Maundy Musings

 

Today is Maundy Thursday, the first day of the Great Paschal Triduum.    The name Maundy refers to the ritual footwashing that traditionally takes place on this day.   St. John, who provides the longest account of the evening remembered today of any of the Evangelists, even though he begins his account after the Last Supper, highlighted in all the other Gospels, has ended, tells us that after the Last Supper, Jesus washed His disciples’ feet, then told them:

 

Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well: for so I am.  If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.   For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. (Jn. 13:13-15)

 

Later in the same chapter St. John records Jesus giving the New Commandment: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another”.   The Latin word for commandment is mandatum, the source of the word “mandate” that public health officers have made so odious by their abuse of such over the last two years.   It is also the source of the word Maundy as the word for ritual foot-washing.   

 

Footwashing was not the only ritual instituted by Jesus that evening.   The other Evangelists all record the institution of the Eucharist which took place immediately prior to this during the Last Supper.   As St. John begins his account of this evening at the end of the Last Supper he does not record the institution, although earlier in his Gospel as part of his account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand – the only miracle other than the Resurrection found in all four Gospels - he recorded Jesus’ discourse about Himself as the Bread of Life in which the meaning of the Eucharist is expounded at length.  

 

That St. John begins his account of this evening after the Last Supper, so emphasized in the other Gospels, has ended is not surprising.   Eusebius of Caeserea, the Church’s Herodotus, in his Ecclesiastical History records an account by Clement of Alexandria of how copies of the other three Gospels had come into St. John’s hands and he, having proclaimed them faithful and true, wrote his own Gospel with an eye to including material that they had left out.   (Book III, chapter 24).   The Patristic writers specify that St. John included the events that took place between Jesus’ baptism and John the Baptist’s imprisonment – this covers all of the first three chapters of his Gospel and at least part of the fourth.   Other material that St. John includes that the other Evangelists omit are Jesus’ words and deeds in Jerusalem on His visits there prior to the Triumphal Entry, and His lengthy private discourses.   The latter is what we find in his account of the evening of the Last Supper.   After the account of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet, commanding them to do likewise, and the subsequent account of Judas’ departure, the New Commandment comes at the beginning of a lengthy discourse that extends through to the end of the seventeenth chapter.   It is generally called the Upper Room Discourse although Jesus and the disciples begin moving from the Upper Room to the Garden of Gethsemane at the end of the fourteenth chapter.   In this discourse Jesus speaks of His coming departure back to the Father, comforts His disciples with the assurance that He will return to take them to the place He is preparing for them in His Father’s house, promises that when He returns to the Father He will send another Comforter, the Holy Spirit, to them, commands them to abide in Him (“I am the true vine”) and expands on the New Commandment.   He warns them of the persecution they will face in the world for His sake, but assures them that He has overcome the world.   He concludes the discourse with a prayer in which He asks the Father to glorify the Son, to keep His disciples from the evil in the world, and that they might be one as the Father and Son are one.

 

One interesting difference between St. John’s account of this evening and those of the other Evangelists cannot be explained by the Fourth Evangelist’s consciously choosing material that had not already been covered.   This is the difference which F. F. Bruce called “the thorniest problem in the New Testament”, namely that St. John seems to date the events of this evening one day earlier than the other Evangelists do.   In the Synoptic Gospels, the Last Supper seems to be the Passover Seder.   In St. John’s Gospel, however, Jesus’ accusers when they bring Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate, refrain from entering the Roman judgment hall themselves “lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the Passover.” (18:28).   There is a theological implication to St. John’s timing.   At the beginning of his Gospel he tells of how John the Baptist pointed Jesus out to his followers saying “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. (1:29)   By St. John’s dating Jesus’ death on the Cross would have taken place at precisely the moment on the Ides of Nisan when the Passover lamb was slain.

 

The other Evangelists, however, seem to be quite clear on the Last Supper having been the Passover.   St. Mark, for example, begins his account of the Last Supper by saying “And the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the Passover” (14:12) and a few verses later says “And his disciples went forth, and came into the city, and found as he had said unto them: and they made ready the Passover”.   St. Luke tells us that at the Supper Jesus said “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (22:15) and includes details (e.g. “the cup after supper”, 22:20) that belong specifically to a Passover Seder.

 

So how do we account for this?   Let us begin by taking the liberal explanation, the kind that the Jesus Seminar and similar types, would suggest, i.e., that one or more of the Gospels is unreliable, off the table.   This leaves us with a number of possibilities. 

 

One of these is that either the Synoptic Evangelists or St. John do not actual say what they appear to be saying at first glance.   It is not difficult to make the case that St. John does not actually date the death of Jesus to the slaying of the Paschal lamb as he appears to do.    Passover begins on the Ides of Nisan but it lasts a week.   Therefore, St. John in 18:28 could have been talking about a meal later in the week of Passover than the initial Seder.    

