“Maundy Thursday,” what a name. A strange name.
The word maundy is unfamiliar. And when we do trace out its meaning, we find ourselves on the brink of a profound misunderstanding.
Our best guess is that maundy is from the Latin mandatum, meaning “command.” On this Thursday, the night before he died, Jesus strapped on a servant’s towel and washed his disciples’ feet. In his command to follow his example, Jesus charged the disciples to have a self-humbling, sacrificial heart of love toward one another:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34–35)
Here we find ourselves on the cusp of the misunderstanding: On Maundy Thursday, Jesus does issue a striking new command for us to love one another. But as we remember that Thursday night, our love is hardly the proper emphasis.
Old Command Made New
In one sense, the love-command is not new. Centuries before, God had called for neighbor-love: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). In Jesus’s own ministry, when a Pharisee asked him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” Jesus answered, first, love for God and, second, love for neighbor. No one knew better than Jesus that the command to love was not new.
What’s new at the Last Supper is that Jesus says to love “just as I have loved you.” His demonstration of love is new, and will be new. God himself in human flesh enacting love, like Jesus will show love on Good Friday, is emphatically new.
The main point of Maundy Thursday, then, is not our love. That will come in time: Jesus will rise and send his Spirit, he will change and warm selfish hearts, and he will see that new desires take root in us and find life in tangible acts of love for each other. But first, Jesus will love us in the single greatest act of love the world has ever known.
We will seek to echo his love, but this Thursday is foremost about Jesus daring to tread ground where he could not be followed that he might show his love for us. Foot-washing is a tiny anticipation. The climactic act will be the cross.
So, do we bring anything to this Maundy Thursday?
Two Vast, Spacious Things
Celebrated poet George Herbert (1593–1633) writes in his Maundy Thursday poem “Agony” of “two vast, spacious things” we find as Jesus prays in the garden and hangs on the cross: his love and our sin. These are the twin focus of the stunning gospel summary in Romans 5:8: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
“Who would know sin?” asks Herbert, and then he invites us to Gethsemane.
See there “a man so wrung with pains,” such that his hair and garments drip with beads of panicked sweat. Some mere spectator may sympathize with his manifest anxieties and fears. But a redeemed sinner sees his Savior, and feels himself pulled through the page, drawn through the screen, summoned into that garden of agony.
Even if this emotional pain is no longer the sinner’s to suffer, it is the sinner’s to know himself, in part, responsible. “Sin,” says Herbert, “is that press and vice which forces pain to hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.” We are here in Gethsemane: as sinners.
Jesus would not be racked with this agony of soul apart from the sin of his own people. My sin. Your sin, if you call him Lord. We will not know the depths of his love without recognizing the horror of our sin.
“Who knows not Love?” Herbert then asks. Now, the dark of Thursday night breaks into the black of Friday. And the poet paints with the color red.
First is Friday’s terror: Christ on the cross. He is pierced, and the “juice” flows:
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
Then comes Sunday’s joy: gathered at the Table, enjoying the cup of life because Jesus took the cup of death. We delight in sweet wine, because he drank death to the dregs for us.
Our Weak Flesh, His Willing Spirit
“Maundy Thursday,” as we may call it, brings us to the limits of our discipleship: We follow Jesus, but like Peter and John, we can follow only so far. He is our supreme example; rightly do we seek to imitate him — till Maundy Thursday comes, with its great moment of separation.
Jesus rises from dinner in that upper room and walks where only he can walk. Now we cannot follow his every step. In Gethsemane, we too find our spirits willing and flesh weak. If we’d been there, we’d have fallen asleep too. Or worse. Surely, we would have fled with his first disciples, if not sooner.
Jesus goes to the cross where we cannot go. He dies for us in a way that we cannot die for him, or for anyone else.
As the Cross Comes Near
In this near approach to the cross, our zeal to imitate him stops in its tracks, and wonders. However much we feel like Peter, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you” (John 13:37), however noble our pledge of allegiance, Jesus answers, “Will you lay down your life for me? Where I am going you cannot follow me now” (John 13:36, 38).
Yes, Jesus gives us his love command. Then he goes by himself from Gethsemane to Golgotha to do what we cannot replicate, even as we hope to imitate his self-sacrificial heart.
But Maundy Thursday is a night not of imitation but of separation. This is not a day to dream about our actions, but to stand in awe of his. We marvel at two vast, spacious things: the sin of our own hearts and the love of our dear Savior.
Desiring God