Eucharist with address and foot-washing, followed by The Watch and Compline

Maundy Thursday gets its name from the Latin word mandatum meaning to command, as we remember Jesus' command: 'Love one another as I have loved you'. 

It is the day when we remember Jesus sharing the Last Supper with his disciples and commanding them to do the same with bread and wine in the future. Jesus also washed the disciples' feet, and this will be recreated in the Cathedral as a reminder of the kind of service we are meant to demonstrate in our love for one another.

At the end of the service, the Cathedral is stripped of all ornamentation and we remember Jesus’ agony and arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, when his disciples abandoned him. Can we stay and watch with him?

With the Nave Choir

This service includes an address from Canon Rosie Woodall, Canon for Worship and Spirituality and Vice Dean. The reflections in this Holy Week are all based around the women who witnessed, and often played a key role in, the events of the final week of Jesus’ life. Most of them are unnamed in Scripture – and admittedly with one or two of them, I’m stretching whether they existed at all – but I wanted to reclaim their stories to make the week less dominated by the famous men we all know about. It was the women after all who remain true to Jesus while the men condemn, betray or abandon him. It seems particularly appropriate in the year in which we celebrate thirty years of women priests in the Church of England to bring women to the forefront of the story.

Entrance for this service will be through the Southwest porch