Homily for Maundy Thursday, March 24, 2016
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Minot, North Dakota
The Rev. Mary P. Johnson, Priest in Charge
Nine years ago, during Lent, my mother, Grace McSkimming
Peterson, almost 92 years old, died very suddenly, and I made the trip to
Kansas for her funeral. It was a sad
time, but as the family gathered, there was a lot of light- hearted
reminiscence and laughter, too. One of
the best and funniest times was at the supper after the funeral, when my aunt,
Wilma Peterson, commandeered a huge chalk board in the church basement where
we’d gathered. Wilma is a dedicated amateur genealogist and so she and a couple
of relatives: Kevin Larson and Jean Anderson Johnson, also genealogy buffs,
created an enormous complex annotated chart to show how the Larsons and the
Andersons were related to each other through our family, the Petersons. It didn’t matter a bit that my mother was a
Canadian of Scottish descent. Wilma made
the chart; Kevin and Jean added stories that put some flesh and blood on all
those names. We learned about the uncle
who played poker and who let the kids play cards, and about the uncle who
burned even the Rook cards the children had received as a Christmas gift from
the teacher in their one-room school. We
learned who was considered “simple minded” and who first went to college. We learned who generously married a pregnant
woman abandoned by her ne’er do well boyfriend, and accepted the child who was
born as his own. We heard who was buried
in which church cemetery, and why.
We were remembering.
We were telling the stories that made us who we are today. We were honoring the values and virtues that
we want to pass on to our children’s children.
We were connecting ourselves into a family tree that extended far into
the past.
Tonight’s liturgy and the Bible readings that accompany it
are about remembering, about receiving a precious, sacred, life-giving story,
and holding it in trust, and then in our turn, passing it on to our children’s
children.
We heard the story of the first Passover. When Moses hands on
God’s commands about how the Israelites are to depart from Egypt, where they
have been slaves for centuries, he says: “This day shall be a day of
remembrance for you. You shall celebrate
it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it
as a perpetual ordinance” (Exodus 12:14).
Jews to this very day retell the story of God’s great deliverance of his
people. Each generation becomes the repository, and, still more, the conduit,
for the Great Story.
St. Paul was the earliest Christian to set down in writing an
account of the Supper that Jesus ate with his disciples in the Upper Room. Paul was not there himself, and only began to
walk on the Way of Jesus years afterwards, but nevertheless he wrote:
I
received from the Lord [Jesus] what I also handed on to you, that the Lord
Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had
given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after
supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it, in
remembrance of me.” or as often as you
eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes
(1 Cor. 11:23-26).
Every time we gather for the Eucharist, we re-tell the
central elements of the story of Jesus and how his life, death, and
resurrection bring life to us, and give us resurrection hope. “As often as you eat this bread and drink the
cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death—until he comes,” Paul writes. And, like Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who wrote
a couple of decades after Paul, Paul records Jesus saying: “Do this in
remembrance of me.” In the interim
between the “already,” the facts about Jesus during his lifetime, and the “not
yet,” when he comes again, we have this story.
We have this Meal. And in the
story and in the meal, Jesus is present.
And until his fuller coming, he comes anew whenever we gather, remember,
and celebrate the Eucharist together.
The Gospel writers aren’t clear and unanimous about the
occasion of this Supper. Matthew, Mark,
and Luke seem to regard it as a Passover meal.
John, who wanted to emphasize that Jesus was the archetypal Passover
Lamb, places the Supper in the Upper Room on the night before Passover would
have begun. But in any case there is a
very close association between this meal and the meal that Jews still eat to
commemorate the Passover. The Passover
meal calls Israel to remember the great deliverance from Egypt that God
accomplished on their behalf. The Lord’s
Supper calls Christians to remember our great deliverance from sin and
death.
Re-living the Great Story of God’s involvement with the human
race is a relational activity. At Passover, the youngest child in a Jewish
household asks questions that invite the re-telling of the story of the
Exodus. This act of remembrance takes
place in community. When we Christians
worship, the central act whenever we gather is an act of remembrance that, by
the power of the Holy Spirit, brings us into the presence of Jesus. He is present; we remember; we take Him into
our very selves, and we say “Thank you.”
But as central as this act of remembrance and thanksgiving
is, one Gospel writer, John, does not mention it explicitly. Tonight we heard part of John’s account of
this meal as our Gospel reading. And it
begins in the middle of the meal with an act that would normally have taken
place before the meal. It begins with
Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. John
makes it clear that Jesus interrupts the normal flow of the meal when he does
this. It makes the actions that Jesus
takes not only practical, given the dusty roads of Jerusalem, but also highly
symbolic.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke record many parables that Jesus told. In the Gospel of John, however, rather than telling these parables, Jesus seems to act them out. Before proclaiming that he is the Light of
the World, Jesus healed a blind man.
Before proclaiming that he was the Bread of life, he fed the crowds in
the wilderness. Here, in his last meal
with his disciples before he is betrayed and killed, he acts out the great
Reversal Rule of the Kingdom of God: The last shall be first and the first
shall be last. The greatest are the
servants.
Peter, the Everyman of the disciples, asks: “Lord are you
going to wash my feet?” And it is vey important that we hear Jesus’
reply.
“You do not know what I am doing, but later you will
understand.”
Later, when they hear Jesus command them to love one another.
Later, when Jesus is summarily condemned to death.
Later, when Jesus is crucified and dies at the time (as John
tells the story) when the Passover lambs were being slain.
Later, when, on the day after the Sabbath, some of them find
an empty tomb.
Later, when Jesus appears to them alive.
The washing of feet was a lowly act that usually a household
servant would do as the Paterfamilias extended hospitality to a guest. Jesus, extending his hospitality and his
welcome on this solemn occasion, did himself what a servant would do. Jesus says: “Do you know what I have done for
you?” (You can hear the silence as the questions sort of just hangs out there
on the air.) “You call me Teacher and
Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am.
So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to
wash one another’s feet.”
Jesus washed feet.
This is surely high-touch, relational activity. Just as surely, it is low-status. Yet it is in this context that Jesus says: “Now the Son of Man has been glorified,
and God has been glorified in him.” By
saying this, I believe that Jesus puts the whole story together. The crucifixion is not to be understood apart
from the Meal or from the radical act of servanthood that the foot-washing
represents. The glory comes in the Great
Reversal. It is the Great Reversal—the
Lord of All becoming the Servant of All—that is the Glorious Thing. The resurrection is a necessary—and equally
glorious—consequence. And it is all
about love.
This night is called Maundy Thursday. “Maundy” comes from the Latin word that gives
us our English word “mandate” or “Commandment.” The Great Reversal sets us all on a new
footing, and the principle for life on this new footing is the commandment that
Jesus gave that night soon after he hung up his towel: “Just as I have loved
you, you also should love one another.”
And so we remember, we retell the story of the Lord of
Life. And in the telling, in the washing
of the feet, or the dishes, or the laundry, we make a community that has a
whole new set of rules based on love.
And, just as Jesus is glorified as he washes feet, there is glory in
this new way of life.
And there is power, power to turn the world upside down. Power to turn back even that last great
enemy, Death.
Love one another!
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