On Easter we will gather together in praise and worship to God our Father who lovingly sent his only son so that we may have life. We will celebrate with Halleluhahs that death no longer imprisons us but that we have been given eternal life. And we will also rejoice that our life here on earth has been radically changed. We have moved out of darkness into light and we have been given the gift of abundant life in God, even in our lifetime. But what does this abundant life look like? How do we dare to dream and to see it as God would have us see it? How do we live it out? How do we know with assurance that we are living as Christ’s followers and not just his admirers?
This is why I think Holy Week and especially Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are so important. If we skip too quickly from Jesus’ triumphant march into Jerusalem straight to Easter we might remain as bystanders to the miracle that Christ shapes in our lives and in the life of our community.
We may remain content to stand at the side of the road shouting Hosanna as Christ passes us by on his way to the cross. We may be too faint hearted to journey with Him to the cross. We may not hear his final seven words, words full of promise for us, and we might not be able to claim and live the commandment he gives us in our scripture passage today, to love others limitlessly, as Christ himself has loved us.
We gather on Maundy Thursday to prepare ourselves for Easter, to ready ourselves for the abundant life that Christ gives to us and with which we will celebrate on Easter.
We spend time with Jesus and we listen to his words and we reflect on his example, all so that when Easter comes we will be ready to be not just admires but followers. Ready not only to claim the promises on that Easter day, but every day onward, even when we are confronted, challenged, discouraged or tired.
We pause on Maundy Thursday so that we may know with full confidence what that abundant life looks like. “Every believer knows that Christ went the way of the cross for our sakes. But it is not enough just to know this. Each of us must find the cross and take it up.”
In Scriptures Jesus describes the abundant life we receive at Easter.
John 13:1-17 NRS Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no share with me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Jesus said to him, "One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you." For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, "Not all of you are clean." After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? 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. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
John 13:31b-35 Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' 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."
The word Maundy is derived from the ancient French and it means a new commandment. And in our scripture reading today we receive this new commandment that shapes our abundant life in Christ that we celebrate on Easter morning. This new commandment is none other than love one another, just as Jesus has loved us. And the example of Jesus’ footwashing gives form to that love. For when Jesus’ washes the feet of his disciples he defies worldly assumptions of love rooted in false notions of power.
After all our Lord and Savior is the one that we glorify with Hosanna’s as he entered Jerusalem on a donkey. This teacher, this master, is one that bows down and washes the feet of his disciples, and in doing so demonstrates that love is both a giving and a receiving, an action of humbling self-emptying that invites others to empty so that they too may receive and share God’s greatest gift of all…love. It is this love that will empower us to follow Jesus to the cross and to be present at the empty tomb on Sunday. All so that we may receive God’s cleansing love for us and share it with others.
The cleansing act of footwashing, humanizes Peter and the disciples. Peter and the disciples may have bathed that day, but they were covered in sin. They needed to be made holy, to be cleansed of their sins, so that they could know the love of God in Christ for them.
Jesus in washing their feet emptied himself so that the disciples could be made clean, so that they could receive God’s love for them. But it was not just a gift given to be hoarded by the disciples. For the ultimate meaning of being made human, of being cleansed and transformed into holiness, is that God’s love restores and reconciles us with the other. To be fully human is to love others as God in Christ loves us. It is to be connected with each other in a way that both simultaneously empties of sin and fills us with God’s love that humanizes the other.
Think of all the ways that we dehumanize each other, both in word and action. We use sharp words, we lie, we ignore, we judge, we condemn, we strip people of power, we beat them, imprison them, we kill them. We treat others as disposable. We make them into something not someone that can be easily discarded. We treat them as animals rather than as humans created in the image of God. In all of these actions we are washing our hands of others, just as Pilate washed his hands of Jesus.
Pilate, motivated not by love but by fear, dehumanizes Jesus. In John 19 we read that Pilate: has Jesus flogged, places a crown of thorns on his head, dresses Jesus in a purple robe to mock him as the king of Jews, allows Jesus to be struck in the face, ridicules him to the mob and then ultimately hands him over to the mob for crucifixion. All are ways Pilate, washes his hands of Jesus.
Joel Marcus writes, “It is precisely this sort of dehumanization that Jesus experienced on the cross – for our benefit. He was flushed away in the ancient Roman sewage disposal system….” Jesus truly becomes as Psalm 22 prophesies “a worm, not human” Paul in Galatians tells us that Christ became a curse for us. In 2 Corinthians Paul writes, “God made him, who did not know sin, to become sin, in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him. “Paul does not say that Christ became a cursed person but that he became a curse; he does not say that God turned him into a sinful human being, but that he turned him into sin. Christ becomes a thing for us – a bad thing.
