MAUNDY THURSDAY Year C, 2013 by Frank J. Hernando Biblical References: Exodus 12:1-14; John 13:1-17 Christians around the world are celebrating Maundy Thursday this 28th of March and I can imagine the throng of Filipino Christian devotees get into the Maundy Thursday evening services and the street procession holding lit candles and follow their chosen biblical characters and events elaborately sculpted and colorfully dressed for the lenten celebrations with the dirges sung by some men and women on a via dolorosa. What of this Christian commemoration that ordinary Christians may need to know? I would like to suggest that we reflect on the meaning of the Passover as written in the Book of Exodus and also on the understanding of foot washing Jesus illustrated and explained to his disciples and captured by the Gospel of John. The Passover as described in the Book of Exodus was one of the watershed events in Yahweh’s liberating acts in the life of the Hebrew people wherein they were finally freed from slavery from the hands of the Egyptians. On that very night, the Hebrews were instructed to prepare for the last supper in Egypt when they will be freed from the hands of their slave masters. The meal was prepared in each household because it consisted of lamb or goat, when a household could not procure the meat, they have to share with other families. Here was the practice of solidarity amongst the families within a nation. Detailed instructions were given them how to prepare the meal and what to do with the fresh blood painted on their doorposts. The meaning of the blood of the lamb painted on the doorposts as written in the biblical narrative served the cultic belief that the blood sacrifice warded off the last plague or epidemic that killed the male and female firstborns of Egyptian families. The Passover had to be remembered in their life as a nation as a perpetual ordinance. Jesus gathered his disciples in an upper room for a pre-Passover day supper. The Gospel of John narrates that on that very night when he supped with his disciples, he washed their feet to illustrate the meaning and purpose of his mission as the Son of God. For all we know, Jesus studied the Old Testament Scripture especially Prophet Isaiah’s description of the servant in what has been known as the Servant Song in Isaiah chapters 52 and 53. Prophet Isaiah described the characteristics of the servant of God, which should not be misconstrued as one person, but the servant nation Israel who suffered so much from their Babylonian captivity. Relating the two thematic emphases of the Passover, the freedom from slavery in Egypt and the Servant Song, Jesus made both God’s actions in history a realization in the life of the first century BCE people in Palestine. In his life, Jesus took a coherent and consistent imaging of the Servant of God, although in the original meaning in the Old Testament, it refers not to an individual person, but to the collective entity, the nation. Jesus assumed the place of a slaughtered lamb at the Passover and his blood freed the people and at the same time he is the Servant. The remorse that Jesus had in the Garden of Gethsemane, the arrest, trial, mocking and finally the crucifixion of Jesus was a historical event where political, economic, social and religious powers made it possible for them to torture and kill him for he assumed to be God, and he posed a threat to the established social order for his organizing work and providing hope for the reign of justice and peace. I think it is shameful on the part of Christians to believe in Jesus Christ yet presumed to be innocent of perpetuating social systems of injustice, violence and disrespect of the humanity of those whose labors have been exploited, those who continue to live in sub-human conditions such as poverty, oppression and discrimination. +++