Holy Thursday: A Feast of Humility

Every year, the services of Holy Week bring before us selections from the Old Testament, of Jacob, of Joseph and his brothers, the great prophets Moses and Job.  We hear the ancient prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah with an awareness that everything that has happened before, everything that has been spoken, reaches its fulfillment in our Lord’s passion. During the services, the Gospel passages recount Christ’s final teachings to his disciples, as well as the events that lead to his Passion.  As the week moves on, the pace quickens as our Savior hastens to the events that are so familiar to us: the dinner, the trial, the scourging, the haggard procession with the cross, and the brutal crucifixion itself.  The Church speaks of an end, but now as the end of this week draws near, we must also speak of the beginning, and understand both what is old and coming to an end, and also what is new and coming to life.

All around us outside, the natural world proclaims this pattern: the sun casts more light upon the earth than night’s darkness.  As the prophet says, “For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.  The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come.”  (Song of Solomon 2.11-12)  The Hebrews even reckoned the annual commemoration of the date of Pascha according to this natural order: “In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month in the evening, is the Lord’s Pascha.”  (Lev 23.5-6)

Commenting on the Lord’s Pascha, some Church fathers seized on this idea of annual re-creation and used images from it to describe this liturgical season of the death and resurrection of Christ.  Many noted that this was even the traditional time of the original creation of the World; it was a natural transition to see Holy Week and our Lord’s death and resurrection as a recapitulation of that original creation.  The new creation begins on Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday when our Lord once again separates light from darkness as he calls forth the dead to life.  And as the great King and true light of the world, meekly bearing salvation, he enters into his city, Jerusalem, with great acclamation.  This great light increases even more as his death, burial, and resurrection draw near.  In the face of the brilliant light of our Lord’s passion, the two lights of creation, the sun and the moon, diminish and no longer illumine the world alone.  The week goes on, and on this holiest of all Fridays, our God fashions man anew, as his Christ is crucified.  From the side of this new Adam will not come a rib, but blood and water, by which he establishes and nourishes the Church.  After this will be the Great and Holy Sabbath, the last day of the old creation; God will rest again.  And on the next day, the eighth day, the first day of the new Creation, the man of the earth, once bound by death, will be freed in the life of Christ Jesus.  There will be a new Creation, peopled by those who have been formed by his word, nourished on the food of his body, and illumined by the light of his power.

Here, on this fifth day, on this Holy Thursday, our attention is drawn to numerous themes – the mystical supper, the scheming of the elders, the treachery of Judas.  But let us stop and consider only one event of this day, the washing of the feet.  For here again on this fifth day, the waters splash as they did on the original fifth day, not with every sort of sea creature, but with our Savior calling forth a new way of life for his new creation.  With the knowledge “that the Father had given all things into his hands,” (Jn. 13.3) the eternal Word of God stoops down and humbly puts his hands in the basin of water to wash his disciples’ feet.  By this humble act, as he washes away the filth and grime from feet that trod upon the dusty paths of Palestine and the alleys of Jerusalem, he will create new winged creatures, as man will soar to the heavenly heights of virtue and will keep company with the angels in the presence of God the Father, with his Son, in the Holy Spirit.

The hymnography of Holy Thursday speaks of the washing of the feet as the time “when the disciples were illumined.”  Illumination is, of course, also the way the Church speaks of the mystery of Holy Baptism.  The Church can use this term for both the washing of the feet and Holy Baptism, because the results are the same: we put on Christ, who is our Teacher and Lord, and strive to be all that he is, by doing what he has commanded.  He says as much plainly: “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”  (Jn 13.14-15)  This is how the heavenly heights are opened for us: we will ascend to the heavens when we understand what he did to his disciples and for us, and when we follow his command to “wash one another’s feet.”

We should make no mistake; “foot washing” is not an easy task even now, in our world with all the benefits of modern hygiene.  The extent of our Lord’s love for us can be seen precisely in this, as he takes the filthy, dirty feet of his disciples and washes them clean.  The dirt and grime are precisely what makes this act so beautiful.  In that soiled water, our Lord has called forth new life, a life purified and clean.  He has called forth life that proclaims power in weakness, the triumph of humility and service, the victory of love, and the death of selfishness.  Out of these waters, just like the waters of baptism, he has not called us to be proud or powerful.  He has not empowered us to be self-centered or self-interested.  He has not challenged us to become successful men or women by the standards of the world.  No, he has called us to emulate him.  If we have called him our Lord and King at our baptism, we ought to “wash one another’s feet,” just as our Lord and Teacher has done.

