Homilies for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, 2007
The Very Revd Michael J. Pitts
Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12:14 (5-10)11-14
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
This liturgy of the Institution of the Lord’s Supper has always been for me one of the most moving of the Christian Year. By bringing together the two symbolic actions of the washing of the feet and the common meal, it provides the pattern for what ministry is all about. When I speak of ministry, I need to be clear that I am not just speaking of the work of professional ministers, though that is included. I am speaking of the ministry of all the faithful in carrying out the covenant of our Baptism, which we shall renew in the liturgy of the Great Vigil on Saturday evening.
This evening’s liturgy focuses on two movements of ministry. The common meal speaks of our movement into community around the risen Christ. The washing of the feet speaks of our movement outward into the wider society in witness and service. Let us look at them in turn.
As I hope we are grasping in this community, the gospel stories do not present us with an eyewitness, journalistic, account of the life and actions of Jesus. It is hard to let go of this view of our scriptures, and I shall speak more of this in the meditations for Good Friday, tomorrow. What we have in the gospel accounts of the last supper is the story as seen by the Christian communities of the resurrection. This is true even of Paul’s account, which we read as our second lesson. Paul is writing twenty years after the resurrection, and when he tells us that he received the tradition from the Lord, he is not speaking of the pre-Easter Jesus, whom elsewhere he hints he never knew[i]. The Lord, for Paul, is the Risen Christ. Within the tradition of the early church we see a good deal of development. For Mark, followed by Luke and Matthew, the Last supper was a Passover meal. We usually refer to these three Gospels as the synoptic Gospels. Synoptic is a Greek word which means seeing from the same point of view. Paul does not, in this passage, link the Eucharist with Passover while, for John, it was not: it took place the day before.
So what the synoptic Gospels, Paul and John are speaking of is a common meal which developed in the first Christian communities as a means of remembering Jesus, and interpreting the meaning of his death.
One thing, however that is as sure as anything historical gets, is that the pre-Easter Jesus was a party animal. As well as healing, wise sayings and stories, and his challenge to the religio-political power structure of his time, what is remembered of him in the early texts is someone who had a program of eating meals with his friends. More than that, his friends included the impure, the down-trodden, the outcasts, women both of the wealthy class and of the streets, none of whom would be invited to the meals of Jesus’ opponents.
If we look at the letters of Paul to the Church at Corinth, we see a number of struggles going on. One is about the common meal. It seems that in Corinth this was a wild and raucous occasion. Paul is striving to bring order, decency and holiness to what is going on. This, I believe, is part of a wider process as the first Christians refined and codified their collective memory of Jesus. Jesus becomes more holy, more like a typical religious leader. In Mark for instance, Jesus is a carpenter, a very lowly profession at the margins of his society. When Matthew re-writes Mark’s story and, it is Joseph who becomes the carpenter.[ii] There are many more examples.
The process of making the common meal a holy, religious occasion continues down through the history of the church. Eventually, of course huge buildings called churches and Cathedrals were designed around the celebration of this holy worship. It also becomes a symbol of separation. In the tradition we received, none may eat this meal unless they believe the right things and act, at least openly, in moral ways. How far we have come from Jesus’ meals with tax collectors and sinners, where he was known among his enemies as a glutton and a drunkard![iii]
I am not suggesting that we abandon the tradition of our worship, and engage here in the wild drunken orgies that were going on in Corinth. The shaping of the tradition has been guided by the Holy Spirit. But I do believe that the research of recent decades into what we can know of the pre-Easter Jesus, together with our growing knowledge of the history of the tradition, ask us to see that we can change some of our understandings of the Eucharist and incorporate others. The Eucharist, I now believe, should be a common meal, like the church, open to all. It should not be an activity which divides some from others, either on the grounds of right belief or on the grounds of our particular understandings of moral conduct. The Risen Lord invites all to his table. The Eucharist is the place where this open community gathers together around the risen Christ, who is for us the symbol of what it means to be truly human. In particular reference to our community of Christ Church Cathedral, I think it would also be important to see activities like our occasional evening suppers, with their happy hours, our Sunday discussions with their meal of bread and cheese, our end of the month lunches, and our refreshments in the baptistery, not as separate activities, but as part of our whole Eucharistic action.
