A life offered freely and because of love


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Therefore the Holy Thursday has to celebrate this event which anticipates Jesus’ Passion, the narration of his exodus from this world to the Father. But in the evening liturgy of the Holy Thursday, besides remembering and living as in every Eucharist this gesture of its Lord, the Church significantly lives and repeats another gesture made by Him, i.e. the Maundy. As a matter of fact, also the fourth Gospel narrates “Jesus’ last supper with his disciples”, the supper during which the traitor’s identity was revealed, Peter’s denial and all the other disciples’ flight were announced; the supper made on the occasion of Jesus’ last Passover in Jerusalem before his death. But instead of narrating the sign of the bread and the wine, John tells the sign of the Maundy! Why a “different” gesture, a “different” sign? And yet the fourth evangelist knows the story of the Eucharist, because the Church had been celebrating this sacrament for decades by then. Why then the remembrance of this different sign? We can deem quite probable that this choice in the fourth Gospel is motivated by an urgency felt in the Church at the end of the first century: the Eucharistic celebration can’t be a rite disjoined from a consistent praxis of agape, of love, of service towards the brothers, as this is exactly its meaning: to give one’s life for the brothers!