This Night - A Sermon for Maundy Thursday

They are gathered around the table, candles lit, reclining on pillows.  The youngest child, her dark hair curled, a slight lilt of French in the softness of her diction, sings in Hebrew: Mah nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot? Outside the diesel roar of a Panzerwagon passes, all are silent for a moment, alert to every street sound until quiet returns. 

“How is this night different from all other nights?” was the question she sang.  They are gathered to mark the liberation of Israel from Egypt, the Passover that was God’s great act of love for his people. 

It is a willful act, this remembrance.  Outside the faithfulness of God seems fragile and fickle.  They are in Paris, it is 1942.  The Nazis have been arresting anyone who would sing these songs and eat this meal.  12,884 Jews were captured and brought to a sports stadium, two-thirds of them were children.  The woman in whose house this Passover meal is being held had spent three days caring for the children in the stadium before they were loaded on trains for Auschwitz. Her name is Mother Maria Skobtsova.

Mother Maria—a Russian refugee, a one-time Bolshevik, had moved from the atheism of her youth to an embrace of Christ.  It was the death of her 5 year old daughter, Anastasia that had been the final turning point toward her calling.  As she later wrote, in the grief at Anastasia’s death she heard a call “to be a mother for all, for all who need maternal care, assistance, or protection."  That call led her to take Monastic vows in the Orthodox Church among the Russian refugees of Paris; vows she took on the condition that she would never live in a convent but would instead give her life to serving the poor and marginalized. 

How is this night different from all other nights?

It was on this night, in a celebration of Passover, that having loved his own Jesus loved them to the end.  He showed this love by breaking bread and pouring wine, signs of the death that would be his ultimate offering.  It was on this night that Jesus humbled himself and washed the feet of his disciples, even the feet of his betrayer.  This humble washing was a living parable, an example of the love that was to mark out his disciples in the world. 

It was that love and its mark that Mother Maria recognized as more revolutionary than anything the Bolsheviks could offer.  That Christ, God become human, would take upon himself a shameful death, was for her a sign that God transcended the logic of nature.  Nature is that set of drives that dictate our survival, the evolutionary logic of the fittest.  When we follow our natural impulses, we seek the preservation of ourselves, our own, our kin.  In such a state it might make sense to give one’s life for the sake of one’s child, a brother or sister, maybe even a nation.  But to give one’s life for an enemy, an outsider? That goes against the logic of survival and selfish genes.  It was that love that Christ offered and we are to imitate, loving as Mother Maria said, “to the end without exception.”

How is this night different from all other nights?

Where was Mary the mother of Jesus on the night we now remember?  She was in Jerusalem we know.  Perhaps she was there with her son in the upper room.  Perhaps she was elsewhere with the greater gathering of disciples.  Wherever she was, it was on this night that her son was betrayed, beaten, humiliated.  The prophecy given at his birth finally became true: her heart was pierced with the sword of his suffering (Luke 2:34-35).

For Mother Maria, it was Mary her namesake, that was the model of discipleship.  To be a disciple we must imitate Jesus, our teacher, but we should also imitate his Mother, our example.  Jesus chose his cross, offering himself for the sake of the world, and we should also give ourselves for the sake of love.  Mary never chose the cross, and yet, as Mother Maria wrote, “she cannot help suffering the sufferings of her Son.” 

I was recently in an Intensive Care room in a Catholic hospital.  In the corner, there hung a crucifix—a cross with the twisted body of Christ in the midst of his suffering.  It is a long tradition to offer this image to those in the midst of bodily agony.  It gives a kind of solidarity with Christ, our suffering joining his suffering, his suffering joining ours.

But as I looked at the crucifix, I thought too of Mary.  I’d talked to the friends and family members of this patient, those who had to watch their beloved’s suffering.  In this they were also experiencing the solidarity of the cross, not with Christ but with his Mother.  She had to endure watching her son hang there; they had to watch their loved one experience the humiliating agony of disease.

“[The human soul] should imitate not only Christ, but also the mother of God,” writes Mother Skobtsova.  In this way, we should develop what she calls the “God-motherly part of the human soul.”  This part of the soul, she says, “begins to see other people as its children; it adopts them for itself.”  It is through this love that we begin to love others as Christ loved us, even to the end: co-suffering with our neighbor. In following Christ, we take up our crosses; but in loving Christ, we follow his Mother and suffer in solidarity with our neighbors as they bear their own crosses.  It is with Mary that we stand, as we weep with the mothers of Nashville and Ukraine; Syria and Jerusalem; it is with Mary that we bear witness to the suffering of a world that is unwilling to stop raising its hands in violence against all her children.

How is this night different from all other nights?

In 1943 Mother Maria was arrested for helping forge Baptismal Certificates to offer cover for Jews still living in Paris.  She was taken to Ravensbruk Concentration Camp, where she was imprisoned for two years.  On this night, in 1945 the Nazis were selecting the next group of prisoners to be executed.  Following the night of the Passover, on the day we call Holy Saturday, the selected prisoners were taken to the gas chambers.  Many witnesses in the camp say that Mother Maria, had not been selected, but volunteered to take the place of another.  She entered the chamber and was killed.  In so doing, she joined the suffering of the Mother of God with the suffering of the Son, freely offered for the sake of love.  Having loved her own, all those who had become her children, she loved them to the end “with no exceptions.” It is to that love that we are called this night. Amen.