The church does many things to make this service special; the white and gold altar frontal and vestments, the special ceremonies, the music, the procession with incense which we only use on this night of the year, the flowers in the lady chapel. This night is special because it introduces what is known as the triduum, the three days from Maundy Thursday to Easter Day in which we celebrate the heart of the Christian faith. And yet paradoxically what we celebrate this evening is very ordinary. At the heart of this service are bread and wine, a bowl of water and a towel, ordinary common things in Jesus’ life and in ours.
This paradox of the special and the ordinary is perhaps common to the whole of the Christian life. We may associate the idea of God with what is out of the ordinary or extraordinary, whether it be in miracle or vision, in his transcendent otherness, in unique spiritual experiences, in music and art which give us a glimpse of something special, something glorious. In worship we expect a special language, words whose register is nearer the poetic than the everyday, and we treasure the King James Bible because of its special poetic language. But though these special things have their place in the practice of our faith, they are also dangerous – dangerous because they may lead towards our putting God in a special category, a religious category of experience which is detached from other experience. We set aside particular times and places for God and we leave him there.
But it is on this night that he breaks out of his box, he defeats our categories and invades the rest of our lives with the everyday ordinary stuff of bread and wine, water, bowl and towel. It isn’t easy for us to allow God to break through to the ordinary and familiar, to what we take for granted and so hardly give it the time of day. So how are we to talk about God in ordinary, God in everyday human dress, God as part of the ordinary, proper things of life?
If we look again at the Last Supper you might say that that was no ordinary meal. It was probably a Passover meal, though in John’s gospel it is not. And even the other gospel writers make little mention of the details of a normal Passover celebration. They recline at table, and there is a common cup of wine, referred to as the fruit of the vine, and there is a hymn; but the bread is not referred to as unleavened though it probably was, there is no mention of bitter herbs or of the Passover lamb and no recitation of the story of the escape from Egypt. Symbolically it is important for the gospel writers that Jesus’ death is taking place at the time of the Passover, but only because Jesus is seen as establishing a new escape for a new people of God. And what establishes the new people of God is a meal, now given new significance by Jesus.
Jesus says the prayer of blessing over bread and wine as though he is the head of the household of this new family but he is very different kind of leader from what went before. This leader also acts as a servant who washes feet. He does not arrange for others to do it, he does it himself. ‘He is both host and slave…. Here is something that is neither lordship nor servitude. Here is the meal of equals.’ (McCabe) Our distinctions between ordinary or special people are done away with.
Today the Passover dimensions of this meal have mostly dropped out of site; the washing of feet is only a part of the eucharist on this night. But a new direction has been established. The church describes this as a sacrament. And by a sacrament we mean the taking of something ordinary from everyday material life so that it can become the vehicle of God’s presence, the vehicle of the Trinitarian work of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The chief sacraments of the church are all linked with the life and activity of Jesus; but in principle anything could become the vehicle of the divine grace in the life of the Church. In his incarnation Jesus entered our physical world. In him the spiritual and the material are united and so from him the world becomes potentially sacramental in its ordinary proper existence. The ordinary objects and the simple actions of the world can become the vehicles whereby the spiritual and the material are united in us.
The spiritual and the material remain separate in us because we fail to make connections. We keep our spiritual lives and our material lives in separate compartments. The purpose of the sacraments is to bring them together. It is because we live in separate compartments that we fail so often to escape the sinful life for the graceful life. We treat our world as we do, we treat each other as we do, because we fail to see God in our world and in each other. We do not see that our purpose in life, what we are for, is to restore the connection between the spiritual and the material. In his last supper Jesus gives bread and wine to his disciples and washes their feet so that all hospitality and all service can become holy, Every meal is potentially a holy thing because of the Eucharist. Every act of service in answering the needs of another person becomes holy because Christ washed the feet of his disciples. What we have to do is make the connection so that the ordinary proper things of our lives become God’s holy gifts for God’s holy people. Amen