Dear Friends,
As
we prepare to walk through Holy Week together, I thought it might be helpful to
share with you some of the rich symbolism embedded in our Maundy Thursday
worship. Because we do this liturgy only
once per year, it’s easy to lose sight of the many layers of meaning it
contains.
Holy
Eucharist
We
celebrate Holy Eucharist in almost every worship service, but this is where it started: on the night before he died, Jesus gathered
his disciples together for a meal and “instituted” Communion, identifying the
bread as his body and the wine as his blood of the new covenant, and asking the
disciples to continue the practice in remembrance of him.
Footwashing
In
John’s gospel, there is no mention of bread and wine at the Last Supper. Instead, Jesus washes his disciples’ feet and
tells them to serve one another in the same manner. Maundy Thursday draws its name from John’s
account—“Maundy” comes from the Latin Mandatum,
which means “commandment.” Jesus gives
his disciples a new commandment: to love
one another.
The
Stripping of the Altar
This
ritual does not appear in the Book of
Common Prayer but is practiced in many churches, including St.
Andrew’s. It symbolizes what happened to
Jesus: being stripped bare and left
naked and vulnerable. During the
stripping of the altar we remove all of the usual adornments, and we also empty
the aumbry, the storage space behind the altar which normally contains
consecrated bread and wine. In essence,
we remove Jesus from our midst, just as the crucifixion removed him. I wash the stripped altar in remembrance of
those who washed Jesus’ body once it was taken down from the cross. The stripping of the altar can be done in
silence or can be accompanied by psalm 22, which this year Sarah Charlock will
chant for us.
I pray that our worship
together on Maundy Thursday will be a blessing to you and to us all.
Faithfully,
Anne
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