Feast + Fast: Maundy Thursday

For each day of Holy Week, Christina Rees offers a reflection for our hearts and minds, and a recipe for a simple meal to nourish our bodies. All these recipes and many more can be found in her book Feast + Fast: Food for Lent and Easter

Thursday 9^th April 2020 – Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday, the day before Jesus was crucified, is filled with events that have profoundly shaped the understanding and practice of the Christian faith. The account of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet as they gathered for supper became the foot washing ceremony, observed for many hundreds of years on this day in churches and at informal gatherings throughout Christendom. Jesus told his friends that, as he had washed their feet, so they ought to wash one another’s feet, a sign of being prepared to care for and serve one another, a willingness to be humbled for the sake of Christ, an insight into the nature of God.

The meal shared that night by Jesus and his disciples became the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, a most precious sacrament by which believers are able to experience union with Christ and with one another, whether that is taken as a symbolic re-enactment, real spiritual union or more literally as partaking of the real substance of Christ’s body and blood.     

After supper, Jesus and the disciples, apart from Judas who has already left in order to betray Jesus, walk to a nearby olive grove known as the Garden of Gethsemane. It is here that Jesus sets his will, though sweating blood, and sets his face towards the cross. It is here that Jesus accepts whatever terrible events will unfold during that night and into the next day.

Maundy Thursday reveals ugly truths about human nature. It shows the stark contrast between Jesus, humbly and tenderly washing the feet of some of his closest friends, the same men who would a few hours later betray, desert and deny him. Jesus’ faithfulness to his Father’s will, his ability to submit himself to the humiliation, torture and mockery that was to come, shamed his disciples and still shame us.

I might like to think if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep, run away or pretended I never knew him. But I know that isn’t the case. I know it because of all the times in my life when I have been too weak to bother about things that really matter, when I have not stood up for those being treated unjustly, when I have sidestepped blame by shading the truth or by telling downright lies and when I have betrayed my own friends in different ways.

As I wrote in a reflection for Maundy Thursday in Feast + Fast – Food for Lent and Easter, at some point if we are ever to be freed from bondage to our past, we need to accept God’s forgiveness and also forgive ourselves for our weakness, our ‘sickness’, our sin. We need to forgive ourselves for doubting God’s capability, God’s commitment to us, God’s faithfulness to us. We need to forgive ourselves for resisting God’s enduring, transforming love, which is the greatest power there is.

We need to see that it is this love that is the only way out of the Garden, the only way through Good Friday, the only Way. We need to understand that it is the power of this love that made the first Easter possible and that this love is still here, still with us, still waiting to transform our lives, if we let it.”  

During this time of lockdown, it is still likely that we can create tasty meals from what we already have in our cupboards. The following recipe for a basic Bircher Muesli requires only one fresh ingredient, yogurt, as the juice can be replaced by some tinned fruit in its own juice. If needs be, even the yogurt can be replaced by tinned rice pudding, custard or tapioca.

RECIPE

Bircher Muesli

Contributed by ALEX REES

This is my inspiringly hyper-fit daughters favourite standby breakfast. For those who don’t like or who can’t eat eggs, this filling and energy-packed muesli will see them happily from breakfast until lunch. The only trick is to remember that it has to be made the night before.

Serves one hungry person!

4oz/115g oats

1oz/25g (about 10 pieces) dried fruit e.g. raisins, dates, apricots or figs

2oz/50g (about 20 pieces) nuts (optional)

10fl oz/275ml) fruit juice

3 or 4 tablespoons plain natural live yogurt

Put the oats, dried fruit and nuts into a large bowl. Pour in enough fruit juice (apple, orange or combinations like peach and passion fruit are delicious) to cover the other ingredients. 

Refrigerate overnight. The oats will absorb the juice and the nuts and dried fruit will become moist and softened. In the morning, add the yogurt, stir and eat.