 

Another possibility is that Jesus arranged to eat the Passover a day early.   “The day of unleavened bread” that the other Evangelists talk about could possibly refer to the day before Passover when the bedikat chametz, the thorough going over of the home to find and eliminate any leaven, took place, and “when the Passover must be killed” could possibly refer to the time of day rather than the specific date.   While this is a far less plausible explanation of the words of the Synoptic Evangelists than the explanation in the previous paragraph is of St. John’s, it arguably finds support within the Synoptic Gospels themselves in that these record that the chief priests who conspired to take Jesus “by craft, and put him to death” had said “Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people” (Mk. 14:1-2).  The chief priests would have had to sign off on any request to have an early Passover and this would have provided them with a reason to do so.   If they allowed Jesus to have an early Passover, that would have gotten Him away from the crowd, enabling Judas to bring their posse to arrest Him, all before the Passover actually began.   As it stands, the words of the conspirators just quoted are difficult to reconcile with their actions if the Last Supper took place on the actual Passover as SS Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to indicate, because that would mean they did precisely what they had agreed not to do. 

 

Interestingly enough, another explanation could be that both the Synoptic Evangelists and St. John mean exactly what they appear to mean and that both are right because there was more than one Ides of Nisan.  Even though that explanation sounds at first like it might come from a movie by Harold Ramis featuring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell we know that at least one sect of Second Temple Judaism, the Essenes, the ascetic mystic sect that left behind the famous scrolls of the Qumran Cave, followed a different calendar from that of other Jews.   They used what they called a Jubilee Calendar, a solar-based pentecontad calendar that placed the Passover on the same day of the week every year.   By the ordinary Jewish lunar calendar, in which each month begins with the new moon, the Passover falls on different days of the week depending upon the year.    While Jesus was not likely to have used the Essenes’ calendar – and it would have put the Passover on a date that fits none of the Gospels if He had - the point is that there were differences among first century Jews about these matters.   The beginning of the month was set by the Sanhedrin which ruled on the basis of witnesses attesting to having seen the new moon.   Discrepancies were not unknown. Rosh Hashanah 22b in the Talmud discusses an incident in which the Boethusians – a sect similar if not identical to the Sadducees – bribed a couple of witnesses to falsify their testimony about the new moon.   Although the Talmud depicts the scheme as failing and the Sanhedrin becoming stricter as to whose testimony they would accept – Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein, a Messianic Rabbi (1) of the nineteenth century, argued in his New Testament Commentary that the Sadducees had pulled this same stunt the year of the Crucifixion in order to get their way in their famous controversy with the Pharisees over the timing of the Feast of Weeks which would have had the effect of moving Passover by a day as well.   The Pharisees would not have taken this well and with their large popular following would have been able to get away with keeping the Passover the day before where it would have been without the shenanigans.  Since He was to die the next day on the official Passover, Lichtenstein reasoned, Jesus celebrated the Passover with His disciples on the day the Pharisees kept it that year.

 

While this third explanation involves more conjecture than the other two, it is hardly baseless conjecture.   Jesus Christ is the “Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world” as John the Baptist said, and our Passover sacrificed for us as St. Paul wrote (1 Cor. 5:7), making it appropriate that His death occur when St. John implies it did at the time of the slaying of the Paschal lamb.   Through this Sacrifice He established the long promised New Covenant as He announced in advance at the Last Supper, as He instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist, making it appropriate that this take place at the Passover of the Old Covenant, as the Synoptic Gospels say.   The third explanation, which allows for both, seems the best to me.

 

Have a blessed Maundy Thursday.

(1) That is a Rabbi who believed in Jesus as Messiah.

Lighting Candles and Cursing Darkness

The expression “it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness” is often said to be an ancient Chinese proverb.   Many even attribute it to China’s greatest philosopher, the legendary sixth century BC sage and government advisor/official Kong Fuzi himself.   There is not much in the way of evidence to support these claims.   The earliest known use of the saying goes back only to the early twentieth century AD, during which century it spread like wildfire due to its popularity among liberal Democrat American presidents and their wives.   Although Roosevelt and Kennedy predated the period in which liberal Democrats became enamoured of all things Chinese provided they were no older than the Cultural Revolution it is probably stretching credibility to the breaking point to suggest that they had some special insight into the Confucian origins of an adage that continues to elude the best scholars in the field. 

 

In actuality, it is difficult to imagine such a saying originating in the wisdom literature of any ancient civilization when it so clearly bears the manufacturing stamp of twentieth century, Western, liberalism on it.   As a comparative value judgement it is a truism and an insipid, banal, and trite one at that.   It implies that we are under some sort of moral requirement to make an either/or choice between lighting a candle and cursing the darkness, thus demanding the question why one cannot do both, to which question, of course, there is no answer.  

 

Today is a good day to be contemplating these matters.