John is the latest-written of the Canonical Gospels. When he came to write of the last days of Jesus earthly life, he was either drawing on a tradition which had diverged significantly from that of the synoptic gospels, or he changed the tradition for his own hermeneutic reasons. As I have already said, the supper of Jesus and his disciples in John is not a Passover supper: it takes place the evening before Passover. Not only that: there is no mention of any detail of how the meal progressed, no story of Jesus breaking bread and sharing wine. Instead John gives us the story we read as our Gospel this evening, and which we shall shortly perform as a dramatic action.
I want to meditate on this for a few moments, for if the story in Paul and the synoptic gospels provides a pattern for how the community comes together and what the nature of this community is, John’s story is about what the community does. Notice especially Jesus words
“So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet.”[iv]
This should make us think of Jesus’ later words in John’s story:
“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you”[v]
The gathering of the community around the risen Lord is not for its own sake, not for our sake. The food we receive here is food for a journey. The journey takes us to those who are outside the community, to bring healing, peace and well being. Notice too that the washing of the feet is not some condescending act of charity. Jesus, the carpenter, the one without power, wealth or prestige at the margins of society, steps one stage lower to perform the function of a slave. The next day he is to be killed by a means of execution reserved for those who have committed acts of treason and for slaves. Our mission (remember mission means being sent) is not to convert the world to our way of thinking, not to manipulate ourselves into positions of power, nor to manipulate those in secular positions of power and certainly not to show how wonderful we are through our acts of charity. Our mission is to be at the menial service of the world to let the world know that wealth, power and success are not what true humanity is about. In the one who sends us, we find an example of what true humanity is: the struggle for, peace, well being and equality in an open and inclusive community.
Good Friday, first address
When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.[vi]
There are still many in the church who have to insist that everything in the Scriptures is literally true, and so I have heard preachers and read articles claiming that the three hour period of darkness on the first Good Friday was a physical event like an eclipse of the sun. In just the same way every Christmas we hear of attempts to prove that the Wise Men’s star was a comet or a conjunction of planets.
My reaction to this literalism is a sense of pity. The mystical, beautiful, poetic, metaphorical language of scripture is being reduced to the simplistic every day language of mere facts. I want to suggest therefore that the darkness over the whole land, of which St Mark writes, is the inner darkness of Jesus as he feels his life ebbing away as he dies with a painful sense of failure and abandonment by God. This sense of darkness has been experienced by many who have undertaken seriously the path of spiritual ascent. The great masters of the spiritual life have called it the dark night of the soul, and experience it as the prelude to a greater enlightenment to follow.
Even among more ordinary Christians like me, and among those without faith, there is often an experience of darkness in everyday life which we refer to as depression, which can sometimes occur as a reaction to a major psychological or physical trauma, or sometimes come upon us seemingly out of nowhere.
But I want to meditate on a rather different experience of darkness which can come as a result of the letting go of the simplistic, literal view of scripture and faith, with which I began. For simple faith is not just to be found among those whom we call evangelicals or right wing Christians: it is found in all of us. It is the faith we were taught in Sunday School, in confirmation classes, and have so often heard expounded in sermons. It is deeply seated in our inner lives, so that the pain of letting go is enormous.
Why do we need to let go of simple faith?
First because, if we have had any contact at all with modern thought and knowledge, we find that simple faith is just incompatible with it. There is no heaven above the bright blue sky, the home of God and angels. There are galaxies and universes of dumbfounding immensity and distances, but all researchable through theoretical and experimental physics. Geology tells us that our earth was not created in seven days, but emerged from the primal explosion over billions of years, and is still quite young compared with other parts of the universe. Biology tells us that there was no special creation of humanity. Homo sapiens is the present result of statistical chances of evolution.
Secondly, because those same scientific mindsets, applied to the study of our Scripture, have shown us a body of texts not sent down from heaven, dictated by God, but constituting the gathered spiritual and secular experiences of people and communities, passed down orally, and then committed to writing by individuals and communities, over maybe three thousand years.
Thirdly because, if we really study seriously the history of the handing down of our faith, a process we call our tradition, we find that the simple and literal view of scripture and faith is actually quite modern, not more that three or four hundred years old.
