Maundy Thursday

Sharing a meal together, and remembering the events that brought us together.  Covid has been with us for more than a year now, and we don’t share meals together like we used to – here in church, of course, but pretty much throughout our lives, except perhaps for immediate family if we have them.  And the times that we remember when we were able to gather freely with family and friends and even with strangers to eat and drink and celebrate together, these times seem more disconnected than usual from our current lives.

And yet human beings have always come together to eat and to drink and to remember the stories that bind us together.  Even if, as tonight, we have to be a bit creative about how we do it, gathering to eat and drink and remind one another of our common story is just part of being human, part of a community.

Whether it is the Jewish people, who for centuries have gathered each year at this time around tables to share a meal of lamb and unleavened bread and bitter herbs, to tell the story of how God freed them from bondage and slavery in Egypt, how God continues to set them free to live as God’s people, reflecting God’s justice, loving God with their whole heart and mind and soul and strength and their neighbors as themselves, seeking God’s wisdom and peace.

Jesus too, on the night before his death, gathered with his chosen family, his disciples and friends, ate and drank that Passover meal and shared the story of the God who delivers God’s faithful ones from death to life, the God who confronts human evil and breaks the chains in which the power of death holds us tight.  Tonight we read Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, written a little more than twenty years after that night, in which Paul quotes the story that was already known to his readers and that is so familiar to us as well, about how Jesus, on the night before his death, gave us a way to share in his life-giving body and blood, to proclaim his death and all that it means for us until he comes again.

And as we gather tonight to eat and to drink and to tell one another that story, the gospel passage from John tonight reminds us of some essential parts of that story.

One is how the chosen family that Jesus gathered with him on that night is characterized by the service and humility that is made visible and tangible in the washing of feet.  Even when health conditions allowed us to meet in person, many of us were always reluctant to wash the feet of others, and even more to allow someone else to wash our feet.

And that’s not just a modern sensibility; we read tonight that Peter openly said it just felt too weird for him to think of Jesus getting down on his hands and knees and washing his feet.  I think of Isaiah’s famous vision of heaven, and the six-winged angels around God’s throne – with two wings they flew, with two wings they covered their eyes (for no one can see God and live), and with two wings they covered their feet – because there are some things best kept covered up in polite company.

But Jesus invites his disciples to be a community that honors one another precisely in our most vulnerable places.  Which is a problem because many of us have been hurt by people who did not respect our vulnerability, people who had an agenda and took advantage of us.  Without mentioning names, I’ve had personal experience of church communities that violated my own trust and vulnerability, and I’ve spent a lot of time recently trying to process and come to terms with that experience.

And so we instinctively hide our vulnerability and our weaknesses and our stinky feet, it’s a normal instinct of self-preservation.  Which is why Jesus insists that a community that honors each one’s vulnerability must first be a community that sets aside all agendas, all assertions of power and control over others, and focuses solely on love and service to others.  As Jesus set aside his robe, got down on his hands and knees, as God set aside divinity to take flesh for us, as Jesus laid down his very life for the sake of his friends.

To find a place that is safe enough that we would let someone wash our feet – that is a rare and precious thing.  Many people never find it.  And many communities that call themselves Christian don’t achieve it – they have agendas, things they want you to believe, people they want you to obey, stuff they want you to do or don’t do, principles they expect you to embody, someone they want you to be for them.

The good news I have for you tonight is that the community that is God – the community of Father, Son, and Spirit – is not like that.  The community of persons that is the one God is a communion of self-giving love, where there is no coercion, no agenda other than love of the other, where each Person is so grounded in the security of being loved that they can be fully vulnerable to one another, so confident in being honored and loved and cared for that they can risk anything – even a cross – for the sake of that love.  The good news is that in Jesus God became human so that humanity can be caught up in that love which is God.

And so, as the ancient hymn for Maundy Thursday reminds us, wherever that love and compassion and honoring of vulnerability may be found, that is where God is.

We know that we don’t live up to that love – neither did the community Jesus gathered with on the night before his death.  They may have been the chosen family of Jesus, yet one betrayed him that night, another denied him, most abandoned him.  Yet this did not stop Jesus from loving them, and our betrayals and denials and lack of faith does not stop God from loving us either.

And if our experience of betrayal and faithlessness – whether in the church or elsewhere – makes us fearful of showing our vulnerability and our weakness, I at least find the beauty of this vision of community so compelling that I want to believe in it, that I want to try to learn to set aside my agenda and my fear and live with others in the safe space that Jesus has opened up for us – to live with you in that communion of mutual love and vulnerability where we hope to see the presence of God.

For – as the ancient hymn says – wherever there is genuine love and care for each other in our vulnerability, there is God.  It’s the love of Christ that has gathered us together, so let us rejoice and be glad in him.  Let us honor and love the living God, and care for one another with sincere hearts.