The Triduum: Maundy Thursday

The Promise of Home

Over the next three days, tonight, at the good Friday service and at the Easter Vigil, I will be looking at this idea of home. Tonight we will think about the promise of home, tomorrow the price of home and on Saturday the arrival at home.

When Claire and I were sharing our first home together, we didn’t have two pennies to rub together. Straight after university, I had managed to get a job in a school in the middle of nowhere in deep rural Lincolnshire and Claire got a job first as a lab technician before becoming a teaching assistant. We moved into the tiny and rather uneventful village of Heckington in the flatness of Lincolnshire and it was a dull place to be, but we were starting out on our own and were excited to be moving into our own place even though we had to sleep on the floor and our only furniture was two garden chairs. On weekends we would sometimes go and look at the posh show homes at executive new builds. On one trip the saleswoman looked us up and down and in a very rude way said we could she supposed, look around but please don’t make a mess and be quick. Amazing how her demeanour changed when I said that I had inherited from a wealthy aunt, which of course I hadn’t. Suddenly she was piling us with literature and trying to make us promise to come and visit again. Leaving her with a fake phone number we laughed all the way back to our tiny and empty little 2 up and 2 down.

Of course later once we were able to move into our own house and it was amazing the amount of paperwork that the bank, the builders and the legal teams had us sign. Reams and reams of information and hard work, but once we had signed what felt like our souls away at the start of a 40 year mortgage, we were given the shiny new keys to the shiny new home and we were so excited. Having a home, a place of belonging, a place of safety that was ours. But the cost was high for us. The mortgage, the word of which comes from the French, literal means a death pledge, i.e. a promise to keep paying until you die, was a heavy burden and I am sure lots of you know exactly what I mean. You pay them for what feels like forever and they give you the means to buy a house. We had entered a covenant with the bank, and you can be sure that we were utterly at their mercy should we not pay one month.

 At the Last Supper, at the Eucharist, we also enter a covenant. We also enter into a mortgage, a pledge to death. Jesus, tells His disciples just how eager He is to get His disciples, His followers, us to sign on the dotted line. In Luke 15, as they sit at the Passover meal, just as we have, Jesus says ‘I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer’. The word desired in English really doesn’t get the full meaning of the original Greek. It’s the same word they use for lust – a complete want and need. For Jesus, it seems that this was the moment He was waiting with the most anticipation. But unlike a mortgage advisor looking for a commission, or a housebuilder or a bank, Jesus’ terms and conditions for His covenant are rather different. Instead of demanding obedience, or payment, or praise, Jesus takes bread and says ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ A body about to broken on a cross. Jesus takes a goblet of wine and says ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins’. You see on this contract, on this mortgage, on this covenant, Jesus is providing the home, and also paying the price. The mortgage, the death pledge, hasn’t got our signature on it. No, it has His. The reward? Salvation and life forever. We have not earned it. We have not paid for it. We have taken no part in delivering it. But Jesus promises us the new home, promises us a share in the Kingdom, promises us life, fully realised with Him forever.

In that beautiful hymn ‘How Deep the Fathers Love for Us’ by Stuart Townsend, he absolutely captures what is signed and sealed as in the last verse it says:

I will not boast in anything

No gifts, no powr, no wisdom

But I will boast in Jesus Christ

His death and resurrection

Why should I gain from His reward?

I cannot give an answer

But this I know with all my heart

His wounds have paid my ransom

His wounds on the cross are the price, the mortgage, the death pledge. And Jesus wastes no time. In Matthews account we are told they sing a hymn and straight away they go to the Mount of Olives and from there to the Garden of Gethsemane. The contract has been signed, the price of the death pledge has to be paid. And in the darkness, with the disciples who have in no way really understood what Jesus has done for them, who have no idea the price He is willing to pay and is about to pay, who were yet to understand that the meal that signed the deal meant a journey for Christ to the cross, in that darkness Jesus waits praying for anyway out, but surrendered to the Fathers will. Thus the darkness came to claim its ill gotten gains. And it was night.