Eat and Run

“I hate to eat and run, but…” It’s something we say or imagine saying. But it’s not usually how we talk about worship. In fact, worship is for lingering, for gathering and reflecting. But there is something different about Maundy Thursday. We often focus on the meal Jesus shares with his disciples, but the “maundatum” or “mandate” of Maundy Thursday is linked to washing feet, because Jesus calls us to love one another in the way Jesus does when he washes the disciples’ feet— to love one another like servants rather than masters.

I think of the show Downton Abbey when I think about servants, because you rarely see the servants sitting around doing nothing. While the family converses over a multi-course meal or entertains visitors in a sitting room, the servants are rushing around in out-of-the-way parts of the house, out of sight yet keeping the house running. There’s a danger in today’s world of glorifying busyness, of using the “eat and run” excuse to keep ourselves moving so we don’t have to pay attention to the why or the how of what makes our lives so hectic. For congregations that rarely have worship services in the middle of the week, Maundy Thursday offers an opportunity to cut through the fast-paced noise of our lives and slow us down to pay attention. To remember why we celebrate the Lord’s Supper as an outward sign of an inward grace. To feel the water wash away the dirt from our feet or our hands. To pray with Jesus at Gethsemane. To hear once again the mandate to love one another as Christ has loved us. To be ready to serve each other, not so we can be busy, but so that we can be active agents of love in the world.

These are the vignettes of Maundy Thursday that we invite our congregants to experience. Perhaps you move through the story chronologically. Perhaps you treat these moments as a constellation of experiences that center around Christ’s mandate, or perhaps you choose one—the foot washing, the Passover meal turned Lord’s Supper, the Garden of Gethsemane—to give particular focus. However you approach this service, find ways for your congregation to enact the story: to wash hands or feet, to share in a meal, to pray with those in distress. These are all ways we practice loving one another as Christ has loved us. I also encourage you to end the service by stripping the altar if you did not already do this on Palm/Passion Sunday. Removing everything but a single cross from the altar as part of worship helps symbolize the journey to Golgotha, preparing congregants for Good Friday.

Dr. Lisa Hancock, Director of Worship Arts Ministries, served as an organist and music minister in United Methodist congregations in the legacy Northwest Texas and North Texas Annual Conferences, as well as the New Day Amani/Upendo house churches in Dallas. After receiving her Master of Sacred Music and Master of Theological Studies from Perkins School of Theology, Lisa earned her PhD in Religious Studies from Southern Methodist University, where she researched and wrote on the doctrine of Christ, disability, and atonement.