WHY IS THIS NIGHT DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER NIGHTS?   You probably know that question is on the lips of faithful Jews on the evening the Passover festival begins, but it’s also our question tonight for two reasons.  First, this year our parish family has made a conscious effort to invite our friends, the people we love, to share this liturgy with us.  Tonight is different because some of our friends are with us, and we owe you an explanation for why this is so important.  What’s going on tonight?  What do all these symbols mean?  But those of us who have been Christians for years, maybe our whole lives, need an answer to why this night is different, because liturgy properly understood and fully engaged transforms us into better Christians and better friends to the people we’ve invited to go with us on this pilgrimage through the next three days.

For our friends:  There is a Latin maxim – lex orandi, lex credendi – literally, “the law of praying, the law of believing,” and what it means is:  If you want to know what we believe, watch how we pray and how we worship. [1]   So, as the priest of my home parish says, if you want to know what Christianity is all about, buckle your seatbelts and “get ready right now for the next three days.”[2]  Tonight begins the Triduum Sacrum, the “holy three days” that mark the end of Lent and are part of the “paschal cycle.” One writer said: 

Individuals and communities who engage themselves wholeheartedly in living the entire paschal cycle – Lent, Triduum and Easter's Fifty Days – discover, not that they have taken hold of the Pasch [“the Passover”], but that the Pasch has seized them and changed them forever!  This is especially so of the Triduum which . . . is an intense immersion in the fundamental mystery of what it is to be Christian . . . .  Year after year, those who keep the [Paschal] Triduum hunger in fasting and rejoice in feasting, share in death and resurrected life, contemplate cross-unto-glory, tell and hear the great stories of salvation, emerge fresh-robed from the waters into light and fragrant anointing, sing songs of victory and taste of the wedding banquet of heaven and earth.[3]

Right out of the gate we have two unfamiliar words:  “Paschal” and “Triduum.”  “Paschal” is unfamiliar because Anglo-Saxons and northern Europeans decided to call it something else:  Easter.  To most of the world, the Resurrection Feast is the Πάσχα (Pascha), which is the Greek form of the Hebrew Pesach or Passover.  The other unfamiliar word is “triduum,” the Latin term for any period that is three days long.  Read the Bible enough, and you’ll find that the period “three days” shows up again and again: 

For three days Esther fasted and Judith kept vigil; for three days the exiles came home to Jerusalem; for three days the Hebrews marched to the waters of Marah; for three days darkness afflicted the Egyptians; for three days Hezekiah lay mortally ill; for three days Jonah was entombed in the belly of a fish; for three days Paul waited in blindness.  On the third day Abraham offered his first-born son on mount Moriah; on the third day God came down in fire and wind upon Sinai; on the third day the boy Jesus was found in “his Father’s house”; on the third day Jesus “performed the first of his signs at Cana of Galilee.”   Echoing the words of Hosea, Jesus announced the three-day Passover of his death, rest and resurrection.  The Paschal Triduum, are for us days of death, rest and resurrection.  We march to the waters of Baptism.  We keep watch for light and for liberation.  For three days we climb Mount Moriah, Mount Sinai, Mount Golgotha.  Those who were lost are found, and those who were exiled come home.

Technically, the Paschal Triduum – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday – make up one three-day-long liturgy celebrating the mystery of the dying and rising of Jesus.  You do get to go home and sleep, but it’s traditionally a time of fasting, so I recommend only light meals.  But it really is one act over three days, and for the next few minutes I want us to do a little “instructed Eucharist” and unfold this liturgy to help us all participate in it fully.  You don’t have to take out your bibles (even assuming Episcopalians carried them around), but take out your bulletins.

Tonight is called “Maundy” Thursday, from the Latin mandatum, for “mandate” or “commandment.”  Three commandments are fulfilled in tonight’s liturgy:

(1)   The first is from the first reading from Exodus:  When God commands the Israelites to remember forever this night of deliverance from Egypt, to celebrate it as a festival throughout the generations to come.  That commemoration in the Passover meal was the “ritual context”[4] for what Jesus, a faithful Jew, was doing in the upper room with his disciples.  The rich story of Israel’s deliverance, the killing of Egypt’s firstborn, the killing of the lamb and smearing the blood on the posts of the door, the journey through the Red Sea – all that is gathered up into a whole new meaning in Jesus.  Jesus takes that commandment and creating a whole new dynamic, giving it a new dimension and making, in effect, a new liturgy from it.

