Rivers of Light
Maundy Thursday 2026
The Rev’d Devin McLachlan
So we found the end of our journey.
So we stood, alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.
Words inscribed on Ted Hughes’ memorial stone in Poet’s Corner, the end of one of his beautiful River poems, ‘That Morning’. Hughes imagines standing waist-deep in a river teeming with wild salmon, light and lupins, fish and water all glowing in a ‘dazzle of blessing’
It is a poem of transfiguration and wonder, carried along by a river which is not only unnamed, but unseen, invisible in the poem, a presence inferred by the swimming of salmon, by the phrase ‘waist-deep’ — but never named, never spoken of directly.
So it is with water, miraculously translucent, carrying all life along. Humans are up to 60% water, our brains three-quarters water: cucumbers with anxiety, as the meme has it. When we look up in the atmosphere, there are some 13,000 cubic kilometres of water up there. Draw out a square meter on the ground and extend it up through the air — that column of atmosphere alone holds 4 stone of water.
And that amount is dwarfed by what lies invisible under our feet, tens of oceans worth, quintillions upon quintillions of gallons not just in underground aquifers, but — miles and miles below us molecular water dissolved under high pressure in the rocks of the earth’s mantle.
Transluscent, all around us. And desperately precious.
Here in Cambridge, we are stewards of some of the rarest waters in the world — chalk streams, such as Hobson’s Brook, in dire need of protection and care.
The abundant, free clarity of water which Bene’t’s churchwarden Thomas Hobson helped bring to Cambridge is all but a thing of the past; water in this country is now not only private but in a state of privation and pollution.
But our attention this week turns to the Holy Land. Today in east Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank water is almost impossible to come by for Palestinians, new wells and even rainwater collection being largely illegal under occupation.[i]
Even in that Upper Room in Jerusalem some two thousand years ago,water was rare and precious. A system of springs, aqueducts, cisterns and pools watered the city of Jerusalem. In the days leading up to Passover, Jews would immerse themselves in the mikvah, pools of living water for ritual purification — required as well before entering the Temple complex. That, along with the enormous influx of visitors to the city for Passover would have made water scarce for that last supper.
Water. Invisible, and all around us. And desperately precious.
Six days earlier, Mary washed Jesus’ feet in Bethany, washing his feet in perfume, as the woman in Galilee, had washed his feet with her tears a year or so earlier. Desperately precious, salt water poured from the penitent heart:
Drop, drop, slow tears, And bathe those beauteous feet,
Which brought from heaven, The news and Prince of peace[ii]
Mary’s gift of anointing affected Jesus deeply, hearts-ease and sorrow combined, quenching his own fears.
He has returned Mary’s extravagant hospitality in that upper room, pouring waters drawn quite possibly from the Siloam pool where Jesus had healed the man born blind. While he does not wash the disciples’ feet with expensive perfume as she did, Jesus kneels at their feet as tenderly as Mary, and — overbrimming with love and knowing what was to come — who can say but that his own salt tears were not mixed in with the waters.
It is to the sound of pouring water, trickling tenderly from a ewer, plashing into a stoneware basin, that Jesus, kneeling and stripped to the waist, gives them a new commandment:
Pour out Mary’s gift, pour out my gift, pour out God’s gift of love, not parsimoniously trickling upstream: but let love roll down ever-flowing. Let love pour out, clear and precious, invisible until the light of God plays across its waves. Let love be a flood of justice, rolling down, an unfailing stream, poured out as libation at the roots of the tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. Let love be the river that bears the church through history.
Love one another. Just as I have loved you, love one another.
A very different poet named Hughes this time — at the age of 17 Langston Hughes wrote a whole history of the African-American experience, of continuity in migration and slavery, in 13 short lines. It famously begins:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.[iii]
For two thousand years, Jesus has been pouring out rivers of love over our feet, inviting us again and again to course his new commandment, a current of love weathering away a new channel in the world.
Like Simon Peter, we resist — a dam of misplaced pride, an ox-bow of insecurity, unwilling to leave the dynamics of the dry desert that is this world’s powers and principalities.
Like Judas son of Simon Iscariot, we resist — uncomfortable with the extravagant flow of love, parsimonious in our love of neighbour, penurious in our love of God, a faith watered down rather than watering.
But Christ’s love is persistent, constant in every sense. We have not loved well; we certainly have not loved one another as Christ loves us. And even still, he kneels at our feet and pours out that love again.
Listen to the sound of water plashing against feet, remember the taste of salt tears, look to the water mingled in the sacramental wine.
Translucent. Living and moving. All around us, above and below us. Extravagant and precious all at once.
May the water of Christ’s love, teach our souls to grow deep like the rivers, so that at the end of our journey we may stand, alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.
[i] cf https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/11/the-occupation-of-water/
[ii] Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650)
[iii] Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, from The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 2002 by Langston Hughes. www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44428/the-negro-speaks-of-river