Holy Trinity in which the Father gives the Son and the Son gives himself to the Father and the Spirit enables creation to participate in this dynamic of giving and receiving.
Here we come to that sublime image in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians –“where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom where we all with unveiled face reflect the glory of the Lord and are transformed into the same icon from glory to glory even as from the Lord the Spirit.” When our faces are unveiled and we have head the divine speech in the community which he has called into being, we see the glory of the Lord in one another and bring one another into being from glory to glory in the medium of the Spirit.
If we do not lose heart but continue to offer his sacrifice and to tend the light within us like some diligent housekeeper for the sake of the whole community then the bridegroom will find us.
It is easy to see how important it is that we who have been called to be knots in the network of the community in which God is teaching us the language of full humanity should ourselves assemble together to encourage one another and by recognising and honouring one another play our dynamic part in awaking in each of us what belongs to us but which would never be without the community of unveiled faces in the medium of the Spirit, giving and receiving the glory of the Lord.
It is not difficult to see what happens when lethal relations take a hold, when we regard the Church and one another with cynicism and go into some version of internal exile. But thank God we have come together as the Passion of the Lord begins, conscious both of our need of one another as of what we have to offer one another in recognition, in service and in anointing.
