Commontide
Paschal Cycle
Moveable feast
Maundy Thursday is the Thursday of Holy Week, the day before Good Friday, and it moves each year with the date of Easter. On it the church keeps the night before the crucifixion: the Last Supper, at which Christ gave his disciples bread and wine as his body and blood; the washing of their feet; and the agony and arrest in Gethsemane. The Book of Common Prayer (2019) keeps the day as Maundy Thursday and explains the name in its own rubric: it comes from the Latin mandatum, the commandment Christ gave at that table, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another" (John 13:34, ESV). The observance is attested in several regions of the church by the late fourth century; the Byzantine churches keep it as Great and Holy Thursday. It closes Lent and opens the three days that lead to Easter.
On the night before his death Jesus ate a final meal with the Twelve. Matthew, Mark and Luke record that he took bread and a cup and gave them to his disciples as his body and his blood (Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22). John alone records that he rose from supper and washed his disciples' feet, and that he gave them a new commandment to love one another as he had loved them (John 13). Afterward he went out to pray in Gethsemane, where he was betrayed and arrested. The Gospels differ on how the meal relates to the Passover: the first three present it as the Passover meal itself, on the fifteenth of Nisan, while John's account implies the fourteenth, with the lambs slaughtered at the hour of Christ's death. The difference has been explained by different Jewish calendars kept that year, by a preference in some recent scholarship for John's dating, and by reading John's placement as theology rather than chronology. The church has kept the night without needing to settle the question.
The observance is attested from the later fourth century, and in several places at once. Canon 50 of the Synod of Laodicea, a council dated only to between 343 and 381, forbids breaking the fast on the fifth day of the last week of Lent; it names the day by its place in the week, not by a title, and regulates a custom already kept. At Jerusalem, in about 381 to 384, the pilgrim Egeria described the day in the diary of her journey. In McClure and Feltoe's 1919 translation, the people gather earlier than usual, and before they are dismissed the archdeacon warns them: "Let us all assemble at the first hour of the night in the church which is in Eleona, for great toil awaits us to-day, in this very night." A second oblation follows behind the Cross: "Nor is the oblation ever offered behind the Cross on any day throughout the year, except on this one day." The people eat at home and go out to the Mount of Olives for a night of hymns and readings, and at first cockcrow they come down to Gethsemane by the light of more than two hundred candles, slowly, worn by fasting, to hear the Gospel of the arrest. Egeria records that their weeping might be heard perhaps as far as the city.
At Antioch, John Chrysostom preached his sermon On the Betrayal of Judas, headed in the manuscript for the Holy and Great Thursday and traditionally dated to 388. Early in its first section, in an English translation whose translator is not named, he tells his hearers: . He kept the sermon short because the faithful were already making their way to communion. In North Africa, around 400, Augustine answered a correspondent, Januarius, who had asked what ought to be done on this Thursday. Some held that on this one day of the year communion might lawfully be received after food, and Augustine declined to legislate either way; where communicants were many there were two celebrations, morning and evening. A canon of the Council of Carthage backed the dispensation; the Catholic Encyclopedia numbers it 24, while McClure and Feltoe cite canon 29 of the council of 397, almost certainly one canon under two numberings. At Rome, in a letter of 416 reported by the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, Innocent I described the custom of reconciling public penitents on this Thursday, before the offertory, so that they might receive at Easter. Asia Minor, Jerusalem, Antioch and North Africa attest the day within roughly a generation, and Rome by 416; none of these sources identifies a place where it began.
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) appoints the same readings for Maundy Thursday in every year: Exodus 12:1-14, the institution of the Passover; Psalm 78:15-26, the water from the rock and the manna given in the wilderness; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, which may continue through verse 34, Paul's account of the Lord's Supper as he received it; and as the Gospel either John 13:1-15, the washing of the disciples' feet, or Luke 22:14-30, the Supper itself and the disciples' dispute over which of them was the greatest.
