The service recollects the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples, the meal in which he instituted the Sacrament of Holy Communion and knelt to wash his disciples’ feet, teaching them that to serve others is greater than to be served. At the end of the service, recalling his arrest and the scattering of his community by armed intervention, the lights go down, all the beauties of the altar are stripped back to bare wood and stone, and the choir sing Psalm 22, the psalm that begins with Jesus’s words of abandonment on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
The Sacrament is taken to St Cedd’s Chapel, the ‘Altar of Repose’, foreshadowing the bodily death of Jesus as a person in the world through the cross.
Watch of the Passion (to midnight)
You are invited to pray at the Altar of Repose until midnight, recalling the disciples as they tried to accompany Jesus in his time of mental agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.