Our worship tonight is very different from our normal Sunday worship. It takes place on a Thursday and at night. It includes the ritual of foot-washing, and it ends in darkness, with the Sacrament in the Chapel and the Church altar stripped and bare. After the service ends, we either leave in silence or remain to keep watch and pray in the chapel. A stranger would find what we do puzzling and odd.

For us, though, our worship tells a story, a story of long ago and a story which is ours today. It tells the story of the Passover meal which Jesus shared with is disciples, just as other Jews did in Israel. This Passover had been shared and celebrated for over a thousand years when Jesus and his disciples met, and today, two thousand years later; the Jews still meet on Passover night. The Passover was and is a reminder to Jews of their deliverance by God from slavery in Egypt and the beginning of the long journey to the Promised Land.

Our worship tells us that the Passover meal shared in that upper room in Jerusalem was different from all Passovers before and since. Christians don't call it the Passover any more, we call it Maundy Thursday. The name comes from the Latin mandatum novum which means a new commandment, the new commandment which Jesus gave to his disciples. At this Passover God is doing something new, humankind is being set free on a new journey, not to the land of Canaan, flowing with milk and honey, but a journey to the heart of God. Jesus Christ is one who shows us that journey; he is its beginning and its end; he is the way itself. So we celebrate with joy. This is the night when Jesus took bread and wine, blessed and broke it and gave it to his disciples and said, "All I have to give you is here. This is all of me, my life, my love, my history, my future, my passion, my spirit." When we reach out our hands we are reaching out to God, and God gives us all that God is and wants us to be. It is in thanks giving for this gift that we meet tonight.

But there is more. When the Israelites set out from Egypt they set out into the desert, a place of thirst and fear, hunger and danger, of temptation and death. Not one of those who left Egypt set foot in the Canaan, not even Moses and Aaron, God's chosen leaders. In the forty years of their journey, they all died, and it was their children who inherited the land which God had promised.

As we come to Maundy Thursday we know that the way ahead for Jesus brought thirst and fear, hunger and danger, temptation and death. Good Friday is tomorrow and we commemorate Jesus' journey to the cross and grave. The good news is that, after our forty days of Lent, we will not die as the Israelites did, for Jesus leads us to an inheritance that we will all share. It is not an inheritance of land, but an inheritance of life. Through Jesus Christ, the wanderings of God's chosen people finally reach the end God had in mind for them. This is the new thing that God is doing on Maundy Thursday. We look forward to the new life we have through the death of Jesus.

This is not the only new thing that happens on Maundy Thursday. The new commandment, the mandatum novum, which Jesus gives to his disciples is that we are to love one another as Christ loved us. Our new life is to be lived in a new way. Jesus gave his disciples and he gives us and example of this new way of life. Jesus washed his disciples' feet. He did what slaves used to do for the honoured guests. And we are to do the same. Tonight, I will wash the feet of any who come forward. I will do it, not because I am comparing myself to Christ, and not because washing feet is the mark of Christian service, but because it is a sign and symbol of the way in which those who live the new life of Christ honour and serve one another. The New Commandment is not to wash feet, but to honour and love, and this may be much harder than washing feet. We all see around us people who it is very hard to honour and love, aggressive angry people, people who scare and repel us, people whose life style is so different from ours that we cannot think how to reach them. Yet it is our Lord's commandment that we should love such as these.

Maybe we need practice, maybe we need to start honouring and loving those we know, so that, one day, we will be able to love the unlovable and honour those who reject us. It is a journey, a journey of loving, a journey of living. On Passover night, the children of Israel prepared to follow Moses in their journey to the Promised Land. Tonight is Maundy Thursday. Let us prepare to follow our Lord Jesus in our journey of new life.