Given For You - Maundy Thursday 2023
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on Maundy Thursday, April 6, 2023 by the Rev. Holly Huff.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” So says Jesus when his hour had come, on the night he was betrayed, sharing one last supper with his friends, feeding them and washing their feet. “As I have loved you, love one another.” This new commandment—or mandatum in Latin—gives us the nickname Maundy Thursday and it also shows the indelible pattern of self-giving love we see in the life of Jesus and follow after in our own journey into his likeness. “As I have loved you, love one another.” When Christians tell the story, God acts first. “We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19). God takes the initiative, calls us into being at creation out of love and for love. God comes to us in human form. Not just any form. Jesus takes the form of a servant, giving himself for us. “Though he was in the form of god he did not regard equality with god as something to be grasped but emptied himself taking the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6-7). This is God with a towel round his waist come to pour himself out for his friends, for those he loves, that is, all of us, his every action saying, “This is my body, given for you.” He comes not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for us all, to set us free to love as he loves. Jesus shows us what God’s glory looks like. He is coming from God and going to God, giving himself away in self-offering love for others every moment of that dynamic trajectory.
When Jesus gets up from the dinner table, on that night he was betrayed, and rolls up his sleeves, bending to wash the feet of his disciples, it is Peter of course who voices the instinctive pulling back many of us feel in the face of God-with-us intimacy, the gift of God’s self wanting to be poured out over us. “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Peter sits self-conscious in dusty sandals and says, no way. “You will never wash my feet.” Peter like each of us lives with shame, a sense of unworthiness, which naturally or rather unnaturally accrues in this world where we turn inward on ourselves in the face of all the little failures of human love and, God forgive us, the large failures, those intimate betrayals of abuse and neglect that teach us to be afraid. To cower in fear and lash out in hatred, rather than walk in love. Perhaps, perhaps we could merit to serve God, we think, but oh no, unbearable to let God serve us, let God wash us, touch us, heal us.
But Jesus says, “Unless I wash you, you have no place with me.” Unless I wash you, you cannot abide with me. Unless you let me wash you, you will not know in your bones the love without condition that flows forth in every moment. Unless you take off your shoes, you remain locked in your too-small betrayed-and-betraying preconceptions of the world, self-enclosed, self-protected from my radiant burning-bush love dying to pour itself out for you and through you for your neighbor. Let me wash you. Let me feed you and wash you and touch you and heal you.
Even me, Lord? Are you sure? You want to wash my feet—toe jam, bunions, collapsed arches and all? Yes. God loves real people, in all our weakness and frailty. As English Bishop Jeremy Taylor wrote of this moment more than 300 years ago, “He chose to wash their feet rather than their head, that he might have the opportunity of a more humble posture, and a more apt signification of his charity. Thus God lays everything aside, that he may serve his servants; heaven stoops to earth, and one abyss calls upon another, and the miseries of [humanity], which were next to infinite, are excelled by a mercy equal to the immensity of God.” A mercy equal to the immensity of God, which excels our next-to-infinite miseries.
So if with exuberant Peter we dare to say yes to that mercy, we allow the Lord to wash our feet, letting thoughts of worthlessness and shame and guilt and inadequacy and pedicures at the spa fade out of the equation, excelled by a mercy equal to the immensity of God. Jesus washed Judas’s feet, too, his all-too-human betrayal excelled by mercy. We don’t have to change anything about ourselves to let love pour over us like cool water. “As I have loved you, love one another,” that’s the formula we’re called to live by, and so we have to let him love us. God lays everything aside to do this.
He loves us exactly as we are. On the night we betrayed him—he took bread, to feed us. He wrapped a towel around his waist, to wash us. In everything saying with his lips and his whole life, this is my body, given for you.
Jesus shows us the faithfulness of God, who will never leave us or forsake us. Our human hearts are double: we waver between Mary’s surrendered “yes” and Pilate’s hardened “no”, the same lips shout “Hosanna!” and “Crucify!” We vacillate between love and betrayal, and then we imagine God approaches us with that same capricious pendulum. But in God there is no shadow of turning; Jesus shows us an utterly reliable, unwavering divine steady Yes. As the letter to Timothy says, even “If we are faithless, God remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself,” that is, God’s own nature as loving-kindness itself. (2 Timothy 2:13) “Where love is, there God is also.” We put our trust in the strong love of God shown to us in Jesus. He lays everything aside to calls us to himself, to feed us with his own flesh, and then kneel to wash our feet.
God wants to be so near to us. God is near to us. “You are in me deeper than even I am in me,” St. Augustine prayed. Jesus will come just as close as we let him. He stands at the door of the heart and knocks. And the miracle of divine love, love that is strong as death and overflowing all our conditioned expectations of absence and scarcity, is that it wants to be given away again. “Love one another as I have loved you.” To fully receive that gift of love is to find ourselves almost despite ourselves giving it away again to others. Having been fed at this table, we go out into the world to feed our hungry neighbors, feed them with our loving attention, with justice, with a box of food passed across the counter at Hildegarde’s Food pantry. Free of charge-gratis! That’s grace. Having had our own feet washed, we will shortly and very literally kneel to wash another’s feet in turn. Ruth Burrows the Carmelite says, “Exposure to other people is exposure to God.” We are flesh and blood, we need flesh and blood, and God’s love is relentlessly mediated to us through the love of our neighbors. Letting them love us as Jesus loves us, sweaty socks and all, we then take our turn to wash the feet of the next person, offering the same love we have received. To receive the gift is to give it away again. Fed and feeding, washed and washing—as Father Tyler says, we are loved into loving. “We love because God first loved us.”
Jesus doesn’t hesitate to give even his life for us. On the night he was betrayed, he says, “This is my body, given for you.” Given for, given for, his whole being is for-giving and given for. This given-for-ness is a tenacious vulnerability and exposure to the world as it is and God as God is. Jesus’s self-giving is undefended, stripped just as bare as this sanctuary will be at the end of the service. He is an open place receiving whatever God gives, offering it back in love, becoming obedient even to death on a cross.
And he calls us to join him in that open, undefended place. “As I have loved you, love one another.” As we go out from this service in silence, some of you will return to keep vigil tonight in front of the Blessed Sacrament at the Altar of Repose, remembering Jesus’s call to his disciples to keep watch with him one hour as he went apart to pray. There too in that Garden his life was total self-offering: offering in childlike surrendered trust to his Father, praying “Not my will but yours be done,” and offering too loving forgiveness to his weary disciples when they nod off in his hour of need. Truly “Whether we wake or whether we sleep, we are the Lord’s” (1 Thessalonians 5:10)! It is God’s action and God’s love that carry us, feed us, wash us, touch us, heal us. Jesus, giving himself for us, laying everything aside to serve his servants, faithful and steady. Heaven stoops to earth. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”