By Fr. George Dorbarakis
On Great Thursday, our Fathers have handed down to us to celebrate four things: the Sacred Washing of the Feet, the Secret Supper, the Preternatural Prayer, and also the Betrayal of Judas. That hymn which summarizes and connects most of these, highlighting their implications for our own life as well, is especially the Oikos of the Kontakion of Matins of the day:
“At the secret table, approaching with fear, let us all receive the bread with pure souls, remaining with the Master, that we may see how He washes the feet of the disciples and wipes them with a towel, and that we may do likewise as we have seen, submitting to one another and washing one another’s feet. For Christ Himself thus commanded His disciples, as He said beforehand. But Judas, the servant and deceitful one, did not listen.”
1. “Let us all receive the bread”: The Hymnographer, expressing the faith of the Church, calls us to approach the Secret Table in order to partake of the Immaculate Mysteries. We stand before the center of our church, the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, which the Lord Himself established precisely on this day, at the Secret Supper. The Lord at this Supper celebrated for the first time on earth the Divine Liturgy, calling His disciples to eat His holy Body and to drink His precious Blood. “Take, eat, this is My Body” and “Drink of it, all of you, this is My Blood” are the founding words of the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, which from then until now are repeated at every gathering of the faithful, according to the command of the Lord, “Do this in remembrance of Me,” thus perpetuating in the Spirit the Secret Supper itself. The Divine Liturgy is thus understood by our Church as the continuation of the Secret Supper; for this reason it has always been regarded as the center of the Church, around which all the other mysteries are woven. And this is, we could say, natural: the Lord, who came into the world and saved us — in the sense that He united us to Himself and thus reconciled us with God, something that becomes active for the believer from the moment of baptism and chrismation in the name of the Triune God — He Himself nourishes us with His Body and Blood, so that this relationship with Him may be preserved and grow “until we all attain to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”
2. The Hymnographer, then, calls us to partake of “the bread,” but also reminds us of the conditions for this participation: fear and purity of soul. Participation in Holy Communion is not without conditions. To partake of the Immaculate Mysteries carelessly and casually, without proper repentance and awareness, creates the conditions for repeating the demonic state of Judas. Let us not forget that Judas also partook, but while his betrayal was already in progress, with the result that he became possessed and was destroyed. This is because the blessed bread acts within a person by activating whatever it finds in the soul: love of God or hatred. Like rain falling upon the earth, which produces either good crops or weeds. Thus, a person may receive Communion and, instead of becoming better, growing spiritually, actually become worse. Therefore, the conditions, according to the Hymnographer, are the fear of God and purity of soul. These two are directly connected, revealing the working of repentance. The fear of God, expressed in keeping His holy commandments, leads to the purification of the soul, and this means that a person is ready to partake of the Body and Blood of the Lord. The participation increases purity, and thus the person is deified by the divine energies of the Mystery and progresses “from glory to glory,” since there is never an end to this process of repentance and growth in God. In this state, the believer becomes a dwelling place of God and, “in another form,” a manifestation of Christ in the world.
3. “Remaining with the Master”: the Hymnographer expresses the above truth with this phrase. What happened at the Secret Supper functions as a model, meaning that many follow the example of Judas: he received Communion while betraying Christ and then left to complete that betrayal. The Hymnographer therefore urges us to remain with Christ, and there to see Him washing the feet of the disciples and wiping them with a towel, so that we may do the same toward every fellow human being, submitting to one another and washing one another’s feet. In other words, proper participation in the Holy Eucharist leads to a genuine imitation of the life of Christ, that is, to humility and loving service to others. To put it as the great Russian novelist and profound analyst of the human soul, Fyodor Dostoevsky, expressed it in his final work The Brothers Karamazov:
“Before certain thoughts, a person stands confused, especially when faced with human sin, and wonders whether to fight it with force or with humble love. Always decide: ‘I will fight it with humble love.’ If you decide this once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humility is a tremendous power: it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.”
Participation in the Holy Eucharist and hostility toward one’s neighbor, or injustice toward him and the crushing of his person in any way, cannot coexist. The Hymnographer is clear: to be a Christian means to see and follow Christ within a Eucharistic, that is, ecclesiastical context, always living His humble love. Anything different means a fall into the deceit of Judas.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
