Reflection for Maundy Thursday - 2nd April 2026
We are now embarking on the Great Three Days, our annual celebration of the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. That makes it sound rather pedestrian, here we go again, it’s all so familiar. It’s hard for us to touch into how it must have been for the first disciples.
Yet we are in the presence of an event with cosmic implications. As Jesus the Son of God died the universe changed, God and humanity were reconciled. There is drama surrounding the narratives of this moment – the sky darkened, earthquakes, graves giving up their dead, the curtain of the temple torn in two. We don’t know what ‘really’ happened, if that is even a sensible question, but the people who wrote these narratives were wanting to convey that something momentous had happened.
The message of salvation is not a philosophy or a nice intellectual idea, it is an event, a happening, or maybe we should follow David Ford and say first and foremost it is a person1. It is something beyond words and concepts, a messy story of the death of God incarnate, that we can only ponder as a mystery. We make this story present each year in our services of the Triduum, not a re-enactment but a making-present of the energy of the original event.
There is something much deeper than emotion that touches us through these events, indeed we can get off track if we simply seek an emotional reaction. Sometimes that does happen but the real work goes on much more deeply within. We must let the mystery of it enter our hearts, let the familiar words soak into us. They carry an energy that is beyond their literal meaning and take us into the presence of God.
As Martin Smith has been saying in the expositions this week2, we don’t know how atonement works but what we do know, along with those first disciples, is that through the death of Jesus the gulf between humanity and God has been bridged. Much has been written through the centuries since that event to try to capture this in words and concepts. Those words enable us to share the meaning of this event with one another but it is important not to get stuck there. The death and resurrection of Jesus carries many layers of meaning and those meanings have to be found anew by each one of us year by year.
What cannot help but be in the background, or even the foreground, this year is the dangerous and violent state of the world. We look on in dismay at the resources and energy that are being poured out in the destruction of war – not just in the Middle East but in many places in the world. We also have to face our inability to curb the demands on the environment posed by our desire for comfort and convenience in the modern world.
As I have held the state of the world in my heart this week part of psalm 33 has stayed with me:
A king is not saved by his great army;
a warrior is not delivered by his great strength.
The war horse is a vain hope for victory,
and by its great might it cannot save.
Well, it is no longer war horses but the high tech warfare of missiles and drones, but even so surely military might is not the way to the victory that matters. We long for a world where everyone can flourish and where the environment is fertile and supportive of the life of all creatures including ourselves. Jesus showed us a new way, that of a self-giving love that sets aside our own needs so that together we can find the way to mutual flourishing.
It was a powerful example that Jesus set but so much more than simply an example to follow. In his death he poured out the Spirit upon humanity to empower us to live the way that he lived. In our own strength we cannot live that way but through the power given us through the Spirit we can be transformed inwardly so that we start to live together in a new way. The world will be changed from the bottom up, not through military might but by communities of people living this new life in Christ.
I pray that through these next three days our hearts will be opened anew to the life-giving power of Jesus’ death and resurrection, that we may become transparent to God’s love and shine as light in a dark world.
Mother Anne - 2nd April 2026
1 ‘Meeting God in John – A Companion for Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Beyond’ By David F. Ford. SPCK Publishing Nov 2025. This has been our reading in refectory through Lent.
2‘Love Set Free – Meditations on the Passion According to St. John’ By Martin L. Smith. Church Publishing Incorporated Sep 2012. We have been hearing extracts from this book through the last week.