The readings hold the night's two acts together. Exodus sets the meal within the Passover, the feast of deliverance from Egypt that the Supper fulfills and that the first three Gospels name as the setting of Christ's last meal. The psalm remembers the food God gave his people on their journey. Paul gives his account of the institution as he received it, together with the warning, in the optional verses, against eating and drinking unworthily. John supplies what the other Gospels lack, the washing of feet and the command to do as Christ has done; Luke, the alternative, places the institution beside a quarrel about rank and Christ's answer that the greatest must become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. John's chapter opens with the sentence that governs the whole night, that Christ, having loved his own, loved them to the end (John 13:1).
The selection is recent. The Prayer Books of 1549 through 1662 appointed 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 as the Epistle, beginning with Paul's rebuke of divisions at the Lord's table, and Luke 23, the trial before Pilate, as the Gospel, a station in the continuous reading of the Passion through Holy Week rather than an account of the Supper. The American book of 1928 began the Epistle at 1 Corinthians 11:23 and allowed John 13 in place of Luke 23. The American book of 1979 added the lesson from Exodus 12 and made John 13 or Luke 22 the Gospel, the pattern the 2019 book keeps.
In the Book of Common Prayer (2019) the day is kept with a celebration of the Holy Eucharist, with its own collect and proper preface and the readings appointed above. The washing of feet is optional: where it is observed, it appropriately follows the sermon. The same book's directions name the hymn "Now my tongue the mystery telling" as one that may be sung in procession. In the Church of England, Common Worship: Times and Seasons (2006) provides a liturgy for Maundy Thursday together with resources for a Chrism Eucharist, a prayer over the oils, the reception of the holy oils, and forms for the renewal of commitment to ministry. Behind both books lies a longer recovery: the more frequent celebration of the Eucharist encouraged by the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement is credited, in several secondary accounts, with making a full Maundy Thursday Eucharist ordinary again in Anglican parishes.
The rite asks the worshipper to take part in both halves of the night. The congregation receives the Sacrament on the day that remembers its institution, and where the washing of feet is kept, it is done within the same service. Christ washed the feet of his disciples at that table, the one who would betray him among them, and John says of that same night that "having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" (John 13:1, ESV).
Much of what is now associated with the day is younger than the day itself. The night office of Tenebrae, the Matins and Lauds of the last three days of Holy Week sung on the evening before, put out its candles in the course of the office; the Catholic Encyclopedia traces the extinguishing to the fifth century, in the first Ordo Romanus and the Ordo of St Amand, and records that the Sarum Ordinal prescribed twenty-four candles. It describes the office as a kind of funeral rite for the death of Christ, with lessons from Lamentations and without the Gloria Patri or the Te Deum. The full three-night ceremonial has largely lapsed; where Tenebrae survives, including in Anglican and Protestant churches, it is usually a single service. The altar is stripped, on this day in Roman use and on Good Friday in the older Gallican use. After the Mass the reserved Sacrament is carried in procession to an altar of repose and watched there; the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that the altar of repose and its procession are not mentioned before the close of the fifteenth century, and no dated origin for the lay watch beside it has been found. In the Philippines and among Filipinos abroad, the Visita Iglesia takes worshippers to at least seven churches on the night, praying at each altar of repose.
From the Gloria of the Thursday evening Mass until the Gloria of the Easter Vigil the church bells are silent, and in strict use the organ as well; wooden clappers have taken their place. Across France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Czechia and Hungary children are still told that the bells have flown to Rome, and in France that they come back carrying Easter eggs. In rural Austria and Germany boys with clappers went through the villages announcing the hours. Among the day's music is the antiphon long sung at the washing of feet, "Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est." Its authorship and date are uncertain, and the Roman Missal of 1970 moved it to the offertory. The procession to the altar of repose borrowed Thomas Aquinas's Corpus Christi hymn, Pange lingua, sung in English as "Now my tongue the mystery telling."
