...posted a sermon, that is. Why not.

A Sermon for Maundy Thursday

John 13:1-15, 31b-35

Maundy Thursday is a difficult day to preach. It is often difficult to get the tone just right. On the one hand, Jesus’ last supper with the disciples is a joyful yet reverent Passover meal, a retelling of the story of God’s faithfulness to the Israelite slaves and their liberation from Egypt. Jesus blesses the bread and shares the cup, and he washes his disciples’ feet, an act of service, humilty, and love. John writes, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

He loved them to the end. And he commanded them to love one another to the end.

And yet… and yet… and yet.
There is so much life and grace in this passage, and yet.
Death is knocking at the door.
Betrayal is close at hand.
And denial and abandonment wait nearby.
And through it all, Jesus washes their feet.
He washes James’s feet and John’s feet and Matthew’s feet.
He washes Peter’s feet.
And he washes Judas’s feet.
He kneels before a denier, a betrayer, and those who will run away in fear.

You see how the mystery and intricacy of Maundy Thursday is always just beyond us? Like a short gust of song that calls up a memory, but you can’t quite remember the event, just the feeling… Maundy Thursday will always elude us.

One thing does not elude us, however—and that is the reality of death that hangs in the air.

And how are we called to respond? How are we called to live amidst the reality of death—our own, or those whom we love? These are some of the questions of Maundy Thursday. These are the questions that Jesus surely encountered.

As we heard preached on Palm Sunday, the basic intent of the spiritual life is about learning to die. That is what Maundy Thursday is about. Jesus is teaching us how to die, or more specifically, how to live in the midst of death.

It is the fundamental lesson of our lives.

I wrote in my journal recently about a beloved seminary professor who was dying after a long bout with cancer. He has since passed away, but here is what I wrote a few months before his death:

Most of the people I have known who have died have died suddenly. I wonder what it is like to have a deathbed and know you're lying on it, to see your life coming to an end. I wonder what it is like to know that all the work you've done on your legacy is finished, and now it is out of your hands.

This man, my professor, wrote a foundational text on Christian theology, a book that is read by seminary students, Sunday School classes, and church groups all over the world. He has taught people, I can't even imagine how many, from the classroom and the pulpit and the page. Does that bring him some peace, knowing that many of his ideas have taken hold in this world? Is there a sense of completion as he looks back, or did he carry inside himself just one more edition of the book? Or in this time beyond treatment and last-minute cures, with family and friends by his side, do those things cease to matter? We are told that he is at peace, that he feels comfort in the arms of his Creator. Is that true? Has the professor, who tended to our questions and doubts, come to a place where questions are no more?

I wonder if he stands on the threshold between life and death more certain of the truths on which he grounded his life, or more awed by the mystery into which he will soon find himself. What would he say about those type-written lecture notes that he used for years and years? Do they seem a true and humble offering to his God? Or do they seem utterly inadequate in the rosy light of dusk, like a rendering of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in crayon?

He is teaching us still, in the manner of his death. It's silly, but I imagine that when the time comes he will disappear into the cornfield like James Earl Jones's character in Field of Dreams. He will poke a hand in and withdraw it quickly, perhaps because of what he feels there, perhaps because he worries he's been too bold. Then he will look back at those he's leaving behind, smile, turn, and walk away, laughing. The laughing will persist even when we don't see him anymore.

I heard later that a visitor had gone to see him, and asked him whether he was at peace. “Oh yes,” he said. “But the peace is even bigger than I had ever imagined.”

Here, of course, is a man who was in the twilight of life, who died free of pain and surrounded by family. However, we need only read the newspapers and listen to the news to taste the bitter reality that death does not always come on such peaceful wings. A young man in our community died just this week as a result of a drag race with his friends. Ten students and teachers are dead in Red Lake, Minnesota. And of course, all week we have been battered about in a torrent—of political rhetoric, judicial actions, desperation, and sorrow, with a silent 41-year-old Florida woman in the quiet eye of the storm.

Death does not always come on peaceful wings… and nobody knew this better than Jesus.

And yet… and yet… and yet.

He did not hide.
He did not flee.
He stayed.
He knelt with a towel, unhurried. He took the disciples’ feet in his own hands, and dipped those feet in a basin. Wilderness dust ebbed and swirled away as poured cupful after cupful of clear water. He dried their feet with a towel; and he made these ragtag disciples—scoundrels and rascals all—clean and new.
And he gave them a new commandment—a commandment of love.

Even in the shadow of betrayal,
Even in the darkness of death,
Jesus said, “Here is how you are to be with one another. My hour has come; there is no easy way out for me. Nor is there an easy way out for you. You must love one another, not in gauzy romanticized way, but in a way that will demand something from you.”

There is no easy way out of this commandment. The commandment to love comes in the shadow of the cross, which makes it for us a matter of life and death.

And yet, do we not gravitate toward the easy way out—of love? of death?

I heard an interview recently with Laurie Zoloth, a Jewish ethicist, who writes extensively about the moral and ethical issues in relation to human cloning. As you might imagine, she writes with a great deal of concern over the prospect of cloning a human being, and the tangled web of issues such a possibility would raise for society.

During the interview, Zoloth shared her experience of being part of a volunteer Jewish burial society. Jewish custom requires bodies to be buried before sundown if at all possible. Several years ago, also on the day of Passover, she was called to take part in the burial preparation for a four-year-old girl. The girl had been running across the street to her father’s waiting arms when she was hit by a car. Zoloth arrived at the funeral home with the other women to prepare the body, which was horribly, heartbreakingly broken. The preparations for burial included washing the body with water, and dozens of other careful, ritualistic details. “This little girl was the tiniest person we had prepared,” Zoloth says. “I and all the other women there were frantic with grief.”

And then, this Jewish ethicist who has spoken out against human cloning went on to say, “I knew at that point that I would have cloned her. If I could have. If I’d had the technology… I didn’t care if it was risky, I wanted that baby girl back.”

In many ways, it would have been the easy way out.

And yet the mother of this little girl, a woman of deep Jewish faith, said, “If you want to bring my daughter back, I need you to go to work in the world, to do acts of loving kindness and mercy, of justice and love. That will bring her back.” This is the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam, or “healing of the world.” In some Jewish thought, it is this healing, this repair of the world, that will bring the Messiah. This is what will bring the lost ones back. The mother believed that completely. Only through a radically altered world, a world of justice, peace and mercy, would her daughter be restored.
And Zoloth realized, “It is not the body that this little girl needs, it is a world reborn that this little girl needs.”

A world reborn. That is what this Sunday as about for us. But in the meantime…

Death lurks in the margins of Maundy Thursday. There is no stopping it. We cannot avoid it; we cannot circumvent it. And yet as disciples of Jesus Christ, we are no longer waiting for the messianic age. For us, that age has come. And yet the commandment is the same. In the midst of death, amid oncoming shadow, we are called to love. Radical love. World-shaking, world-healing love.

May it be so.