The Eucharist Will Make You Dangerous: A Maundy Thursday Reflection

It was 2002. I was living in a Christian ashram in a slum just outside of Delhi, India—a community that combined contemplative prayer with serving the poor. Once a week, a couple of us would leave the ashram and head to Paharganj, a gritty neighborhood near the New Delhi train station where many street kids tried to survive. These were children who had come from some of the poorest states in India, often to support their families. But the city swallowed them. It started with sniffing glue to dull the hunger and pain. Then came abuse, addiction, and, in too many cases, death. Sometimes our outreach team would find them years after their arrival—devastated and broken, with maggots eating away at whatever was left of their bodies and souls.

On those nights, we didn’t go there to fix anything. We went to sleep on the street.

It was a spiritual practice—a hard one. It was inspired by Rev. James Parks Morton, who used to train clergy by sending them to live on the street, and by what Roshi Bernie Glassman called a street retreat—a spiritual practice of plunging into the unknown, becoming one with those the world discards. We didn’t show up with solutions. We showed up with our bodies, our breath, and the willingness to risk our comfort, even our safety. We didn’t pretend to be homeless. We bore witness to it. We slept on pavements soaked in urine. We got sick. We were sometimes threatened by the police, woken up in the middle of the night and told we could be thrown in jail. Often it was our monastic robes that saved us. And still, we kept returning.

I remember one night vividly. There was a full moon. The light exposed everything—the grime, the beauty, the violence. One of the kids we knew was standing near us with his bike rickshaw. He was eating chapati when a tourist approached him for a ride. He coughed, and a small piece of bread flew out and landed on the man.

The tourist, enraged, began screaming. He spat at the boy—some of it landing on my face—and then violently attacked him. It was a terrifying moment. But within seconds, shopkeepers and chaiwallahs ran in, shielding the boy. That street had seen everything. Tourists. Traffickers. Kids surviving any way they could. That street had seen too much to let another child be harmed.

We slept there once a week, breathing the city’s sorrows. And over time, something shifted. The filth of the street, the noise, the pain—it got inside us. And we let it. Because when you sleep on the street long enough, something changes. You stop being the outsider. You become part of the thing others turn away from. The line between “you” and “them” dissolves. Someone else’s pain becomes your own. Someone else’s scream lives in your chest. Someone else’s wound feels like your wound.

And once you’ve felt that kind of oneness—once someone else’s pain becomes your own—you know you can’t look away. You know that to remain human, actions for healing and justice can’t be optional. They must be your response.

I often return to that night—especially when I stand at the altar on Maundy Thursday. There’s something about the quiet after the violence, the shared hunger, the broken bodies under the moonlight—it echoes another night.

A different night.

The night when Jesus gathered with his friends.

And that night wasn’t chosen at random. It was Passover—the feast of liberation. A meal meant to remember that God does not bless oppression. That God breaks chains, opens prison doors, and leads people out of bondage.

Jesus stepped into that story—not to discard it, but to fulfill it in a new way. Not with a lamb, but with his own body. Not as an offering to appease a violent god, but as a revelation of a God who is always found among the crushed and crucified.

He gathered with his friends. He washed their feet. He took bread and broke it. Took wine and poured it. He didn’t give them a theory—he gave them a felt sense of oneness. A command enacted in flesh. He gave them a new commandment. A new way of relating. No more clean and unclean. No more servant and master. No more saved and unsaved, deserving and undeserving. Just this: you belong to each other. Now act like it.

And that act—of washing, of breaking, of sharing—was dangerous. Because it tore at the fabric of the world they lived in. A world stitched together by separation, by all the purity codes, by empires that depend on people forgetting they are one body. But on that night, Jesus said: No. Not this way. And it was that “No”—to separation, to domination, to religious performance without justice—that made him dangerous. It was that “No” that led to his crucifixion.

And so the question confronts us now, as it did then. As Fr. Kenneth Leech warned, the church can either enshrine the world that crucifies—or become the body that rises. And we too must choose. The Eucharist demands a decision: Will we preserve the order that nailed Christ to the cross—or join the new creation rooted in mutual belonging?

Because it all comes down to this: what kind of God do we worship? Do we worship a god who quietly blesses our striving for individual salvation—a god content with our polite prayers and moral self-improvement, who asks us to be well-adjusted citizens, obedient and agreeable, no matter how just or unjust the laws of the day may be? A god who lets us separate ourselves from those we consider unworthy, impure, or inconvenient?

Or do we worship a God who stops us mid-prayer and reminds us: there is no such thing as private salvation. We are always saved together, or not at all. A God who hears the cry of the oppressed, who topples Pharaohs, who walks with the displaced, who says, “I will be with you”—not in abstraction, but in the dust and blood of real lives. A God who makes us whole by making us one—with the wounded, the excluded, the crucified, including the parts of ourselves that are wounded, excluded, and crucified too.

Only one of those gods is the God of Jesus.

Which is why the Eucharist—and the washing of feet—tonight are not safe rituals.
We are not here to reenact something old and harmless. We’re here to be confronted. To be remade. To let the table become the site of rupture—the kind that undoes our lies, our apathy, and our accommodation to the logic of the world as it is.

Because if this table doesn’t shake us awake, we might just be sleepwalking into complicity. And if we rise from this table untouched—if we take the bread but ignore the broken—then maybe we didn’t receive the Body of Christ at all. Maybe we just consumed a symbol that numbed our guilt and gave us the illusion of holiness—while leaving intact our cooperation with systems of harm.

But this isn’t new. Others have known this truth and lived it.

In the East End of London, in the slums where Anglo-Catholic priests walked among the poor—from the late 1800s into the early 20th century—it was understood: the Eucharist is not a reward for the pious—it is fuel for revolution. Not a comfort blanket, but a dangerous calling. It doesn’t just remind us of God’s love—it asks us to become it.

So tonight we gather to remember—but not like we remember facts. We remember in the biblical sense: to make present again. To re-member the broken body. To let God stitch it together in us.

Because the Christian response to suffering—our own and the world’s—has always been the same: Exodus—the story that began with liberation and continues at this table. The table where no one is turned away. The basin, the towel, and the kneeling God.

This is not performance.
It’s participation.
It’s protest.
It’s prophecy.
It’s the Eucharist.

And it will make you dangerous.

And if it doesn’t—then maybe we’ve traded the liberating God of the Exodus for the god of empire. For what Fr. Kenneth Leech once warned us against: A sacramental religion with no room for judgment, prophecy, redemption, or struggle. A religion that once blessed Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar—and still blesses oppressive regimes today.
But sacramentalism is not enough.

The doctrine of the Body of Christ is not a vague sense of fellowship. It is a weapon in the struggle for a world that works for all and not just some. It is the proclamation of a new creation. A new humanity. One in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bond nor free. Just one table. One body. One love.