Maundy Thursday – 2018
Some thoughts and prayers
Marian Free
In the name of God who loved us enough to take on human form. Amen.
Bodies are interesting things – they come in a myriad of shapes and sizes. They can be strong and straight or twisted and misshapen. They can function as we hope and expect or they can rebel and resist. They can be well and whole or they can be eaten away by age, cancer or degenerative disease. They can attract or repel. They are extraordinarily resilient and yet easily broken.
By and large our bodies serve us well, yet many of us have an ambivalent attitude towards them – they are not thin enough, muscular enough, pretty enough. We wish that one bit or another were smaller or larger, smoother or prettier.
Our ambivalence towards our bodies is demonstrated in the way we respond to those whose bodies are damaged, disfigured or aged. We turn our heads away. We are reluctant to touch or to hold those whose skin is not smooth and unblemished, whose limbs are not straight and strong.
God has no such problem with the human form or its functioning. None of the considerations that cause us anxiety or dismay, held any fear for God when God in Jesus chose to inhabit our human form. The one who created us, showed absolute confidence in God’s creation – risking everything to be born and to live as and with us.
Nor did Jesus show any dismay or distaste for the bodies of others. He was not afraid to touch and be touched– touching the blind, the lame and the leper, allowing himself to be touched by the woman with a hemorrhage, the women who anointed him, and ultimately those who flogged him and nailed him to the cross.
At the Last Supper, Jesus did what no self-respecting person would do – he took on a role reserved for a slave. Kneeling before his friends, he took in his hands their dirty, calloused and cracked feet, tenderly touching, washing and wiping them.
The Incarnation is all about bodies – our bodies and God’s body.
Imagine God in human form. Imagine your body as God’s body. Imagine God stooping to wash your feet, touching you caressing you, loving you in all your physicality.
Maundy Thursday Intercessions
Loving God, who in Jesus was not afraid to take for Godself human form, open our eyes to see you in the wounded and dispossessed, in the despised and ill-treated, the refugee and the prisoner. Seeing you in others may we reach out in love and strive to build with you a world of justice and peace.
Word made flesh.
Hear our prayer.
Servant God, may we as your church reach out to the marginalised and distressed in our own communities. May we never seek to meet our own needs, but only the needs of others.
Word made flesh.
Hear our prayer.
Jesus our friend and companion, help us to reach out to those who never experience the gentle, loving touch of another – children abandoned by parents, children, the disabled and the aged cared for in institutions in which there is often not enough love to go around, those whose damaged or deformed bodies cause us to turn our gaze away, and all whose age, frailty or disability confine them to a life of loneliness.
Word made flesh.
Hear our prayer.
Wounded God, bind up the broken hearted, support those who struggle, comfort those who mourn, heal those who are stricken in body, mind or spirit and hold in your loving arms, those who are dying.
Word made flesh.
Hear our prayer.
Jesus, who faced death with fortitude if not courage, give us the grace to accept our own frailty and mortality and to understand that death is the gateway to something so much more.
Swallowsrest 