On this day, we are given a vision of God’s new creation.  For all of us who live in this new creation, “washing one another’s feet” means giving ourselves to one another in all love, humility, and service.  The new creation is to be populated by those who are willing to beautifully debase themselves and wash the feet of their brothers and sisters, to offer themselves, to humble themselves, to give entirely of themselves, not being concerned by position, status, authority, pride, pomp, or any consideration other than loving their brother and sister the way the Lord has loved them and in exactly the same fashion.

Fathers, brothers, and sisters, as we stand now at the foot of the steps, ready to ascend to the upper chamber and, as companions of our Lord, to partake of the Divine Word, let us commit ourselves once more to this same Lord, who is going to his voluntary passion for us and for our salvation, to inaugurate a new creation.  Let us pray therefore that by emulating in him in our words, deeds, and thoughts, we may find ourselves in that chamber with him and with all those who have been well pleasing to him from all the ages.  Amen.

Archpriest Alexander Rentel (SVOTS ’95) is Assistant Profess or of Canon Law and Byzantine Studies and the John and Paraskeva Skvir Lecturer in Practical Theology. Fr Alexander finished his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Fr Robert Taft, SJ, at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome in January 2004. Prior to coming to St Vladimir’s as a professor, Fr Alexander was a 2000-2001 Junior Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. He has taken numerous research trips to Greece, Italy, and France. He was ordained to the priesthood in July 2001. He and his wife, Nancy (née Homyak, SVOTS ’95) are the proud parents of three children, Dimitrios, Maria, and Daniel.

The Matins of Holy Thursday: A Meditation

“Great are you, O Lord, and marvelous are your works, and there is no word which suffices to hymn your wonders!”

These words, which come from the blessing of water at the baptismal service and at the water blessing on Theophany, are probably not the first words that come to mind now, at the midpoint of Holy Week. (The matins of Holy Thursday, a rich and beautiful service, is usually celebrated on the evening of Holy Wednesday. In many parishes in North America, however, the Service of Anointing is celebrated at that time, and the matins service is omitted.) This is hardly a time for celebration.

We are now at the point in Holy Week when things go from bad to worse. The shouts of “Hosanna” have long faded, and the crowds will soon be yelling “Crucify him! Crucify him!” The religious authorities, threatened by Jesus’ popularity and his assaults on their traditions, are plotting to kill him. The civil authorities have their own agendas, focused on maintaining their positions of power and preserving the pax Romana. Judas, one of the Twelve, is laying his own plans to betray the Master even as he eats and drinks at the Last Supper with the Lord and the other disciples. And immediately after the supper, the disciples begin to argue among themselves about which of them is the greatest. Soon, the disciples will abandon him as he undergoes the passion. Peter will deny him three times, and all the apostles will scatter after Jesus’ arrest. Only a few women remain faithful as they accompany him at his crucifixion, and later as they come to anoint his dead body—and for this reason they become the first witnesses to the resurrection.

No one knows or comprehends the cosmic events that are taking place. The world at large is completely oblivious, and the story of Jesus leaves almost no mark on the official historical records of the day. The Jewish nation rejects the Messiah as, at best, another prophet who met a sad end—he was certainly not the triumphant, worldly king they were expecting. Jesus’ followers, bewildered and confused, give up. Even the women who remain faithful do so not because they understand the significance of what is happening, but because of the personal love they feel for him.

And what about us, who gather together some two thousand years later to remember these events? As the texts of the Holy Week services make abundantly clear, we are just like those weak, sinful individuals portrayed in the scripture readings and in the hymnography. Indeed, it is to us that these texts are addressed. We are just like those crowds that yell “Hosanna” one day, and a few days later crucify our Lord. We do this whenever we despise or ignore our neighbor, who is the living image of Christ. We do this when, like the Pharisees, we concern ourselves more with the externals of the faith than with the law of love. We do this when, like Judas, we value the thirty pieces of silver more than the gift of eternal life.

For the Holy Week liturgical cycle functions as one big parable: a story that first draws us in, and then pulls the rug out from under us as it reveals the weakness of all our own arguments, our own rationalizations. We think that it is the Jews who are responsible for crucifying Christ—and at one time people calling themselves Orthodox Christians would launch pogroms against Jews on these days. We may even consider that some of the Holy Thursday and Holy Friday texts are anti-Semitic, and we fail to realize that they are actually speaking about us. For it is by our own sins and actions that we crucify Christ. It is we who stand condemned.

These Holy Week services thus paint a dark picture of the fallen world in which we live. This is a world in which darkness reigns, where individuals and nations commit the vilest atrocities and genocides. Modernity, despite bring much improvement of the lives of so many people, has also made the extermination of entire peoples ever more efficient and impersonal. Our cities are full of suffering and crime, and that in the richest nation on this earth. And in many parts of the world, conditions are far worse.

