Meditations on Covenant Thursday1
Meditations on Covenant Thursday1
Covenant Thursday is one of the very important days in the Church.
And the most important events of this great day are three matters.
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The Lord Christ washing the feet of His disciples…
And the Church celebrates this important event with the service of the Lakkan, then the bishop—or the serving priest—washes the people’s feet. -
The Lord Christ instituting the Sacrament of the Eucharist:
And the Church celebrates it by performing the Divine Liturgy for the first time during the Pascha, and the majority of the people usually partake, prepared for that through repentance and confession. -
The Lord’s concern for His disciples, and His farewell discourse to them, and His prayer for them.
Some speak about Holy Week as though the sufferings of Christ were limited to this week! Or as though His sufferings were restricted to the crucifixion, or to the pains preceding the cross, such as the scourging and beating and carrying the cross, and the spitting and insult and mockery and the wounding words of challenge and the false testimony…
No, for pain encompassed the whole life of Christ.
His pain was not merely one week, but the whole period of His ministry and even before it, and since His birth. Indeed, the divine revelation summarized the life of the Lord in the flesh in that deep concentrated expression in which it described Him as “a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3).
And it was said about Him also that He “suffered, being tempted” (Hebrews 2:18).
And the depth of spiritual life became that we “suffer with Him” (Romans 8:17).
Or that we enter into the “fellowship of His sufferings” (Philippians 3:10). For every suffering for the sake of righteousness is considered a participation in the sufferings of Christ.
And it was said about Christ that He was sorrowful and distressed and wept.
It was said that He was sorrowful and distressed (Mark 14:33). And He said in the garden, “My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38).
And it is enough concerning His sorrows that “He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). That is, all the sorrows and pains of humanity were placed upon His shoulders and became feelings within His heart.
And it was mentioned in the Gospel more than once that He wept. He wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41) as He recalled what would befall her from her enemies, and He also wept over her because she did not know the time of her visitation.
And He also wept at the tomb of Lazarus, of whom his sister said that he had decayed because he had been dead four days (John 11:35, 39). He wept as He saw how, by sin, death entered the world and reigned over man who was created in the image of God… and how it became possible that this man should decay…!!
Christ tasted pain even from the day of His birth.
He was born on one of the coldest days of winter, in a damp place—a manger for cattle—because His mother had no place in the inn (Luke 2:7). And Herod exerted all his effort and cunning to kill Him, to the extent that he killed all the children of Bethlehem, hoping He would be among them! And the Virgin was compelled to flee with Him into Egypt. Then she returned “after those who sought the young Child’s life had died” (Matthew 2:20). And Christ spent the period of His childhood and youth unknown, in the house of a poor carpenter who was called His father, and the world knew nothing about this period.
And Christ lived poor, bearing hardship for our sake.
He never walked in the broad way, but lived a life entirely full of pain, whether regarding the body or the soul.
He had no house in which to lay His head. And He had no money; even when the tax was demanded of Him, He had nothing to give.
He experienced tiredness, and He also experienced hunger and thirst.
And as an example of His tiredness, it was said that He was wearied from the hardship and length of the journey, and He had walked long distances in order to save the Samaritan woman. And Scripture says of this: “Jesus therefore, being wearied from His journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour” — exactly noon (John 4:6).
And just as Christ experienced tiredness, He experienced hunger. And when we say hunger, we do not mean ordinary hunger, as when a person is an hour late from his mealtime and it is said he is hungry! No; rather, when it was said that Christ hungered on the mountain, it meant the utmost limit that human capacity can bear in abstaining from food. Therefore it was rightly said that “He was afterward hungry” (Matthew 4:2)—after a fast lasting forty days.
And when it was said that He thirsted on the cross, it meant an unbearable thirst, after nearly all the blood and water in His body had been drained…
But regarding His thirst and hunger at the Samaritan well, Scripture does not say that He drank water at that time. And regarding food, He did not eat, and said, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me” (John 4:34). And Scripture does not say in that event that He hungered or thirsted. It is ordinary hunger and ordinary thirst that Scripture speaks of…
And in Christ’s ministry He faced another pain: the pain of rejection:
“He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him” (John 1:11).
“He was the Light of the world, and this Light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1:5). It is truly painful that the Light came into the world, but people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil (John 3:19). And in Him was fulfilled the prophecy of the Psalm: “They have rejected me, the beloved, like one dead and despised” (Psalm 38:2).
He lived treating people with love, yet found no love corresponding to His love.
He found no love that matched His love, nor kind treatment matching His kindness to people. And the expression said about Him, that “He had no place to lay His head” (Matthew 8:20), just as we understand it materially and literally, we also understand it emotionally. For the Lord lived among ungrateful people, denying goodness, denying love.
He once went to His hometown, Bethlehem, and its people refused to receive Him.
They did not believe in Him, but met Him with mockery and contempt, saying, “Is this not the carpenter’s son? Where then did this Man get this wisdom and these mighty works?” And they were offended at Him (Matthew 13:54–58), so that the Lord said to them: “A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house.”
And He went to one of the Samaritan villages, and they shut their doors in His face.
Even His two disciples became angry at this matter, but He endured the Samaritans with great love and long-suffering until He was able later to enter it and work for its salvation. And when He saw the fruit of His labor in Samaria, He said to His disciples, “I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored” (John 4:38). Yes, the work for the salvation of the soul requires labor and endurance…
Sometimes He saw the doors of hearts closed, so He stood and knocked:
And His standing might be long, until “His head was filled with dew and His locks with the drops of the night” (Song of Solomon 5:2). And He does not grow weary of waiting, nor is ashamed of it…
And the Lord thus gives us a lesson that gaining the love of people requires from us endurance and long patience. For sometimes hearts are hard and severe, and cannot be entered quickly or easily… If you labor in entering people’s hearts, do not be distressed. So it happened to Christ, the Source of love. And if you enter a heart and do not find in it love like your love, do not be sad. For so it happened to Christ before, and He did not treat people as they treated Him.
But in the midst of all He “went about doing good” (Acts 10:38).
“Preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all kinds of sickness and all kinds of disease among the people” (Matthew 4:23). Who among the people did not receive from the love of Christ and from His labor? All received… even those who rejected Him, even those who later cried, “Crucify Him, crucify Him”…
He distributed His love to all, and encountered criticism from the teachers of the people.
If He had compassion on a tax collector to save his soul, they criticized Him saying, “He has gone to be a guest with a man who is a sinner” (Luke 19:7). And Christ answered, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham.”
And the Lord endured those critics and worked on convincing them to win them.
How many times He did good, and they criticized Him for doing good from some angle, as happened in the love He showed toward the tax collectors to save them, or toward the Samaritans despised by them… so that He was compelled to tell them the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9–14), and the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–35).
And likewise He had compassion on that sinful woman who washed His feet with her tears, and Simon the Pharisee criticized Him, saying in his heart, “This Man, if He were a prophet, would know who and what manner of woman this is who is touching Him, for she is a sinner” (Luke 7:39). So He explained to that Pharisee how the one forgiven much loves much…
And with the same compassionate, tender, kind heart, He had compassion on the adulterous woman caught in the very act, and He saved her from the harsh accusers who sought to stone her, knowing His compassion for sinners, but they did this “testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him” (John 8:6).
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An article by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III, published in Watani newspaper on 10-4-1988.
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