MAUNDY THURSDAY
As a Christian, I consider the most important day of the church year to be not Easter, not Christmas, but Maundy Thursday. For the meaningfulness of this day I am indebted to a set of lectures, The Holy Thursday Revolution, by the Christian philosopher Beatrice Bruteau. In it she points out that the greatest revolution in the history of mankind occurred on Maundy Thursday–or what she calls Holy Thursday, the day before Jesus’ crucifixion. She sees it as a two-stage revolution. The first stage occurred when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Until that moment the whole point of things had been for someone to get on top, and once he had gotten on top to stay on top or else attempt to get farther up. But here this man already on top–who was rabbi, teacher, master–suddenly got down on the bottom and began to wash the feet of his followers. In that one act Jesus symbolically overturned the whole social…
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