In short, these services unmask the reality of this world, a reality we try so hard to conceal even from ourselves. Like the emperor in the familiar fairy tale, we are revealed as having no clothes. Or, in the language of the exaposteilarion that we sing at the matins services from Monday to Thursday of this week, we have no “wedding garment” to enter into the bridal chamber.

Yet it is only when we become aware of this absolute emptiness that we can begin to understand why it was necessary for Christ to come into the world in order to overcome this darkness. We begin to see this now, as Christ first washes the feet of his disciples, then offers his Body and Blood to us in anticipation of his own death on the Cross for our sake. He, and He alone, is under no delusion. He alone sees this fallen world for what it is—a world that rejects its Maker. And yet, as we hear in John’s Gospel, God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten Son, who, by his presence among us, fills the darkness with light. The One who created the world never stops loving his creation, even when that creation does not return his love and chases after idols.

Later today, as we celebrate the Eucharistic liturgy of Holy Thursday, we shall sing “One is holy, one is the Lord, Jesus Christ.” As we do this, we confess not only that he alone is holy, but also that we, because of our sins, are not. Yet we do this with the certainty that through him, we too become holy, not because of anything that we do or have done, but because he freely bestows his holiness on us. We become holy when, at our baptism and chrismation, we are clothed with the “robe of righteousness.” And we reaffirm this each time that we approach the chalice.

The garment that we lack is provided to us freely by the Master. At the time of Christ, the host would provide a wedding garment to all the guests he invited. They did not have to purchase or earn it for themselves. So, in the familiar parable about the wedding feast, the man who comes without the proper attire does so only because he has rejected the free gift of the garment from the Master (Matt 22:11-13).

Our calling today, as we prepare for the liturgy of Holy Thursday, is not to reject that gift, that festal, baptismal garment, but to accept it with gratitude, knowing full well that we do not deserve it. It is for this that Christ comes to us, and why he accepts to suffer and to die on our behalf. This, even more than the many miracles that Jesus performed during his sojourn among us, is the greatest wonder of all.

“Great are you, O Lord, and marvelous are your works, and there is no word which suffices to hymn your wonders!”

Dr. Paul Meyendorff (SVOTS ’75) is a leading specialist in the history, theology, and practice of the Orthodox liturgy and is The Father Alexander Schmemann Professor of Liturgical Theology at St. Vladimir’s Seminary.

Holy Tuesday: a hymn of invitation

Come, O faithful, let us work zealously for the Master; for he distributes wealth to his servants.

Let each of us, according to his or her ability increase the talent of grace:

let one be adorned in wisdom through good works; let another celebrate a service in splendor.

Ihe one distributes his wealth to the poor; the other communicates the word to those untaught.

Thus we shall increase what has been entrusted to us, and, as faithful stewards of grace, we shall be accounted worthy of the Master’s joy.

Make us worthy of this, Christ our God, in your love for mankind.

As more and more people attend and thoughtfully follow the services of Holy Week, many are struck by the incomparably rich hymnography, often sung in unique and evocative melodies. Many of us have favorite hymns, which we greet as friends when they come along each year. There are the landmark hymns of the Bridegroom services, repeated for several nights running. There are, of course, the unforgettable moments of Holy Thursday: “Of Thy Mystical Supper!” The Twelve Gospels! Then Friday: the Burial Shroud! The Lamentations!… Then Saturday and the victorious Prokeimenon! These are like lanterns, lighting our way forward in an otherwise dark terrain.

One of my own favorites is a humbler little hymn (blink and you’ve missed it for the year) sung with the Aposticha at Matins and Vespers on Holy Tuesday. [They hymn's text is at the beginning of this post.] Why do we sing such a hymn during Holy Week? Let’s spend a minute examining its liturgical context before looking at it more closely.

By the time we sing this hymn, we have entered squarely into the journey to Christ’s life-giving Passion. We have traveled six weeks of Great Lent. We have celebrated the victorious entry of Our Lord into Jerusalem (a bitter victory: Jesus knowingly enters the city where he is to be betrayed and slain). We have heard him preaching with increased intensity against civil and religious hypocrisy and injustice. But as we follow Jesus’s journey, we also direct attention at ourselves. As we Orthodox always do in our penitential hymnography (for example, in the Canon of St. Andrew of Crete), we apply all that hypocrisy, all the examples of pride, lust, murderous intent, to our own lives as we live them. It is not a pretty picture. So we ask God’s forgiveness and beg him to help us to become better human beings.

