Thursday April 1 Maundy Thursday
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Psalm 102
A lament at the destruction of Jerusalem 600 years before Jesus. It ends with hope of God’s faithfulness. The imagery of desolation is appropriate for Holy Week—tomorrow Jesus will be betrayed, abandoned, and in hours will be dead. Yet God will remain faithful.
Jeremiah 20: 7-11
Jeremiah continues to suffer rejection and abandonment even from his friends because of his urgent need to name the abuses going on in the land. Some of these images may have influenced early Christians in describing Jesus’ torture and death using similar details.
This concludes our readings from Jeremiah, who challenged oppressive authority and so suggests some ways of understanding the reasons for Jesus’ persecution and death.
John 17: 1-26
As typical in John’s gospel, Jesus speaks about the meaning of his death in semi-poetic terms with many allusions. Before going into the Garden of Gethsemane where he will be betrayed and arrested that night, Jesus asks God to glorify him so he can glorify God. The glory to which he refers is his own execution the next day, because it will enact the depth of love that God, in Jesus, has for the world. God’s intention to love at that depth was there when the universe was created.
He goes on to speak of having given the disciples God’s “word.” The word “word” is “logos” in Greek, and also means something like “deep reality” or “underlying principle.” Jesus has helped the disciples to understand that his’ execution is not an historical accident, nor the act of a very committed person, but is our experience of the deepest processes of God’s love which lies behind everything.
Just as Jesus himself faces opposition, so, he says, will his disciples because the world rejects the call to love at such depth. Jesus asks that his disciples will be protected from their inevitable persecution and that their lives will be characterized by the same degree of love as his own, which is actually God’s. Finally, Jesus asks that those who follow the disciples, which is us, will be united in the self-offering love which is the ultimate character of God and that we will be upheld by that love and so will ourselves be in glory.
We might have expected the reading today to include the Last Supper. But John does not record that event, but at the place of the last supper presents today’s meditation on the glory of Jesus’ self-offering and that of his disciples and ourselves. Perhaps that’s what John understood the Last Supper and communion were about.
This week’s collect:
O God,
your Son Jesus Christ
has left to us this meal of bread and wine
in which we share his body and his blood.
May we who celebrate this sign of his great love
show in our lives the fruits of his redemption;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
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