When we feel, therefore, that the negative opinion of other people, or their indifference, or our own failings have robbed us of our most precious possession, our image of ourselves as worthwhile human beings, we are not undergoing an experience that is alien to Christ. And it is precisely in this ability to identify ourselves with Jesus, or rather in his self- identification with our dehumanized state, that our humanity is returned to us.
Christ becomes sin, so that we become the righteousness of God in him; Jesus through his cleansing both in his life and in his death gives us the ability to be fully human.
Pilate’s washing of his hands of Jesus is in sharp contrast to Jesus’ actions at the last supper when he washes the feet of his disciples. Jesus does not wash his hands of the disciples. Rather he washes them so that they may receive His love and His promise for their lives, so that they may go out and share Jesus’ life giving promise with others. And in doing so, Jesus sets in motion the life giving redemption of the world, one soul at a time. You see when Jesus humanizes us, he gives us a wholeness that is not just an individual wholeness, but a wholeness that is experienced as connectedness with others. This is the nature of his love for us, it is meant to restore and reconcile us with others, that is how we experience love.
There is a small town in France, called Le Chambon that I believe demonstrated Jesus’ footwashing during World War II. The villagers, mostly Christian farmers living in the mountain town, were isolated from the dehumanizing reign of Nazi Germany. They were not aware of the extent that Hitler and his men went to dehumanize whole groups of people, by placing them in ghettoes, by herding them on trains to extermination camps, by stripping them bare and ordering them to dig their own graves and then shooting them or gassing them. All these actions meant to strip people of their humanity and make them into things. Pilate and his dehumanizing ways were alive and well in the Nazi regime.
The villagers of Le Chambon were aware however, that they had been ordered by the occupying government not to take in Jews, under penalty of death. When Jews began to show up in their town and on their doorsteps, the Christians of Le Chambon decided to ignore their government’s orders and they took the Jews in at great possible risk to their own safety as well as the safety of their families.
When interviewed many years later why they did it, many shrugged and said that it made sense to do it. That they did not see themselves as heroic, that they did not feel any sentimental love for the Jewish strangers that came to their door. They just did it because it was the right thing to do. Many testified though, to a wonderful thing that happened. As they sheltered the Jewish refugees, as they welcomed them into their lives and their homes and their community, relationships formed and bonds of friendship were made that still live on in the ancestors of the villagers. And the blessing received was that many during that time and even to this day encountered and still encounter the risen Christ through the relationships formed. The actions of the villagers of Le Chambon, rooted in Christ’s self-emptying love, transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, into friends and neighbors.
No where is this more evident than when we come together as a community to share communion. Long ago, after Jesus self-emptied himself and cleansed the disciples, he was betrayed by one of them, Judas, who set in motion the dehumanization of Jesus. As Christians we come to the table repenting of our actions and words and beliefs that have dehumanized others, and we seek the wholeness that comes from the transforming power of the Holy Spirit to make us one with God and one with each other.
The meal we share is life changing. It is restorative. It is a place where we encounter Christ risen through our relationships with each other.
As Methodists we share our table with the other, with the stranger, with anyone who genuinely seeks this cleansing in Christ that brings wholeness and oneness with others, and who repents of that which dehumanizes the other.
No where is Christ’s example made plainer, than when we approach the table, with outstretched hands: our hands symbolizing our willingness to be cleansed, to be emptied of all that is not Christ like, and our eagerness to receive all the promises of our Lord and Savior. But often another thing happens when we receive communion. For one moment in time, the person sharing the bread and the cup, and the person receiving it, exchange a glance.
And in that naked moment, when eyes meet, we know the dehumanized Christ on the cross, humanizes us all as a community into the loving purposes of God. At that moment, our humanity becomes cleansed of all that is sinful, all that is death, all that is evil, as we are washed in the body and blood of Christ and transformed anew into someone that is more than just a one, more than stranger encountering stranger. When we give and receive the bread and the cup we are now one of many joined in love.
It is at that moment that we know God’s love for us and we know that we are changed in God’s cleansing blood.
It is at that moment that we know that we truly are Easter people, prepared to live Christ’s new commandment and share the loving promises of God in Christ with others.
