Homily by the Rt. Revd. and Rt. Hon. Lord Chartres for Maundy Thursday, April 2, 2026

The Rt. Revd. and Rt. Hon. Lord Chartres, GCVO, served as Bishop of London from 1995 to 2017.

Transcript

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Father, all those words and thoughts that come from thee, wilt thou bless them and make them fruitful. And all those words and thoughts that come not from thee but from our own vanity wilt thou forgive. Amen. This is my commandment that you should love one another as I have loved you. Jesus' words to his disciples at the Last Supper. His new commandment, his mandatum novum, which is why this is called Morne Thursday. Love for God, as we can see from the gospel story of the feet washing, is not so much an emotion as self-giving. God so loved the world that he was generous and gave himself to us in the person of his son, Jesus Christ. It's that kind of love that ought to mark and build up and nourish a Christian community. As Saint Anthony the Great said, We are all of us saved in our neighbor. And tonight we are going to recall the Last Supper, which Jesus Christ shared with his friends. And Paul said, I have received of the Lord, which also I delivered unto you. He was writing, perhaps, his letter to the Christians of Corinth, perhaps only twenty plus years after the events of the great first holy week. So it's quite recent tradition. I delivered to you what I received first. Jesus gave very few commandments, but this is one of them. Do this in remembrance of me. And we are to remember not so much an event a long time ago. We are to remember as opposed to dismembering him, as the Corinthians were doing by their quarrels and their divisions, especially the division between rich and poor. We are to remember Jesus Christ, not dismember him. And we are to remember him in the here and now. We are to become his body, incorporate in the mystical body of our Lord Jesus Christ. We are to remember Christ in our life together and become his hands, his feet, and in the power of the Holy Spirit embody his love so it can be touched and felt. In the night in which he was betrayed, danger staring them all in the face. Instead of looking back, the Lord handed over his future, his future in the world to ordinary, frail people like us. Our Lord Jesus Christ took the bread with thanksgiving. He broke it and then gave it to them. That pattern taken with thanksgiving, broken, given. That's the pattern of a truly Christian life. We are every day to give thanks for the gift of life. Waking in the morning, eating our food, working, going to bed, always giving thanks. Unblessed bread goes stale. And an unblessed life goes stale as well. We have to lift up our lives to God in constant thanksgiving and see everything we are as an expression of the divine love. And once we've done that, once we've lifted up our lives with the prayer of thanksgiving, we can receive it back, charged with a new intensity, taken with thanksgiving. But if you live in this way, if you live as Paul says, always joyful, constant in prayer, constant in thanksgiving, you inevitably encounter suffering. Jesus is facing arrest, imprisonment, mockery, beating, death of a degrading kind, betrayal by a friend. But the bread is broken, it is not destroyed, and after the resurrection, with the gift of the Spirit which pours from his side, Jesus, the bread of life, becomes available to those who love him in a quite new way. Taken with thanksgiving, broken, given. It's the pattern which he has given to us as the pattern of a Christian life, and it's repeated in our lives at every stage, again and again. Giving thanks for life, accepting the suffering which is the price and the part of love, and the more profoundly you love, the more profoundly you suffer. There is a dreadful equation there. But the brokenness in the power of the spirit leads even us in our frailty with the ability to give ourselves at a deeper level. When we're in trouble, we don't want to go to some hard-boiled success story who's telling us how it really ought to be done and to giving us good advice. We want to be close to someone who's been there, who's been broken open by suffering and can give at a very deep level. One last word. We have in London, over the royal entrance to Westminster Abbey, statues of the martyrs of the 20th century. Among them is a Polish Catholic priest, Maximilian Kolbe. He volunteered to die in the place of a stranger in Auschwitz. Ten men were picked out to be starved to death to discourage escape attempts. And one of the men shouted out as he was being herded off, My wife, my children. Colbay took his place, was starved, and given a lethal injection of carbolic acid. It's the cost of this life taken with thanksgiving, broken, given to others. To Jesus Christ be the glory in this church now and forever. Amen.