Have you always wondered what the word maundy in Maundy Thursday means? I did, so I looked it up. It comes from the Latin word “mandatum” meaning mandate or command. It’s use here refers to John 13:34 in the Bible. Jesus said to His disciples, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”
The scene here is the Last Supper. Jesus is celebrating the Jewish feast of Passover with His disciples in Jerusalem the night before He would be crucified. The disciples, like most of us, were clueless about what was to happen, but Jesus wasn’t. He knows He will be leaving them soon, and He gives them a rule for how to live when He is gone. They are to love each other with the kind of love that He had for them. To demonstrate this love, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, an act of humility.
But that’s only the beginning, and to understand what happens next, you have to understand the significance of Passover. When God was getting ready to free the Jews from slavery in Egypt, He sent plagues on an escalating scale of severity. (Read about this in Exodus 6-12.)The last plague was that the first-born of every person and animal in Egypt would die. The Jews were told to kill a lamb and put the lamb’s blood over their door. God’s angel of death would pass over those houses covered by the blood of the lamb, and those families would be spared. Events happened as God foretold through Moses, and when the Jews were about to leave Egypt, they were told to remember and celebrate this occasion every year.
So while Jesus and the disciples were remembering and celebrating this former act of God’s grace, Jesus institutes a new act of grace. He is to be the lamb who will be slaughtered, whose blood will be sacrificed to pay for all of our sins. He tells His disciples (and us) to remember this new (and final) sacrifice and celebrate it as the Jews had been told to celebrate Passover. Christians call this the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion or Eucharist.
Here’s my poetic tribute for Maundy Thursday.
Last Supper, First Communion
First the last supper,
Then the last death.
The dining, the dying, the rising again.
Come, eat my body,
Come, drink my blood.
The dining, the dying, the rising again.
Upper room sorrow,
Communion white dress.
The dining, the dying, the rising again.
His sacrifice becomes
Our sacrament.
The dining, the dying, the rising again.
Day 111: 9,694 YTD: 1,055,457 Steps Goal: 1,045,000 Steps