We are prepared to empty ourselves and to follow Christ all the way to the cross on Friday, through the darkness of Saturday, onward into the dawning light of Sunday, where we will encounter the empty tomb and will know the joy and peace that our Lord and Savior has risen, and that we now have been given his cross to take up and share with a dehumanized world in need of God’s reconciling love.
This is why I think Holy Week and especially Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are so important. If we skip too quickly from Jesus’ triumphant march into Jerusalem straight to Easter we might remain as bystanders to the miracle that Christ shapes in our lives and in the life of our community.
We may remain content to stand at the side of the road shouting Hosanna as Christ passes us by on his way to the cross. We may be too faint hearted to journey with Him to the cross. We may not hear his final seven words, words full of promise for us, and we might not be able to claim and live the commandment he gives us in our scripture passage today, to love others limitlessly, as Christ himself has loved us.
We gather on Maundy Thursday to prepare ourselves for Easter, to ready ourselves for the abundant life that Christ gives to us and with which we will celebrate on Easter.
We spend time with Jesus and we listen to his words and we reflect on his example, all so that when Easter comes we will be ready to be not just admires but followers. Ready not only to claim the promises on that Easter day, but every day onward, even when we are confronted, challenged, discouraged or tired.
We pause on Maundy Thursday so that we may know with full confidence what that abundant life looks like. “Every believer knows that Christ went the way of the cross for our sakes. But it is not enough just to know this. Each of us must find the cross and take it up.”
In Scriptures Jesus describes the abundant life we receive at Easter.
John 13:1-17 NRS Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no share with me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Jesus said to him, "One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you." For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, "Not all of you are clean." After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? 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. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
John 13:31b-35 Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' 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."
The word Maundy is derived from the ancient French and it means a new commandment. And in our scripture reading today we receive this new commandment that shapes our abundant life in Christ that we celebrate on Easter morning. This new commandment is none other than love one another, just as Jesus has loved us. And the example of Jesus’ footwashing gives form to that love. For when Jesus’ washes the feet of his disciples he defies worldly assumptions of love rooted in false notions of power.
After all our Lord and Savior is the one that we glorify with Hosanna’s as he entered Jerusalem on a donkey. This teacher, this master, is one that bows down and washes the feet of his disciples, and in doing so demonstrates that love is both a giving and a receiving, an action of humbling self-emptying that invites others to empty so that they too may receive and share God’s greatest gift of all…love. It is this love that will empower us to follow Jesus to the cross and to be present at the empty tomb on Sunday. All so that we may receive God’s cleansing love for us and share it with others.
The cleansing act of footwashing, humanizes Peter and the disciples. Peter and the disciples may have bathed that day, but they were covered in sin. They needed to be made holy, to be cleansed of their sins, so that they could know the love of God in Christ for them.
Jesus in washing their feet emptied himself so that the disciples could be made clean, so that they could receive God’s love for them. But it was not just a gift given to be hoarded by the disciples. For the ultimate meaning of being made human, of being cleansed and transformed into holiness, is that God’s love restores and reconciles us with the other. To be fully human is to love others as God in Christ loves us. It is to be connected with each other in a way that both simultaneously empties of sin and fills us with God’s love that humanizes the other.
Think of all the ways that we dehumanize each other, both in word and action. We use sharp words, we lie, we ignore, we judge, we condemn, we strip people of power, we beat them, imprison them, we kill them. We treat others as disposable. We make them into something not someone that can be easily discarded. We treat them as animals rather than as humans created in the image of God. In all of these actions we are washing our hands of others, just as Pilate washed his hands of Jesus.
Pilate, motivated not by love but by fear, dehumanizes Jesus. In John 19 we read that Pilate: has Jesus flogged, places a crown of thorns on his head, dresses Jesus in a purple robe to mock him as the king of Jews, allows Jesus to be struck in the face, ridicules him to the mob and then ultimately hands him over to the mob for crucifixion. All are ways Pilate, washes his hands of Jesus.
Joel Marcus writes, “It is precisely this sort of dehumanization that Jesus experienced on the cross – for our benefit. He was flushed away in the ancient Roman sewage disposal system….” Jesus truly becomes as Psalm 22 prophesies “a worm, not human” Paul in Galatians tells us that Christ became a curse for us. In 2 Corinthians Paul writes, “God made him, who did not know sin, to become sin, in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him. “Paul does not say that Christ became a cursed person but that he became a curse; he does not say that God turned him into a sinful human being, but that he turned him into sin. Christ becomes a thing for us – a bad thing.
