Notes from a Sojourn
April 9, 2020
Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday
Sermon for Maundy Thursday, Year A (John 13.1-17, 31b-35)
The word maundy in “Maundy Thursday” is a Middle English word that comes to us by way of the Latin word mandatum which simply means “command.” The word “mandate” comes from the same root. So, if we wanted to, we could call today “Command Thursday” or “Mandate Thursday” and we’d mean the same thing.
We name today “Maundy Thursday” because Jesus gives a command – a mandate – to his disciples at the occasion of their last supper together before Jesus is arrested, taken to trial, and sentenced to death:
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
This command isn’t arbitrary and it’s not vague: “Just as I have loved you." It is given to his disciples immediately after he shows them how to love. The commandment is an invitation to each one of us to move from observing to participating.
And how has Jesus loved them?
You’ve heard the saying “a picture’s worth a thousand words”? Well, Jesus leaves them a tactile memory – a mental picture – they can keep to remember everything that’s important about how to love as he does. He crouches down and, like a servant does, washes the dirt from his friends’ feet.
It’s kind. Its humble. It’s gentle and patient work. It’s love.
It’s a very good expression of love. A later Christian teacher named Paul tells his beginner Christians that love is patient and kind – it is not boastful, arrogant, or proud. Love is not above meeting people’s needs, especially their most basic and, sometimes, unpleasant ones.
Washing their feet.
That’s the memory, the mental picture of love Jesus wants to give his friends before he endures the terrible night ahead of him. A night of betrayals, denials, abandonment, and violence.
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I want to turn focus to the awkward exchange of words between Peter and Jesus in this story. It's awkward because Peter feels awkward.
[Note: remember, Peter is like our stunt double in a movie – he’s used in scenes like this one to say the things we’re all thinking but are afraid to say, and do the things we are too risk averse to do ourselves. Thank God for Peter because he always shows us what we need to learn].
Jesus washing feet forces Peter to look down at the man he used to looking up at. In the same way celebrity scandals shatter the illusions we hold about stardom, when the teacher Peter calls Lord (“Master”) takes off his dress shirt, kneels, and gets up to his elbows in dirty water, he experiences Jesus doing something beneath the dignity of his title. This isn’t Jesus the sage seated before him handing out wise sayings – it’s Jesus the nameless household labourer crouched silently at his feet giving himself.
I’m sure, without giving it a second thought, Peter would normally receive this intimate foot care from anonymous slaves and forgettable household servants. But he’s challenged in this moment to recognize the presence of his Lord and Teacher in the lowliness of a servant. To acknowledge the presence of Christ in a place where he would not think to find it.
So Peter does what most of us do when we feel awkward and unprepared: he laughs.
“Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”
He looks around at his friends hoping they’ll throw him a line.
Jesus says, “You don’t know what I’m doing right now, but later you will understand.”
Peter: “You will never wash my feet.”
Jesus: “Peter, unless I wash you, you have no share with me.”
Feeling even more awkward, Peter involuntarily cracks a joke:
“Lord not my feet only but also my hands and my head!”
But Jesus isn’t joking:
“Peter, one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet.”
In other words, Jesus is saying to Peter, “Can you receive me as I come to you? Can you see me in this position? Because if not, you won’t understand how to share in my life or how to share my life with others.”
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Washing his disciples’ feet.
This is the memory, the picture, that Jesus gives us before he enters the betrayal of Gethsemane and the abandonment of Golgotha.
Why?
If we can’t see Jesus – the Lord, our God – in the lowliness of a household servant, how will we ever see him in the lowliness of crucified man?
If we can’t let God close to care for our weathered feet, how will we ever let God close enough to care for our wounded hearts?
If I haven’t experienced the humility of receiving God’s love for the stinkiest, dirtiest parts of who I am, what makes me think I’ll have the humility to give God’s love to other people? Especially when their needs are so unpleasant?
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“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
God’s love shown to us in Jesus Christ is a man in his undershirt washing the dirt from our feet.
That love bears our griefs and sorrows; that love believes we are worthy of God’s attention and care; that love hopes we will learn to love as God does; that love endures – even our betrayals, denials, abandonment, and violence.
That’s the love of God for you this holy night.
It's the love Christ commands us to give one another.
Colin+
Assistant Curate
The Area Parish of the St. Lawrence