In England the day has long been bound to almsgiving. King John gave garments and food to the poor at Knaresborough on 15 April 1210, the earliest recorded royal maundy, and medieval monarchs also washed the feet of the poor. Marco Antonio Faitta, secretary to Cardinal Pole, described Mary I's maundy of 1556: the queen washed the feet of forty-one poor women, one for each year of her age, went the length of the hall on her knees, and gave her own gown to the poorest and oldest of them, while the choir sang the . James II was the last monarch to wash feet himself, in 1685, though a competing record places William III doing so in 1698; the Lord High Almoner continued the washing until 1737, and no monarch attended between 1698 and 1932, when George V resumed giving the alms in person. The washing has lapsed; the sovereign still distributes specially minted Maundy money, at a different cathedral most years, to as many recipients as the sovereign has years of age.
Primary sources. Egeria's account of the day is in McClure and Feltoe's translation, The Pilgrimage of Etheria (SPCK, 1919), chapters XXXV and XXXVI, free at archive.org; it is the earliest surviving full description of the day by an eyewitness, and its silence on the washing of feet is itself evidence. Augustine's letters to Januarius, Letter 54 and Letter 55, in J. G. Cunningham's translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 1, show North African practice around 400; his tractates on John 13, Tractate 55 and Tractate 57, in John Gibb's translation for the same series, volume 7, are his exposition of the footwashing. John Chrysostom's sermon On the Betrayal of Judas, preached on the day, is available in a bilingual Greek and English text at the Catholic Library. The canons of Laodicea, in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 14, and those of the Council in Trullo are both at New Advent, for the earliest surviving canon on the day and the repeal of its fasting exception. On the Sacraments, traditionally ascribed to Ambrose, is in T. Thompson's translation edited by J. H. Srawley (SPCK, 1919), whose title page gives it to an unknown author, at archive.org. John Mirk's Festial, edited by Theodor Erbe for the Early English Text Society, extra series 96 (1905), is at archive.org, the richest vernacular pastoral source for the day in England around 1400. Calvin's is at , for the Reformed objection in its own terms. Faitta's letter on Mary I's maundy is calendared in the , volume 6, number 473, at . The Prayer Book texts are free online: the 1549 Holy Week readings and the 1662 collects, epistles and gospels at justus.anglican.org (; ), the at episcopalnet.org, and the Book of Common Prayer (2019) Maundy Thursday materials from the Anglican Church in North America (; ). The 2016 Roman decree is at .
The gesture that gives the day much of its popular image came to it slowly. Egeria mentions no washing of feet at all. Augustine, writing to Januarius again around 400, treats footwashing as a disputed custom not yet fixed to this day, kept by some in Lent and by some in the octave of Easter; in J. G. Cunningham's translation, "Many, however, have not accepted this as a custom, lest it should be thought to belong to the ordinance of baptism". It was living practice at Milan, and the treatise On the Sacraments, traditionally ascribed to Ambrose though its 1919 English edition prints it as the work of an unknown author, observes that the Roman church did not keep it. The earliest evidence of footwashing being required on this day is the Seventeenth Council of Toledo, in Visigothic Spain in 694, which bound bishops and priests to wash the feet of those subject to them under pain of excommunication, because the custom had lapsed in some churches. Whether its first liturgical home was Spain or the Roman sacramentaries of the same period is not resolved. By the later twelfth century the pope washed the feet of twelve subdeacons after Mass and of thirteen poor men after dinner.
