Maundy Thursday – Do We Understand?
So much around Holy Week involves symbols, metaphors, and very specific “labor”. All that silver doesn’t polish itself, and flowers don’t just jump into pots! Eight hundred service leaflets have to be composed, edited, printed. Choral music work for Easter begins shortly after the final verse of Silent Night on Christmas Eve. It can be easy to go through the Triduum with a checklist, marking off “things done” and still “left undone” as the days go on. Which is why it is so important to take the time to sit with the questions. Pilate’s questions to Jesus “What is ‘truth’?” and “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus’ question to Simon in the Garden “Could you not stay awake and pray with me for even an hour?” And Jesus’ question to God “Why?!? Why have you forsaken me?!?” Some believers emphasize the importance of knowing the “right answers.” We tend to emphasize the importance of sitting with “the hard questions.” Tonight, we sit with Jesus’ question to his disciples in the upper room “Do you understand what I have done for you?”
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Transcript
“Do we understand ‘what he did’?”
Stuart’s Palm Sunday sermon looked at the image of a seed that can only bear fruit if it dies. Obviously, “death” in that story means something very different from what our culture customarily thinks about death. Instead, the seed’s necessary death indicates a shedding of everything that encased its life force. Death and going deeper — literally being buried — changed everything for the seed and for its descendants.
Tonight we walk into another scene that also invites a similarly imaginative response that has the capacity to reorient us. I say “capacity” because I think this one may only work if we participate. This may be the difference between Churchill standing on that rooftop while the bombs were falling on London, rather than hearing about it from inside his bunker. Just to be clear, I’m talking about foot washing, not communion.
We tend to elide Jesus’ last supper with his friends that night with the Passover event. Looking more closely, it was just an evening on the eve, shall we say, of the major festival. The context of that evening is significant, however. In the same way that the arrival of eagerly anticipated houseguests on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving might feel to us. My experience as a young adult returning to my family home with my small children in tow, was always that the sweetest, the fullest, the richest conversations were during that first evening, the “in between time” bookended by wrapping up the preparations for the full feast and the frenetic activities that would commence in the morning.
In those in between visits, we truly covered everything — the summary highlights of who was doing what and with whom, the latest news about so and so’s recovery or relapse — topics that quickly spiraled down to essential words. Words which, outside of that precious context, seemed “too soon” or “too heavy”, not wanting to spoil the mood. But, in these threshold spaces, in these passages that move us from ordinary lives into those sacred niches of the occasional gatherings, courage and compassion leave no corner in the dark.
Those unscripted scenes, written on the heart, are truly the ones that remain. The family rituals around the next day’s festivities also matter. Every act done with intention matters. But, what happened that evening between Jesus and his friends is stunning in the same way that altering a creche scene would stun at Christmas. Suddenly, we are curious and instead of musing about other things while a familiar drama unfolds, all of our attention is now focused on this unexpected twist.
“Do you understand what I have done?”
The foot washing was, according to Jesus, an “hypodeigma” that is an example. The phrase shows up five times in the New Testament, each time in the context of extreme distress or conflict; particularly, a context of vulnerability.
Many of us were born into this Christian faith. We have grown up since infancy assuming whatever reputation the culture attaches to our particular tradition. Incense, bells, organ and harp, vestments, pagentry. And, in that light, I confess that I am not sure that I understand “what he has done” in this footwashing.
Only by stepping back from it, allowing a broader context, do I notice. The set pieces of that upper room tableau share an earthiness in common with a stable, a manger, a cold night, a starry sky, and all the world around it preoccupied with other things, while God moves among us. Different sound track, though.
No heavenly hosts singing ‘Glory to God in the highest.’ No visiting magi. No expensive gifts. But, the room is not silent. It has, we might say, a “water feature.”
Close your eyes for just a moment and conjure up the different sounds that water makes: a baby’s bath; using gentle strokes in a bath trying to bring down a high fever; a gurgling fountain; even splashing through a puddle in a parking lot trying to reach shelter during a sudden downpour. Jesus wasn’t showing them how to clean themselves. If it was about that, then Peter had it right — wash all of me.
No, it was about the need humans have to touch, to soothe, to serve each other at what might be seen as literally our lowest point. His “new command” about loving each other referred to what was happening down on the floor. And before everything around ritual and liturgy got crazy, he needed to make sure they “understood.”
This, he explained, this is how the world will know that you know me! Not if you know how to wash each other’s feet. But, if you are unafraid to engage another person at their lowest point. If, in fact, the highest act you can do is to kneel among persons who the world considers to be the lowliest. If you need an image, think of the photos of Princess Diana alongside Mother Teresa on the streets of Calcutta. If we learn to live with each other without being shocked by the havoc the journey has wreaked on a person; to love in a way that expects to come into contact with dirt, brokenness… literally, to be in the presence of open wounds, then we will have learned what it means to live in God’s kingdom.
Our skin is the largest organ of the human body. The psychological effects of touch starvation, sometimes called skin thirst, contribute to depression, isolation, hypervigilance, and chronic anxiety, just to name a few of the consequences of ignoring our basic human need for skin to skin contact. I cannot stress too strongly how important this is in times like these.
A few yards from our home, Hurricane Helene gouged an enormous cataract in the earth, where the day before had been a meadow, now looked like what is was — a natural disaster. The steep walls of the new gorge are littered with 200 foot pines scattered like a box of spilled toothpicks. The horribleness of the scene is a train wreck I keep staring at, as if maybe if I watch it long enough and it wouldn’t be so horrible.
But what mesmerizes me as I stare at it is the now revealed waterway that had been deeply buried beneath that meadow all along — underneath all the “pretty”. Water. Beneath us, above us, inside us, and finally — in a few moments — a basin of it, where someone we may barely know by name, is going to kneel in front of us, and touch us at our lowest point, the water intensifying the skin on skin contact. And in that moment, our bodies will understand Isaiah’s poetic promise:
“Though the mountains be shaken
and the hills be removed,
my unfailing love for you will not be shaken
nor my covenant of peace ever be removed,” says the Lord, who has compassion on you. [Isaiah 54:10]