Maundy Thursday and Triduum

An elephant may never forget, but rats do - especially if scientists have been messing with them.

Researchers at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, have cooked up a drug that chokes off the brain’s production of a substance needed to recall certain kinds of information. Specifically, the agent rejects memories of emotional associations. So far they’ve only tried it on rats but, depressingly enough, our brains don’t seem that different from a rodent’s. (How they figure out a rat’s emotions is a question my source doesn’t address.) The neuroscientists behind these experiments hope to use their discovery to treat dementia, addiction, improve memory and help people overcome trauma.

One possible application quickly occurs to theological types like me: forgiveness. Imagine a tablet that erases my recall of a wrong suffered. Grace in a capsule; take two pills and don’t call God in the morning. “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but for as long as your medication holds out.”

But that’s just the problem: forgiveness, rightly understood, is not forgetting, but remembering and chosing to love. C. S. Lewis actually speculated “that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfefcted humility that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe.” Elsewhere Lewis argues that “real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror, dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it. That, and only that, is forgiveness.”

I’m thinking about this as Lent limps toward its lean conclusion and we sink with a whisper into the Triduum - the Latin name for the three days that lead up to Easter Sunday. The first of these is Maundy Thursday, a day named after a commandment, specifically, a commandment that we remember something.

Maundy is also Latin meaning “command.” It gives us a batch of words that Americans don’t like very much at all, words like demand and mandate. The title derives from John 13.34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.” That’s the directive, soothingly abstract, but Jesus welded it to a couple of distressingly concrete actions: footwashing and the Lord’s Supper. John records the former while the Synoptics detail the latter. Both occurred on the night before Jesus went to the cross, so that night, Thursday night, becomes Maundy Thursday, the day of commandment. And the latter of the commands I mentioned - the Lord’s Supper - Jesus presents specifically as an act of remembering: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Do what? Remember what? A body riven by my rebellion, blood that gushes from the wounds my sin inflicts. Not medicine ingested to help me forget, but food digested to make me remember.

Many times in Evangelical practice we keep only half of Jesus’ commandment. That is to say, we remember - but we choose the memory. Triduum receives short shrift in Baptist life. We reject as Catholic anything with a Latin name. We like to say we’re avoiding legalism but I think what we’re really doing is swallowing the forgetful pill. We like Easter Sunday and empty tombs and unoccupied crosses because they reassure us that the worst is over. Yes, Jesus had to die on the cross but he’s done with that now so we don’t have to think about sending him there or, worse yet, joining him there. “We recoil,” writes Richard Neuhaus, “The derelict cries, ‘Come, follow me.’ Follow him there? We close our ears. We hurry on to Easter. But we will not know what to do with Easter’s light if we shun the friendship of the darkness that is wisdom’s way to light.” If we’re not careful, Easter Sunday winds up meaning, not that Jesus overcame Calvary, but that it’s as if Calvary never really happened, or at least has been undone. And there’s all the difference in the world between a thing overcome and a thing undone.

So I think the Triduum is a good idea. Again, Neuhaus urges, “Do not rush to conquest. Stay a while with this day. Let your heart be broken by the unspeakably bad of this Friday we call good. . . .Stay a while in the eclipse of light, stay a while with the conquered One. There is time enough for Easter.”

So go to church and take the prescription that keeps alive the memory of your sin. Then wait a few days. Then go to church and take the prescription that also keeps alive the memory of your salvation. Three days in the darkness will teach us to love the light.

This entry was posted on April 8, 2009 at 11:22 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.