Other observances gathered around the day. By the fifth century the chrism was consecrated on it for the coming year's anointings, and the Catholic Encyclopedia reports that the Gelasian Sacramentary, in manuscripts dated to the 700s, provides three Masses: for the reconciliation of penitents, for the chrism, and for the Supper. One concession was withdrawn: in 692 the Council in Trullo, in its canon 29, quoted the Carthaginian exception from the fast and repealed it. The reconciliation of penitents faded with public penance itself, absorbed into private confession; its end is undated. The day also gave rise to a second feast. When Urban IV instituted Corpus Christi by the bull Transiturus on 8 September 1264, for the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, the sadness of Holy Week was given as the chief reason for a new feast of the Sacrament, and Thomas Aquinas was commissioned to write its Mass and Office.
The English Prayer Book at first kept the day spare. From 1549 through 1662 the Thursday before Easter received an Epistle and a Gospel but no collect of its own, while Good Friday received three; the Gospel was Luke's account of the trial before Pilate, so the Supper entered the service through the Epistle alone and the washing of feet not at all. The American Book of Common Prayer of 1928 supplied the first proper collect in that line, and the American book of 1979 gave the day a full liturgy, with the footwashing provided for; the Book of Common Prayer (2019) continues that provision. In the Roman Church a general decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae Mysteria, dated 16 November 1955, moved the Mass to the evening and placed within it, after the homily, the footwashing that since 1570 had been a separate ceremony. A decree of 6 January 2016 allowed those whose feet are washed to be chosen from among the people of God rather than from men alone.
The rite has had its critics. Calvin, commenting on John 13:15 in 1553, objected that an annual footwashing could leave its performers thinking their duty done and free to despise their brethren for the rest of the year, when Christ asks his disciples to wash one another's feet throughout their lives. Reporting in Christianity Today in 2024 found the rite moved to quieter services or set aside in some churches, partly because worshippers found it awkward. The church's older reading turns toward the humility of God. Augustine, in John Gibb's translation of his tractates on John, reads the basin through Philippians: "why should we wonder that He rose from supper, and laid aside His garments, who, being in the form of God, made Himself of no reputation?"
Older English called the day Shere Thursday. In his Festial, written about 1400 for parish priests, John Mirk gives the answer a priest should make when asked about the name: in former days men trimmed their hair and beards on that day to be clean for Easter. He makes the shaving a figure of shriving away sin. The word shere meant clean or bright, and the Scandinavian names for the day appear to share that root; whether the name first referred to the cleansing of the altars, to the cleansing of penitents, or to the trimming of hair is not settled, and the name itself is no longer in use. Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Faroe Islands keep the day as a public holiday; Sweden removed it from the working calendar in 1772. In German-speaking lands it is Gründonnerstag, Green Thursday, kept with green herbs, eggs and potatoes, Frankfurt's seven-herb green sauce the best known, and the origin of the name is disputed. The Byzantine churches join Vespers to the Liturgy of St Basil in the morning and keep the Matins of the Twelve Gospels in the evening, and Coptic priests wash the feet of the whole congregation rather than of a chosen twelve, though these accounts rest on secondary sources rather than the service books themselves.
Further reading. Martin F. Connell, Church and Worship in Fifth-Century Rome: The Letter of Innocent I to Decentius of Gubbio (Joint Liturgical Studies 52), is a modern edition of the letter that records the Roman reconciliation of penitents on this day, recommended because the account of that letter given above rests on the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia. Joel Marcus, "Passover and Last Supper Revisited," New Testament Studies 59 (2013), is a journal article on how the Supper relates to the Passover, for readers with library access who want to pursue that question.
Online resources. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, though dated and written from within one tradition, gathers much of the early evidence in its articles on Maundy Thursday, the Washing of Feet, Tenebrae, the Altar of Repose, the stripping of an altar and the Feast of Corpus Christi; its account of the Council in Trullo should be checked against the canons themselves. The Middle English Dictionary's entry for sher Thuresdai documents the old English name. The appointed readings are available at Bible Gateway in the English Standard Version: Exodus 12:1-14, 1 Corinthians 11:23-34, John 13:1-15, and Luke 22:14-30.
Almighty Father, whose most dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it in thankful remembrance of Jesus Christ our Savior, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.