Maundy Thursday 21 April 2011

If there is one word that captures what is distinctive about Christianity it is 'grace'.

If there is one wonder of our life that expresses that most it is the Blessed Sacrament.

As someone wrote, 'the world can do almost anything as well as or better than the church. You need not be a Christian to build houses, feed the hungry or heal the sick. There is only one thing the world cannot do. It cannot offer grace.'

To live as a Christian is to live conscious of another world, open to the supernatural enfolding and empowering of grace.

Grace - G-R-A-C-E - God's Riches At Christ's Expense - I've heard it put that way.

What riches are ours, particularly in this Sacrament. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.

God's riches - all the benefits of his acceptance, love and empowering - at Christ's Expense - flowing from the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus all of which is already present at the Maundy Thursday supper table and at every eucharist.

Blessed, praised and hallowed be Our Lord Jesus Christ, upon His Throne in Glory, in the Most Holy Sacrament -and in the hearts of all his faithful people.

Tonight God's riches, his unconditional love, are poured into our hearts at the expense of Jesus Christ Himself!

By tonight’s action Our Lord gives himself by intention, and intention to be sealed on the Cross by the actual breaking of his body and shedding of his blood.

His intention is love of Jesus since sacrifice is about love before it is about death. For Our Lord it is about a love stronger than death.

The Blessed Sacrament is His Body Broken for us, his Blood outpoured for us.

We are never worthy of this Gift, as we say repeatedly before Holy Communion. Lord I am not worthy to receive you...

There is nothing we can do to make ourselves worthy, to make Jesus love us more.

There is also nothing we can do to make him love us less, that is the wonder of it all.

'There's a wideness in God's mercy, like the wideness of the sea' wrote Fr. Faber 'but we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own; and we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own. If our love were but more simple, we should take him at his word; and our lives would be all sunshine in the sweetness of our Lord.'

Grace, God's riches at Christ's Expense, this is the very sweetness of our Lord to us.

Grace, unconditional love and acceptance, is foundational to Christianity.

The Blessed Sacrament is not given to us tonight as a reward for good behaviour, even if God's grace is not to be presumed upon.

Jesus makes as free a gift to us which he desires to give to all people.
It is a free gift but not a cheap gift. What expense Our Lord has borne to provide this gift!

And in the garden secretly and on the Cross on high should teach his brethren and inspire to suffer and to die.

After the joyful table gathering tonight we have a procession to a place of sorrows where we keep the Gethsemane Watch before the Blessed Sacrament. I hope a few of us might manage to obey the plea Jesus made to his disciples on this holy night

Could you not watch with me one hour?

So we move back into the action of tonight, the footwashing, the Last Supper Table and Gethsemane , pondering grace, God’s riches at Christ’s expense, given for us and for our salvation on this most holy night.