Mandatum Day
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Like countless other children, I grew up hearing the term "Maundy Thursday" during the Lenten season and just assumed that the grown-ups around me were saying "Monday Thursday." I knew Easter was a special time, so I just assumed that this "Monday Thursday" thing was part of the deal. If Jesus could come out of the tomb on Easter morning, why couldn't we have Monday and Thursday on the same day??
I was actually in divinity school, about ten years ago, before I never learned the origin of Maundy Thursday. By then I knew enough to say "Maundy" instead of "Monday." And I knew the term had to have something to do with the final gathering of Jesus with his disciples on the night he was betrayed. But I still didn't know what the strange modifier "Maundy" meant, nor why it had been attached to a day that otherwise would have done just fine as "Holy Thursday."
Tracing Maundy Thursday's lineage actually requires doing something that Protestants almost never do: opening up the Latin Vulgate. Turning to John 13, where Jesus washes the disciples' feet, we read this in verses 34-35:
Mandatum novum do vobis, ut diligatis invicem. Sicut dilexi vos ut et vos diligatis invicem. In hoc cognoscent omnes quia mei discipuli estis, si dilectionem habueritis ad invicem.
Here is a literal, if somewhat clunky, translation:
A new commandment I give to you all, that you love mutually. Just as I have held you dear, so that you may also hold one another dear. In this way, everyone shall learn that you are my disciples, if you will have love for the purpose of mutuality.
The Latin mandatum novum translates as the English new commandment (think of our synonym "mandate"). And Maundy is just a corruption of the original mandatum. So Maundy Thursday is really just Commandment Thursday, the day when Jesus commands us to love one another as he has loved us. Moreover, wrapped up in Jesus' mandatum to us is a deeper implication: namely, that if we are doing it right, the world will be able to identify us as Christians by the very quality of love that we bear toward one another.
When we preach this passage on Maundy Thursday, we should take care to emphasize the extent of the love Jesus was talking about. Specifically, Jesus' qualifier, "Just as I have held you dear" (or more conventionally, "Just as I have loved you"), calls us to look both forward and backward in the gospel for those specific ways that Jesus loves the disciples.
Looking backward, we recognize that Jesus says these words right after he has disrobed and, taking the role of a servant, washed each of the disciples' feet. He models love for them not by a long-winded discourse on the virtue of love, but rather by showing them love firsthand through his actions. The footwashing conveys a depth of meaning that simple words could not.
We also look forward to how Jesus will love the disciples (and indeed, the whole world) through his death on the cross. So while the love he models for us takes the form of servanthood, it also carries that servanthood to an absolute extreme. It includes the sacrifice of the servant's own life, or as Jesus himself says, the laying down of the shepherd's life for his sheep (John 10:11). And this is the love with which we are to love one another.
As difficult as this teaching is for Christians, we should recognize that it is not an option. Jesus teaching is a mandatum, a commandment. And there is a reason for this. In English translations, the end of the passage reads, "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." But the static quality of "know" in English obscures the meaning of the Latin cognoscent, which carries the progressive meaning of learning or acquiring knowledge. The world does not understand the true meaning of love. But through the church's witness to Christ's love for the world - expressed through the love of the disciples for one another - the world can learn what love really means. So the telos of Mandatum Day is that our embodiment of the command becomes the means of salvation for the world. Only when the church faithfully practices Jesus' love can the world learn that there is a better way to live.
posted by Andrew C. Thompson at 8:58 PM
3 Comments:
I was just blogging last night about how young moms and small children (I experienced this for the first time last night) are not really welcome at some churches to come to the Maundy Thursday service, because the kids make noise and this keeps others from focusing perfectly upon this commandment to love. I'm not sure what to think of that. In light of your blog, thinking of the point of Thursday as the command to love one another, I'm inclined more to think there is something wrong with that church practice.
klh, I am sorry that you had that experience. I wish you could have been at my church last night! After the sermon, we all came forward to the chancel as a congregation and gathered around the altar, sharing the Lord's Supper as a true family of faith.
I just read your poignant blog post about your experience last night. Again, I am sorry that you went through that. I know that Christ was present with you and your daughter, regardless of the attitude of your brothers and sisters during the service.
I sometimes wonder how much the sense of proper decorum in churches is largely determined by the size of the congregation. My wife and I attend a church with an average attendance of about 65. Everybody knows everybody, and the recent addition of some families with small children to the church has been a great cause for joy! Sure, kids sometimes act up in the service. And sure, sometimes it is disruptive enough that a parent needs to take the child out into the hallway to walk around, calm down, etc. But I don't think anyone in our little church would ever suggest that the children shouldn't be there. Our Savior had a pretty high view of kids, after all. That ought to be a clue for us.
One other thing I would mention is the way one family to whom we are close handles the care of their three children (who are 7, 4, and 2 years old). They go to children's church during most of the service, but when it comes time for the Eucharist the dad goes and gets the two oldest so that they can participate in the sacrament. In that way, they can learn bible stories during most of the worship time, but then they get to join the community during the holiest moment of worship.
However ministry with children is approached in the church, I tend to think it is of the utmost importance that we realize the great necessity of loving Christian formation for the young among us. (That was the purpose of my recent column on Christian formation.) If it makes worship a bit messy, so be it! Frankly, our kids are more than worth it.
You all make me love the fact that the youth group are the ones who write the Maundy Thursday service in the congregation I'm currently serving. They deliberately make it friendly for people of all ages but in the end, because of their age, it skews younger. We include footwashing on a regular basis for the very reason that we have children:
Several years ago in VBS, I was telling the footwashing story to the kids. When it got to the part where I asked the kids if I could wash their feet, they immediately started pulling off their shoes and socks. Then they started pulling off the shoes and socks of every adult near them, assuming that because Jesus wanted us to do this that of course everyone would want to do it! Children in the footwashing part of our Maundy Thursday service have become the ones who set the rest of us free to experience Christ's love...they are not those whose "interruptions" keep us from it.
Yay!
Cynthia
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