When we feel, therefore, that the negative opinion of other people, or their indifference, or our own failings have robbed us of our most precious possession, our image of ourselves as worthwhile human beings, we are not undergoing an experience that is alien to Christ. And it is precisely in this ability to identify ourselves with Jesus, or rather in his self- identification with our dehumanized state, that our humanity is returned to us.
Christ becomes sin, so that we become the righteousness of God in him; Jesus through his cleansing both in his life and in his death gives us the ability to be fully human.
Pilate’s washing of his hands of Jesus is in sharp contrast to Jesus’ actions at the last supper when he washes the feet of his disciples. Jesus does not wash his hands of the disciples. Rather he washes them so that they may receive His love and His promise for their lives, so that they may go out and share Jesus’ life giving promise with others. And in doing so, Jesus sets in motion the life giving redemption of the world, one soul at a time. You see when Jesus humanizes us, he gives us a wholeness that is not just an individual wholeness, but a wholeness that is experienced as connectedness with others. This is the nature of his love for us, it is meant to restore and reconcile us with others, that is how we experience love.
There is a small town in France, called Le Chambon that I believe demonstrated Jesus’ footwashing during World War II. The villagers, mostly Christian farmers living in the mountain town, were isolated from the dehumanizing reign of Nazi Germany. They were not aware of the extent that Hitler and his men went to dehumanize whole groups of people, by placing them in ghettoes, by herding them on trains to extermination camps, by stripping them bare and ordering them to dig their own graves and then shooting them or gassing them. All these actions meant to strip people of their humanity and make them into things. Pilate and his dehumanizing ways were alive and well in the Nazi regime.
The villagers of Le Chambon were aware however, that they had been ordered by the occupying government not to take in Jews, under penalty of death. When Jews began to show up in their town and on their doorsteps, the Christians of Le Chambon decided to ignore their government’s orders and they took the Jews in at great possible risk to their own safety as well as the safety of their families.
When interviewed many years later why they did it, many shrugged and said that it made sense to do it. That they did not see themselves as heroic, that they did not feel any sentimental love for the Jewish strangers that came to their door. They just did it because it was the right thing to do. Many testified though, to a wonderful thing that happened. As they sheltered the Jewish refugees, as they welcomed them into their lives and their homes and their community, relationships formed and bonds of friendship were made that still live on in the ancestors of the villagers. And the blessing received was that many during that time and even to this day encountered and still encounter the risen Christ through the relationships formed. The actions of the villagers of Le Chambon, rooted in Christ’s self-emptying love, transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, into friends and neighbors.
No where is this more evident than when we come together as a community to share communion. Long ago, after Jesus self-emptied himself and cleansed the disciples, he was betrayed by one of them, Judas, who set in motion the dehumanization of Jesus. As Christians we come to the table repenting of our actions and words and beliefs that have dehumanized others, and we seek the wholeness that comes from the transforming power of the Holy Spirit to make us one with God and one with each other.
The meal we share is life changing. It is restorative. It is a place where we encounter Christ risen through our relationships with each other.
As Methodists we share our table with the other, with the stranger, with anyone who genuinely seeks this cleansing in Christ that brings wholeness and oneness with others, and who repents of that which dehumanizes the other.
No where is Christ’s example made plainer, than when we approach the table, with outstretched hands: our hands symbolizing our willingness to be cleansed, to be emptied of all that is not Christ like, and our eagerness to receive all the promises of our Lord and Savior. But often another thing happens when we receive communion. For one moment in time, the person sharing the bread and the cup, and the person receiving it, exchange a glance.
And in that naked moment, when eyes meet, we know the dehumanized Christ on the cross, humanizes us all as a community into the loving purposes of God. At that moment, our humanity becomes cleansed of all that is sinful, all that is death, all that is evil, as we are washed in the body and blood of Christ and transformed anew into someone that is more than just a one, more than stranger encountering stranger. When we give and receive the bread and the cup we are now one of many joined in love.
It is at that moment that we know God’s love for us and we know that we are changed in God’s cleansing blood.
It is at that moment that we know that we truly are Easter people, prepared to live Christ’s new commandment and share the loving promises of God in Christ with others.
We are prepared to empty ourselves and to follow Christ all the way to the cross on Friday, through the darkness of Saturday, onward into the dawning light of Sunday, where we will encounter the empty tomb and will know the joy and peace that our Lord and Savior has risen, and that we now have been given his cross to take up and share with a dehumanized world in need of God’s reconciling love.
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