Sermon on Maundy Thursday: What is the "Maundy"?
Here we are again on “MAUNDY” Thursday, as evidence for how flexible the English Language is.
You all know the word “Maundy” is a corruption of the Latin word “mandatum” which means commandment.
It is drawn from the Vulgate translation of the Bible, once read in England,
of the passage in today’s Gospel, where Jesus says “I give you a new commandment [mandatum] that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
So, a simple, phonetically pronounced word in Latin gets twisted around from mandatum to Maundy
That’s sort of metaphorical for Christianity. I mean these two sentences, less than two dozen words in English, on this commandment turns the whole point of Christianity.
But how has that point fared throughout history? How hard are Christians working at loving one another?
This commandment was not new, even in Jesus’s day and age. He says it was “new” because it often gets lost in all the other stuff religion came to be about: Rules about rituals and correct behavior. But Jesus redefines the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, saying many times that to love thy God and thy neighbor is the essential summary of the law.
The hard part is actually doing it.
Jesus himself set an example. He did NOT say “love one another except for the one who betrays me.”
He included the betrayer in the command to love. It’s hard to love our betrayers and our enemies, but also just people we find difficult. Still, if Christians had more often more thoroughly worked at or work at these things, the world must be a better place.
But there are so many problems, and so much seems to me to be getting worse.
We can’t depend on weapons;
we can’t depend on money;
we can’t depend on guilt;
we can’t depend on force;
we can’t depend on laws;
we can’t depend on empathy;
we can’t depend on any of these things of the world to help us love one another.
What we do is try to create a community of followers of Jesus,
who emptied himself for us. Our liturgies and rituals are all about reminding, reliving, remembering going over the same payers and sacraments But we will never get them right; we are flawed and imperfect.
Getting them right is not the most important thing—struggling to love is the most important thing.
And it sure is a struggle. I don’t know about all of you, but it is for me. And that’s why I appreciate liturgies such as this. They help strengthen my resolve to obey that mandatum, (commandment, Maundy) to love others.
Being part of a church community is a way to find a way to living out that new commandment,
"By this everyone will know that [we] are [His] disciples,
if [we] have love for one another."
Written for the parish of St. James & St. George 2021 April 1
URL: <http://therev.brianpavlac.org/srms/20210401.html