AN EVENING TO REMEMBER

AN EVENING TO REMEMBER
Reflections on Maundy Thursday
By Frank J. Hernando
17 April 2014
Seoul, Korea

Tonight many Christians around the world will commemorate the evening to remember in the life of Jesus Christ through the reenactment of the Lord's last Supper. Many ministers and common people on the pews having conscious efforts to recollect with full attention to details and almost perfect execution of the eucharist by ministers will make all eyes and ears fixed on the sacred sanctuaries during the breaking of the bread and the pouring of wine or juice.


The occasion of remembering the passion of Jesus caused by the unfolding of the tragic end of his life and ministry would find many pious believers into heartbreaking repentance to receive absolution of their sins or failures to live out a godly life that imitates the life of love Jesus exemplified.


But what is always lacking is the conscious effort to put draw out the meaning of this gospel story from its personalistic overtones to the broader social perspective, that elevates if not translates the truth about God’s passion, death and resurrection into ethical imperatives in the communal, national and global sphere of experience.


On the evening of the great Jewish celebration of the Passover, commemorating God’s saving action in the exodus experience of the Hebrew people from Egyptian captivity, Jesus gathered his disciples to the occasion, while upholding the feast, he transformed it into a new experience and put new meaning into it. Here is the Johannine version of the first Maundy Thursday which I put into sequence with corresponding questions and reflections:

1. Jesus has foreknowledge of his eventual departure from the company of his disciples and of all those who loved him. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. Who are those people Jesus considered or classified as “his own”? Those that Jesus call his own are those whose lives are illumined by the light of God and have refused to be co-opted by the powers of destruction and death. They are those who are willing to build new ways of organizing communities around the values of kingdom of God such as compassion, justice and peace. They are those who have decided or if not willing to renounce the sacrificial system that makes ordinary people the sacrifice for the greed of the powerful and resolved to never again make human life as sacrifices for state or religious group’s greedy goals.

2. God’s action or Judas’? The devil has already put into the heart of Judas to betray Jesus. Jesus has an inkling into Judas secret negotiations with the Jews and the Roman officials of turning him over to their hands as an arrest for one who has violated the laws of the Jewish nation and for plotting a coup d’ e

tat. Exegetes would assume that the devil is an external force but here we can understand that the devil is intrinsic as in discontent of Judas of what Jesus intend to do, a growing frustration that the teacher will end up his ministry in a sublime movement and fail to transform the social realities in which the disciples and the followers live.

3. Ritual of foot washing was misunderstood by Peter. Water symbolizes cleansing, the removal of dirt from the body which Peter thought he will be cleansed and more acceptable to God when his head, hands and feet are washed. Jesus insisted he would not do Peter’s wish, for those who have bathed need not wash his feet. Jesus is saying that the Jewish authorities have assumed the position of being on the side of the “cleansed” people, rather than hoping to be cleansed by the love and compassion of God.

4. The disciples should wash each other’s feet--symbolic of acceptance of each other, of mutuality and love for each other, emulating Jesus’ way of caring for others. Mutuality in the community of faith is essential for compassion and love to grow. Many churches and communities and society itself have thrive and benefited in the hierarchical and patriarchal structures they stand and work for. Jesus taught the reverse structure by illustrating to them the way the kingdom of God must be lived-out.

5. The betrayer revealed in a manner obscured from the disciples, the dipping of bread in the cup. Judas knew what Jesus’ action meant, so he left the house and got lost in the night, a voluntary departure and exclusion from the fold of disciples. It seemed that the other disciples were unaware of the psychological undercurrent between Jesus and Judas, because they thought Jesus told Judas to purchase materials for their celebration of the Passover. But Judas and Jesus knew that this is the moment when the betrayal will happen because at the temple of Jerusalem the charges against Jesus was brewing up and Judas was already identified as one of the collaborators to get Jesus into their scheme of accusations and religious bigotry.

6. At the moment of Judas’ departure and voluntary exclusion, Jesus declared that he has been glorified and God has glorified him--meaning that Judas betrayal and the succeeding events that would follow-his arrest, trial, conviction of blasphemy, rebellion, etc, crucifixion and death were parts of the whole process of glorification. God’s design for the world is really amazing, albeit confusing in the sense that allowing God’s son to be the last and final human sacrifice to atone the corrupt, violent, unjust human predicament was not humane and just after all.

The gruesome experience of the slaughtered human sacrifice would break us but this is the glorification of God’s son, for Jesus believes that once this final sacrifice is done, the world will come to realize that God’s justice and love cannot be captured in time and space, no, not in the Garden of Gethsemane, neither on the cross of Golgotha nor in the dark tomb of death. This is powerful beyond one’s imagination that God’s love is victorious over the state or the temple’s greed and violence. Let us join Jesus in his agonizing moments so we may share his glory in defeating the powers that be. Amen.