During Holy Week, this sort of penitence is brought to a high level of intensity, a dosage that we cannot sustain for long. But here we are pushed to our limits, because Our Lord himself, the King of Glory, who made the heavens and the earth, is on his way to being betrayed, abandoned, and slaughtered. Matters do not get any more serious than that. We have to make sure we are paying full attention.

That is why, at the Bridegroom services, usually celebrated on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings of Holy Week, we pray for several things surrounding the theme of bring ourselves into realization of who we are and what is happening:

• We ask God to “illumine the vesture of our souls,” to purify us, to give us appropriate clothing in order to celebrate properly the Feast of Feasts.
• We remind our own selves to be wakeful and watchful, rouse ourselves out of our slumber, to penetrate the usual half-awake state of our minds and hearts.
• We contemplate scriptural images as lessons or as inspiration. The common theme to all these services is that of the Bridegroom (Christ) who comes in the middle of the night and finds some who are prepared, others for whom it is now too late. But on different evenings we sing about the withered fig tree, the betrayal of Judas, and – as a positive image – the repentant harlot who wipes Jesus’s feet with her tears and hair.

It is within this broader context, then, that we come to that Holy Tuesday hymn, in which we urge each other to do the particular work that God has given us to do. Let’s look through it to see what it is saying, and why people may be attracted to it.

• We goad each other to work zealously. Don’t almost do something, or just thing about doing it, or do it in a half-baked way. Do it, and do it well for the sake of God.
• Notice that God gives the wedding garment. God gives the talent. Without this initial gift, we have nothing, we are nothing. But once we realize that God has filled our otherwise empty vessels, it is very much up to us to take up that gift and to act on it.
• When God distributes his gifts, he is not using a cookie cutter to form identical little shapes. He is not drawing a uniform pattern for us to imitate like robots. We are different from each other; we do not strive to conform to a single model, even if sometimes the image of a virtuous person in the Church’s Tradition seems frustratingly uniform. In iconography and spiritual literature (depending on where we’re looking) we might find a preponderance of monks, bishops, and virgins. But if we look closer, we find a message applicable to school teachers, social workers, bankers, moms, dads, writers, sanitation workers – people from all walks of life and different talents.
• When it begins enumerating tasks, our hymn encourages us to “do good work” – whatever our station of life, whatever our vocation. Then it identifies specific vocations – but let us take note how these are both particular and universal in character.
• One “celebrates a service in splendor.” (When I was sacristan during my student days at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, I watched as Fr. Paul Lazor, the consummate liturgical celebrant, made a large and meaningful sign of the cross over himself during that line.) Although this verse does carry a particular, clerical meaning, doesn’t it also pertain to our corporate celebration of the liturgy? All of us celebrate the liturgy in splendor when we participate meaningfully in it. Going still further, can this not also pertain to any way in which we – whether lay or ordained – as “priests” offer the world to God, making our whole life a creative service of splendor?
• In the Divine Liturgy we pray for “those who remember the poor.” Is helping the poor, then, something that someoneelse always does? No. Although we recognize realistically that not everyone is called to make his or her whole life a service to the poor, none of us is off the hook in the basic, universal, Christ-imitating vocation of ministry to the poor, solidarity with the outcast, speaking out against injustice.
• While teaching the Word applies in a particular way to teachers and catechists, don’t we all impart knowledge and wisdom – both explicitly and implicitly Christian Truth – in our various vocations (not least those of us who are parents or godparents)?

Wherever we are, whatever we do, whatever our station in life our task is to build upon what we have been given. First, of course, we have to identify the gift, and that is not always simple. But by understanding the gift and recalling that it indeed comes from God himself, we can build on it. The gospels tell us that wasting our talents is one of the things that seriously displeases God. But we pray that, if we recognize and work with our gifts, we will be “deemed worthy of the Master’s joy,” a joy that is beyond anything that we can imagine.

Dr. Peter Bouteneff (SVOTS ’90) teaches courses in theology, patristics, and spirituality at the seminary, where he is Associate Professor in Systematic Theology. After taking a degree in music in 1983 he lived and worked in Japan, and traveled widely in Asia and Greece. He has a doctorate from Oxford University, where he studied under Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. He has worked for many years in theological dialogue, notably as Executive Secretary for Faith and Order at the World Council of Churches, and has written extensively on Orthodox relations with other churches. His theological interests include Christ, the Church, and the human person, but as a great fan of music and cinema he is also committed to exploring the connections between theology and popular culture, and regularly offers a course on religious themes in film. He conceived of and edits the popular “Foundations” series for SVS Press, to which he has contributed a volume on “dogma and truth” called Sweeter than Honey. His most recent book is Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives, published by Baker Academic Press. Tune in to his podcast on Ancient Faith Radio, Sweeter than Honey.