Love All the One Anothers

Sermon for Maundy Thursday, March 28, 2024
John 13:1-17,31b-35

If you’ve come to our Maundy Thursday worship before, you might be surprised to see me up here.  This is a preaching moment that calls for a deacon, not a priest, because of the uniquely servant-oriented ministry of the diaconate.  And we had planned to do that, as you’ll see with Deacon Adam’s name there in the bulletin.  But I wanted to reflect on a change we’re making in our Maundy Thursday worship this year, something that might make the liturgical purists grumble.

As you probably know, our service tonight focuses on two commands Jesus gave us – and it’s that sense of “command” that gives the day its name.  In Latin, it’s mandatum, from which we get our word “mandate.”  So, we might well call Maundy Thursday “command Thursday.”

One command we remember tonight is about the Eucharist: that, on the night he was betrayed, Jesus took the bread and wine from the Passover seder meal and imbued it with a new sense of God’s deliverance.  Just as it had symbolized God saving the Israelites from slavery and death under Pharoah, so Jesus made the bread and wine a sign of our eternal deliverance from the forces of sin and death.  The Old Covenant with Israel, that they would be God’s missionary presence to the nations, had grown into God’s New Covenant with all people – eternal life opened to everyone through Jesus giving himself up to conquer death.  “Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus said (Luke 22:19).  He tells us to do it because we need it.  It’s how we remember that life is so much more than what we make of it, day by day.

So, Holy Communion is one of Jesus’ commands we remember tonight.  The other is what we just heard about from John’s Gospel, the command to wash each other’s feet.  Jesus ties a towel around himself, and gets down on his knees, and does the last thing his friends would have expected:  He takes their worn and tired feet, hardened by countless steps in a culture that traveled on footpaths in sandals, and he washes them like a household servant would.  The meaning is even deeper than we’d imagine because, in that culture, the power differential between servant and master was ever-present.  Yes, Jesus was the disciples’ spiritual master, but all around them were actual masters with actual slaves, reinforcing the hierarchy and patriarchy of the Greco-Roman world.  So, Jesus puts himself in the slave’s place, something scandalous to everyone in the room.  Peter says it out loud: “You will never wash my feet!” (John 13:8).  But the scandal is the point.  Jesus explains, “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14).  And so, on this “command Thursday,” we do.

Or, rather, we did.  As most of you know, we’re changing our practice this year from footwashing to handwashing.  So, are we countermanding Jesus’ order?  That seems an odd choice on a night when we remember our calling as his servants. 

On top of that risk, handwashing carries its own baggage in the Holy Week story.  As a parishioner pointed out to me, we remember Jesus for washing feet, but who do we remember for washing hands?  Pontius Pilate, the brutal Roman governor of Judea.  Once Pilate realized he had no power to stop the drama leading Jesus to the cross, Pilate commanded his servants to bring out a bowl of water.  And there, at the pinnacle of state power, Pilate washed his hands of responsibility, saying to the religious leaders and the crowd, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to [his death] yourselves!” (Matthew 27:24).  That’s probably not our best Holy Week role model. 

So, why are we washing hands?

Well, if we go on a bit further in chapter 13 of John’s Gospel, to the end of our reading tonight, we hear Jesus’ give “the why” for his footwashing command.  At the end of the day, it’s not about the feet; it’s about the washing, the servant ministry of love.  Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (13:34-35)

I’ve been failing in that for a couple of decades’ worth of Maundy Thursdays now.  As we’ve offered this service over and over, I’ve often thought, “I wish more people would come up to have their feet washed.  It’s so powerful, such a sacramental sign of God’s love freely given to people who absolutely haven’t deserved it.  Why don’t more people come up for it?”  Now, certainly, our reticence to receive God’s grace does get in the way of taking part.  But so does something much more mundane: our knees and our backs.  It never occurred to me that the physicality of this wonderful sign of divine love could be a barrier excluding people from experiencing it.  If you can’t get down to reach someone’s feet, it’s pretty tough to wash them.

So, here’s a peek behind the curtain of liturgical planning.  Fr. Jerry Kolb wrote me just a few days ago, asking if I’d ever considered shifting to handwashing as a way to let everyone take part.  Honestly, I’d heard about other churches doing handwashing – and I later learned it used to happen here, in the 1980s and ’90s – but, no, I’d never considered it.  And I should have.

Ideally, we’d offer the opportunity to wash both hands and feet – and most likely, that’s what we’ll do next year.  But, two days before Maundy Thursday didn’t seem like the optimal time to tell the Altar Guild they needed to make a pivot like that. 

So, for this year at least, we’ll just be washing hands.  For those of you who fast-forward to Pilate washing his hands of responsibility for Jesus’ death, here’s a thought:  Even our most powerful signs and symbols can be used in ugly, sinful ways.  Just a generation after Jesus’ instituted the Eucharist, the apostle Paul had to write to the church in Corinth, telling them to stop making Communion a drunken revel (1 Cor 11:17-34).  And how many times have we seen the cross used to promote politicians or sell plumbing services?  Yet the Eucharist and the cross will not be emptied of their power.

And so it is with washing hands.  By this, too, “everyone will know that you are [Jesus’] disciples.”  Because by this, everyone will know that you have love for all the “one anothers” in the room.