 

It is the second day of the second month.   On the liturgical calendar it is a Feast Day, the official designation of which in the Book of Common Prayer is “The Presentation of Christ in the Temple Commonly Called the Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin”.   This is because it is forty days after Christmas.   The Mosaic Law required in the twelfth chapter of the book of Leviticus that after a woman gave birth to a male child she would undergo a forty day purification period after which she would present the child in the tabernacle – later the Temple – to which she would bring a lamb for a burnt offering and a pigeon or turtledove for a sin offering, or, if this was beyond her means, two turtledoves or pigeons for both offerings.   The fulfilment of these requirements is recorded in the second chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke – it is specified that the second option for the offering was taken – which is the occasion upon which Simeon and Anna prophesy over the Holy Infant.   The informal designation of this Feast is Candlemas.  (1)  This title alludes to the ancient custom of the blessing of the candles which traditionally occurs on this day.   The candles, representing Christ as the Light of the World, are presented in Church in ceremonial reenactment of the presenting of Christ in the Temple, and are blessed.

 

In how many parishes will this be occurring this year?

 

Not very many.

 

The Hungarian Jewish writer Arthur Koestler is most remembered for his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon.   In the novel, his protagonist, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, is taken away by the secret police of the revolutionary regime he helped create in the middle of the night, and imprisoned.   He is given a number of hearings, not for the purpose of determining guilt or innocence but obtaining his confession.  Ultimately, he gives the confession and is executed.   Although the story and its characters are fictional they represent real events that had just taken place in the Soviet Union.  After Joseph Stalin had become dictator he had secured his control over the Communist Party and his absolute rule over the Soviet Union by ruthlessly eliminating his rivals within the party.   One of the more conspicuous elements of the Purge were the show trials, held in Moscow from 1936 to 1938, in which Trotskyists and other Old Bolsheviks who dissented to Stalin’s rule were made to publicly confess to various crimes before they were put to death.

 

It was Koestler’s girlfriend at the time, Daphne Hardy who later went on to become a sculptor, who gave the book its title.  She was also the one who translated it from his German manuscript and arranged for its publication in London, while Koestler was fleeing the Nazis in a highly adventurous manner.   The title was inspired by the fourteenth verse of the fifth chapter of Job although it has little to do with what Eliphaz the Temanite was haranguing Job about.   It refers to the contrast between the reality (darkness) and the illusion (noon) of Communism as experienced by true believers – such as Rubashov within the novel, and Koestler its author (2) – who are brought to the realization that the ideal paradise they believed they were creating was actually an extremely oppressive tyranny.

 

It seems that no matter how many times the darkness of Communism is revealed for what it is – when a Malcolm Muggeridge tells the world about the Terror Famine in the Ukraine, when an Arthur Koestler paints a literary picture of the Show Trials, when an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brings the GULAG to light – there will be those who blindly look to Communism as a source of light.

 

Today, our governments have taken away our most basic rights and liberties.   They have forbidden us from gathering together socially, assembling as religious communities to worship, and in some jurisdictions, even to leave our homes without their explicit permission and a justification they consider valid.   They have forbidden large portions of the population from running their own businesses or earning their own livings for extended periods of time, and basically told us all that we must look to government rather than to our businesses and jobs for our means of support.   They have conditioned us to expect security guards to be the first and last people we see everywhere we go, to be under constant surveillance, and to be stopped by enforcement agents at any time and made to give an account of why we are out and what we are doing.   They have encouraged us to snitch on our friends and neighbours every time we see or suspect them of violating any of an ever growing list of infractions.   Protests against these lockdowns are broken up by police and the protestors fined and/or arrested.   We are told by the media, speaking with a monolithic voice much like the press in the Soviet Union, that all of this is humanitarian and necessary for the greater good.   Everything about this, right down to the “science” invoked as justification for it all, resembles nothing so much as the dark tyranny the Bolsheviks imposed upon Russia a century ago.

 

These lockdowns are the reason that Churches will not be meeting to bless the candles today.   The politicians and health bureaucrats have declared that Church services are “non-essential” and, even though it is clearly Satan’s opinion that the politicians and health bureaucrats are speaking, the Church leaders have decided to obey man rather than God.

 

Which brings us back to where we started.   The nonsense that it is “better to light a candle than to curse the darkness”.

 

Unless the Churches start cursing the darkness that is Communism – including the Communism that wears the mask of public health orders to slow the spread of bat flu – instead of kissing its butt they will never be able to light candles again.

 

(1)   An old tradition says that fair weather on Candlemas indicates that winter will be long.   In North America, this has led to the day acquiring the secular name of “Groundhog Day” after the creature assigned the task of checking the weather.   The legend accompanying this name is more specific than the tradition from the Old World and the specifics are rather amusing.   The groundhog or woodchuck – a really big squirrel who lives in a hole in the ground rather than in a tree – comes out of hibernation on Candlemas to check the weather.   If he sees his shadow – which will only happen in fair weather – it means there will be six more weeks of winter.   If he does not – it will be an early spring.   The joke of this is that the vernal equinox in this part of the world is always more than six weeks after Candlemas.    It falls between the nineteenth and twenty-first of March – this year on the twentieth.   Thus, a mere six more weeks of winter after the second of February would constitute an early spring.   The outcome, in other words, is the same whether the groundhog sees his shadow or not.   Very amusing – almost as much as Harold Ramis’ 1993 comedy film Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.

(2)   Nine years after Darkness at Noon came out, Richard Crossman’s anthology of ex-communists-turned-anti-communists The God That Failed was published.   Koestler was one of the contributors.