(2)   The second commandment, in the New Testament lesson, is to keep Holy Eucharist.  Paul writes that on this night, before Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and wine and said “this is my body and my blood; feed on this and remember me until I come again.”  Every time we go to mass, every time we celebrate together this Holy Eucharist, it looks back to that night and to that meal Jesus shared with his followers.  The scrim between heaven and earth is lifted, and all of time is drawn up into this one instant, and at this meal we are with Jesus at the first Eucharist, we are fed by God tonight in this very bread and this very wine, and it is “proleptic,” an “anticipatory” sign of the future messianic banquet at the end of the book of Revelation. 

(3)   The third commandment is in John’s gospel where Jesus took off his garments, took up a towel and basin, washed the feet of his disciples, then commanded them to love one another as he had loved them.  That new mandatum to love one another puts servant love at the very center of what being a Christian is.  Loving people where they need it, on their terms, with no thought of a return on our investment and no thought of the cost to ourselves.  And the story is more than that – it’s a parable of Jesus’ whole life:  Jesus takes off his “garments,” his divinity, and condescends to us, humbling himself to be a servant even unto death, all to wash us and make us new.  Then he takes up his garments again, assuming his divinity and ascending into heaven.  That is what this night is about. 

Now, in the liturgy of this night, much is common, but some things are unique, like the “Maundy” when people from the congregation come up and the celebrant, standing in the place of Jesus, washes their feet.  If you watch closely enough, you may notice that after the prayer of consecration the Peace is said, but it’s not given because in the middle-eastern world a kiss means affection, reconciliation, friendship; but tonight a kiss becomes the signal of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus.  Then at the end of Holy Communion we do something very different.  St. Matthew says that after the last supper, “when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives,” (Matt. 26.30), they walked through the Kidron Valley to the Garden of Gethsemane.  Tonight we walk in procession to the Altar of Repose, taking that journey with Jesus, present in the consecrated bread, to the chapel which becomes Gethsemane.

And there is profound symmetry here because the bible begins in a garden; and the whole sin problem begins in a garden; and the reversal of the problem begins in a garden.  It’s there that Jesus begins the last battle with the serpent who tempted Eve and who in a few hours will strike Jesus’ heel.  Jesus agonizes in that garden, his sweat even mixing with blood, suffering, but finally saying “yes” to God’s will, not his own.  One theologian has written this, of Jesus’ anguish in Gethsemane:

It is clear from all the accounts that Jesus’ experience of turmoil and anguish was both real and profound.  His sorrow was as great as a man could bear, his fear convulsive, his astonishment well-nigh paralysing.  He came within a hairsbreadth of break-down.  He faced the will of God as raw-holiness, the mysterium tremendum in its most acute form: and it terrified him . . . .  In Gethsemane the whole, terrible truth strikes home.  The hour of reckoning has come.  Now is the last moment to escape.  Beyond it there can be no turning back. 

When Moses saw the glory of God on Mount Sinai so terrifying was the sight that he trembled with fear.  But that was God in covenant: God in grace.  What Christ saw in Gethsemane was God with the sword raised (Zc. 13:7; Mt 26:31) . . . .  In a few short hours, he . . . would stand before that God answering for the sin of the world: indeed, identified with the sin of the world (2 Cor. 5:21).  He became, as Luther said, ‘the greatest sinner that ever was’ (cf. Gal. 3:13).  Consequently . . . ‘No one ever feared death so much as this man’ . . . because for him it was no sleep (1 Thes. 4:13), but the wages of sin: death with the sting; death unmodified and unmitigated; death as involving all that sin deserved . . . .  The wonder of the love of Christ for his people is not that for their sake he faced death without fear, but that for their sake he faced it, terrified.  Terrified by what he knew, and terrified by what he did not know, he took damnation lovingly.[5]

Then we leave Jesus there, but there is yet one last thing to do – we strip the altar.  Jesus is dragged in chains from the garden to be stripped, tried and executed.  He is outcast, rejected, mocked, helpless.  We strip everything off, and while the choir sings “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22) we take water and wine and wash the altar, which is a symbol of Jesus’ body, preparing it for burial.  One thing you won’t see unless you get up close – on the top of the altar are five engraved crosses, which are symbolic of Jesus’ five wounds.  We wash those wounds through which we were washed for eternal life.

Then the darkness settles in, and we keep watch.  This is the Triduum.  It is into this that God invites us now, into the three great days, to walk with our Lord into his Passion this night. 

+ Amen.