02.04.2026
Chrism Eucharist – Maundy Thursday Offers Inspiration to Service and Holiness
Clergy, Lay Readers and Chaplains from all over Dublin and Glendalough gathered in Christ Church Cathedral on Maundy Thursday (April 2) with Archbishop Michael Jackson for the Chrism Eucharist.
During the service all those involved in ministry renewed their commitment to ministry and the oils for anointing the sick, for baptism and the oil of the chrism were consecrated. The Archbishop also washed the feet of a number of clergy and lay people in the congregation.
In his sermon Archbishop Jackson explored St John 13 and its inspiration to service and to holiness. Maundy Thursday, he said, is the gateway to the three days that immediately precede Easter. A lot happens in a short time and on Maundy Thursday, the foot washing and the institution of the Last Supper are complementary.
The Archbishop said that in St John 13 three specific features of the prophetic life and ministry of Jesus Christ come to the fore – praying, watching and listening – and these are enlivened by Jesus taking a towel.
“The action is more than a gesture. It is an inversion and a subversion of role in a way that upends formula in the cause of service. Jesus does this in full recognition that he has come from the Father and is going back to the Father. He does this as God incarnate. He now does what is entrusted to him, it is his mandate, it is that for which he has been living. What he does is to show, by a lowly act of manual work, that everybody matters within the love of God. The feet of Judas are included among the feet that are washed as part of offering the new commandment to the disciples to love one another even as he has loved them,” he explained.
The Archbishop said there were resonances for today’s church. In Judas’s silence he suggested that many people today live in their own silence but this is how people miss out on what is happening to them. He worried that people in these dioceses not attending church were missing out on “the inspiration poured out by God in a gathering ground with the purpose of enabling them one by one to hear the call to exercize the novum mandatum (new commandment). Ultimately it is thiswhich inspires anyone and everyone who will hear that voice to speak to others in love. And it is here that Peter is given new life. It is these very silences that erode our witness, our confidence and let The Devil in”.
As we enter the most intensely violent time of the Christian year, Archbishop Jackson observed that it is a time when the Holy Land is once again subjected to warfare and destruction, cruelty and annihilation – intense violence. “This immediate context gives a very specific resonance to our Three Days with Jesus Christ the Son of God and Son of Man,” he said.
You can read the Archbishop’s sermon by clicking here.
