“A creamed green soup made of seven spring herbs or simply of new spinach is served on that day, garnished with hard-cooked eggs that are sliced in half lengthwise and tiny meat balls lightly browned in butter and poached in the soup. Fried or poached eggs on a bed of creamed new spinach is the alternate.”
Mimi Sheraton
The Thursday before Easter is one of the oldest celebrations in the calendar of Holy Week, and yet one of the least known today. In the English-speaking world it is known as Holy Thursday, Maundy Thursday, or Shere Thursday. But in Germany and a few other places it is called Gründonnerstag, or Green Thursday.
There is some debate about the meanings and origins behind all of these names, but they all speak to ancient ways of observing this evening that begins the Easter Triduum.
“Maundy” comes from the Latin word mandatum, or “command”, because this is the day that people typically commemorate the Last Supper, in which Jesus gave His disciples what is called the new commandment. “Shere” means clean, pure, or guilt-free, and refers to the common practice of cleaning the altars on this day before the Easter Triduum.
But why “Green Thursday”? Some scholars think that it refers to the way penitents were given symbolic green branches by the medieval church as a blessing and symbol of their reformation. Some believe it’s a mistake, that it’s supposed to be the German word for weeping—greinen—and somewhere along the line it got confused into “green”. Nevertheless, on this day people in Germany (and a few other European countries) eat fresh spring greens and hardboiled eggs as an observance of Green Thursday.
Because the practice of eating spring greens on Gründonnerstag persists to this day, I believe that Green Thursday has something deeper to teach us.
The ancients understood something very well: that where they are matters. Without the distractions of technology—though they undoubtedly had their own distractions to contend with—our ancestors were much more “in tune” with nature as a matter of necessity. The weather, seasons, and regional rhythms dictated their lives. When Christianity took root and grew in Europe, the people found ways to marry the truth of the gospel story with the truth of their environment. They could not imagine the one without the other.
A plate or bowl of spring greens, the first real nutrients of the year after a long bitter winter, is as good a symbol as I can think of for the new commandment, given by Christ to his disciples during the Last Supper:
“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)
We are often in danger of losing the power in Scripture from repetition. But imagine the newness of those words from the lips of the Christ who-had-not-yet-died. The man they all expected would overthrow Rome and rescue them. How unexpected! How different! To love one another, just as He loved them. And then He washed their feet to prove it, something only a lowly servant was supposed to do. Love in action, a thing that nurtures and cleanses and provides an environment for growth.
On Green Thursday, a plate of spring’s harvest can be every bit as rejuvenating as the charge that Christ gives to each of us:
Love one another. And in doing so, flourish. Together.
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💚🌿 I loved learning more about this practice, it’s new to me - but would’ve been something many of my ancestors would’ve known!