We have to let go of all that if we are to find a faith which commends itself to a real engagement with, rather than an escape from, our modern and now postmodern world. And a faith which engages with the world we live in is surely a necessity when our core belief is that the Word was made flesh.
But this letting go and finding a new form of faith is a dark and painful experience. It is like losing part of our selves. Often, in the process, our thinking can be years ahead of our feeling. I know that I have been on this road for at least fourty five years. At times we are accused of abandoning the faith all together, and it is easy to internalize the accusation.
At three o'clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" [vii]
Good Friday, second address
And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.[viii]
The religion of Jesus’ day was a religion of separation. The pure was constantly separated from the impure, and that applied to both food and people. Ritual impurity was at all costs to be avoided. Some tried to keep themselves pure by withdrawing from everyday life and living in monastic communities in the desert. These communities believed that impurity had touched the very Temple itself and the priesthood.[ix] Others, among them the Pharisees, attempted to maintain ritual purity while living an ordinary life in the community. This involved avoiding unclean foods. In our own day it is important to note that the distinction of clean and unclean was a ritual distinction. It had nothing to do with hygiene, a concept unknown until quite recent times. The maintenance of ritual purity also involved avoiding sources of impurity, dead bodies, lepers, and certain bodily discharges. Maintaining purity and regaining it after defilement also involved elaborate and costly rituals of washing and sacrifice. It was clearly only available to the leisured classes.
Other than for the desert Essenes, the symbol of purity was the Temple with its concentric courts. There was an outer court for the gentiles, within which was the court of women, then a court for Jewish men, and then at the very centre the Holy of Holies, screened from view by a curtain, through which only the High Priest could pass, and then only once a year on the Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement. God was truly separated from ordinary humanity.
Much of Jesus’ ministry was devoted to overcoming separation. He ate and drank with the outcasts of society, who were, by definition unclean. Not only that: Jesus encouraged his disciples to eat their meals without going through the elaborate rituals necessary for purity. This part of the gospel is probably history remembered. In other Gospel stories, which may more likely be the early community’s experience of the risen Christ, he declared that all foods are clean. He reached out to touch lepers, and in a story praised the untouchable Samaritan because he helped the victim of a mugging who every body else had taken to be dead, and therefore a source of defilement. In the Gospel story, and probably in history, he welcomed women into the circle of his disciples, even though women were thought to bring to bring defilement. He even allowed women to touch his body. When he was executed on the cross he became defilement itself.
Small wonder that the early post Easter communities saw Jesus, death on the cross not so much as the historical execution that it had been, but as the sacrifice which overcame all separation, bringing healing and reconciliation to the world. Small wonder that when Mark, or the tradition he had received, spoke about the death of Jesus, the gospel tells that the very symbol of separation, the curtain of the Temple, was torn in two from top to bottom.
Nor was the God whom Jesus knew separated from the world in untouchable holiness. God, for Jesus, was know as Dad, to try to render the Aramaic word Abba into everyday English. He taught his disciples to understand and know God by considering the everyday activities and relationships of peasants and of other groups in society. He also asked them to picture God in terms of the animals and crops of the peasant life. He spoke of a God who desired not ritual, but justice, compassion and equality. Small wonder again that the post resurrection communities began to see Jesus, both in his historic life, and in his risen presence with them, as the presence of God among them and within history.
Here I believe we find the resources to embark on the task of letting go of the God with the beard above the bright blue sky in heaven, and seeking through the darkness and pain of that letting go, the God who is within and beneath, found in the depths of truth and reality, whatever truth and reality is. As John the Evangelist, understood, the Word was made flesh[x]. We shall find God hidden within humanity, hidden within the very world and universe. God we might say is the isness of all that is.
Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, "Truly this man was God's Son!"[xi]
[i] Galatians 1:11-24
[ii] Mark 6:3, cp Matthew 13:55
[iii] Matthew 11:16-19, Luke 7:31-35. As this is from the early Q source, and as it is not complimentary of Jesus, it stands a good chance of being historical.
[iv] John 13:14
[v] John 20:21
[vi] Mark 15:33
[vii] Mark 15:34
[viii] Mark 15:38
[ix] Of these groups, mentioned by Josephus, we now have much greater knowledge from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
[x] John 1:14
[xi] Mark 15:39