Lord, wash all of me! (Maundy Thursday)

In just over an hour, it will be Maundy Thursday.   It will be the fifth day Jesus has been in Jerusalem, after entering triumphantly on the day we now celebrate as Palm Sunday.  And it is a day of great change.  Maundy Thursday is the night of the Last Supper, when tradition holds it that Jesus celebrated the Feast of the Passover with his closest friends, thus instituting the ritual Feast that we now call Holy Eucharist.  After this meal, Jesus takes Peter and James and John to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he tells them he is troubled, and he prays bitterly until he is betrayed by another of his closest friends, which sets in motion the trials and execution of Jesus.

The stories we hear in worship on Maundy Thursday are very familiar to us.  We hear first the story of the Passover: the Hebrews subjugated and enslaved in Egypt, marking their doors with the blood of a perfect lamb, so that the angel of death will pass them by.  It is as a result of this night that Pharaoh finally relents and allows God’s people to leave, because God has taken Pharaoh’s own firstborn.  New Testament scripture refers to Jesus as the Lamb, and to us as being made clean in the blood of the Lamb.  At the first Passover in Egypt, the blood on the doorposts marked God’s children, set them apart as special.  Now, every one of us is God’s child.  Every one of us has been marked with the blood of Jesus and set apart as special.

The reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians tells us a story that we act out every week: the first Eucharist.  Each week, when we gather in church, we hear these same words.  This is my body.  This is my blood.  This is the new covenant.  Do this in remembrance of me. Each week we celebrate and remember the Passover when we celebrate the Eucharist, and as we do so, we celebrate our place at God’s Table, at God’s Feast, in God’s kingdom.  Jesus told us that God’s kingdom had already arrived.  And it has — even when we’re too blind to see it.  God’s kingdom is present in each one of us who shows up to worship, each one of us who gathers to celebrate the Passover, the Eucharist.  God’s kingdom is present when we act in love, when we forgive, when we repent and turn to God.  God’s kingdom is present whenever we so much as think about God.  God’s kingdom is present in each and every one of us.  All of us — you, me, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Abp. Akinola, Abp. Williams, Bp. Schori — because Jesus became the Passover lamb for all of us, and now we marked with his blood and set apart as God’s special children.

In the Maundy Thursday gospel, we hear a slightly different story.  Here, Jesus ordains a different sacrament for us: washing each other’s feet.  When his friends had gathered for dinner, Jesus knelt before each one of them and washed his feet.  This was a tradition of hospitality.  When you travel everywhere by foot, your feet get pretty dirty.  It is your host’s job to make you comfortable, so the host makes sure that your feet are cleaned.  A well-to-do host will most likely assign a servant or child to perform this task, since it involves kneeling before you guest in a posture of submission and servitude.  And in Thursday’s gospel story, it is Jesus who takes this posture.

Of course, Jesus does use the foot-washing as a lesson.  Poor bumbling Peter objects to his teacher, his master, his Messiah taking this position of servitude, and Jesus rebukes him.  See, with our puritanical heritage combined with our Christianity, we like to give.  We like to do things for others.  We don’t like so much to receive; this makes us uncomfortable.  If we are presented with a gift, we immediately try to put strings on it.  We reciprocate with a gift or a favor.  We insist on giving something back.  We want to earn the gift.  We tend to be terrible at accepting a gift freely given, with a genuine smile and an authentic expression of gratitude.  But the gifts that come from God can never be earned… which is perhaps why we are so good at rejecting them.  God’s gifts — like Jesus washing the feet of the disciples — are given to us freely, without any expectation that we could possibly ever earn them or even deserve them.  This is called grace, and this lesson is one Jesus wanted the disciples to learn.  He told the disciples that they would be blessed if they wash one another’s feet.  And I’ll tell you, if you have twelve disciples involved in washing feet, then six of them are giving and serving, and the other six are receiving.  These friends had to learn not only to give to each other in love, but to receive as freely and generously as they give.

The final commandment that Jesus gives to his closest friends is in this story, too: Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  He even tells them that this is how they will be identified, by their love.  Aside from Jesus, only one person in that room knew what was about to happen.  The other friends probably did not understand the significance of this gathering, this meal, the lesson of the foot-washing, the commandment to love.  When Jesus said, just as I have loved you, they were probably thinking fondly about their adventures on the road, their songs and laughter together at camp, the crowds that gathered to hear Jesus teach, the people who were healed by Jesus and his disciples.

When I imagine myself at the Last Supper, not knowing what was in store for Jesus, I imagine the warmth of the room, the warmth of the food, the warmth of the wine flowing through me, and the warmth of the love surrounding me.  I can see myself smiling, laughing, enjoying these friends.  And yet, one night later, these friends are scattered, hiding, terrified.  One night later, Jesus is dead and buried, a rock sealing the tomb.  One night later, the Sabbath has begun, but I know these friends and followers got precious little rest.  Two nights later, I imagine their feelings of fear and desolation.  Perhaps they feel themselves safe from Roman retribution; if they hadn’t been rounded up for trial and execution yet, then they were probably okay.  And then Sunday morning, when the women returned from Jesus’ tomb raving about what they’d seen and heard: maybe at this point, the disciples would begin to realize just how much Jesus loved them.

Jesus loved us so much that he became the Passover lamb: the perfect lamb, without blemish.  By sharing the bread and wine with Jesus that Passover night, the disciples were marked as God’s children, set aside and special, and the wrath of the Jewish leaders passed over them.  By sharing in Jesus’ life, each one of them was changed, renewed, filled with life.  And each of them heard the commandment that we will hear: Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

This Thursday night, after we celebrate the Eucharist, we will clean the church.  The linens will all be stripped from the altar.  Any bread or wine that have been reserved will be consumed.  The presence light that remains over the aumbry to remind us that Jesus is present in the consecrated elements: this light will be extinguished.  As Jesus leaves the Feast to pray in Gethsemane, we will leave the Feast to hold vigil, to watch and pray.  We will embrace the loneliness, the darkness, the fear of the between-time, the time in which Jesus left the world.  And our joy on Sunday, when we celebrate God’s return to us in a new, resurrected form, will be all the more complete.

Almighty Father, whose dear Son,
on the night before he suffered,
instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood:
Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully
in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord,
who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life;
and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Amen.