Maundy Thursday - A
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
April 21, 2011
“Just as I have loved you...”
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
It would be nice if we could get our story straight.
Here we are, gathered together on one of the holiest nights in Christian reckoning. Tonight we observe the foundational feast of the Christian movement. All the other meals that Jesus ate with his disciples have looked forward to this one. All the meals we have eaten since then have looked back to this one. Tonight we remember it, observe it, and celebrate it.
It would be nice, then, if the five written witnesses would at least agree on what happened. It would be nice if what we say about this meal bore some resemblance to any of our written witnesses. It would be nice if we could get our story straight.
In 1 Corinthians we have the earliest version of the founding of this meal. Much of it is familiar, but the setting is different than in the other four witnesses. This meal takes place “on the night when he was betrayed” with no further explanation. As we read on we also discover that the meal as observed in Corinth was more like a potluck supper than the sacrament we celebrate. We hear some members of that church criticized for digging in without waiting for everyone else to be served. We also hear rich members of the church criticized for bringing their own food to eat, so that they wouldn’t have to join in the common table.
In Matthew, Mark and Luke, this meal is set within the celebration of the Passover, the Jewish freedom festival, celebrating the liberation from slavery in Egypt. The acts of the Passover meal and the giving and receiving of the loaf and cup of the Christian Eucharist are not really distinguishable, as if Jesus has not founded a new feast, but reinterpreted an old one. In Luke there seems to be an extra cup! In Mark and Luke we drink the cup as the new covenant in Jesus’ blood, but in Matthew it is also for the forgiveness of sins.
Then, in John’s gospel all this takes place before Passover. In fact, John seems to have arranged the story so that Jesus’ dies at the moment that the Passover lamb in the Temple would have been killed. This makes sense. Remember that when Jesus first appears in John’s story, the first thing said about him is said by John the Baptizer, who says, “Here is the Lamb of God.”
The meal in John is placed firmly in the background. All we hear about it is that the events of the story took place “during supper.” There is no further mention of the meal and certainly none of the preparations that are found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Instead of the founding of a meal, we have Jesus taking a towel and basin and washing his disciples’ feet.
It would be nice if the five witnesses could get their story straight. We, of course, have taken these five stories and woven them together, like we’ve done with the Christmas story, until we had shepherds and magi all gathered around an infant Jesus, all the inconsistancies resolved and much of the power of both stories safely removed.
We have our own ways of doing the same thing with the stories of the days just before Jesus’ death and with the meal that Jesus left in our hands. Two methods stick out.
The first is to turn this meal into a commemoration, sort of like the Civil War reenactors who wear itchy underwear and grow their beards long to “remember” Gettysburg. Somehow we have to “remember” an event from which we were absent, having been born at least one thousand nine hundred years later. I am being a little snarky hear, and I apologize. My point is that what we mean by “remembering” is quite different from what it meant to these folks. This kind of memory is not the kind that we use for a spelling quiz or for finding our car in the parking lot at a large mall. This is not a mental exercise in the recalling of fact. Nor is it the detours that we take when we try to tell a story about something that happened to us and end up arguing about whether Uncle Freddy was there or whether he and Dorothy had already divorced.
It’s the kind of memory that happens when I hear the music I grew up with and suddenly the past is no longer past but present and I am a part of it once again. It’s the kind of memory that happens when I walk into church on Easter Sunday morning and smell the lilies and am suddenly walking into the church of my childhood and the lilies are arranged in their dozens in the front of the sanctuary and the preacher is smiling for a change and the choir composed of warbling ancients sounds young and strong again and my new suit itches a little and I can hardly sit still. It’s that kind of memory; it’s re-membering; it’s becoming a part of something once more.
Instead of celebrating this meal we “cerebrate” it. That is, we have turned it into something that takes place between our ears.This is one method for taming this story and the meal that goes with it, the other is privatizing it. We take our cue from Paul’s critique of the snobby rich and the greedy gobblers of the 1st United Methodist Church of Corinth. We turn this shared meal into an intense, private event between us and God. The first trouble with that is that there is nothing private about following Jesus. It is at times intensely personal, but it is never private. It is a public covenant about public allegiances and public behaviors.
The second trouble is that this meal is a social event. There is a host—Jesus—who has invited us. We gather around a common table. We join in asking God’s blessing. We eat it together. Like every other meal that Jesus ate with his friends and followers, this one is a shared meal. Food has never—until very recently—been about meeting the nutritional needs of individuals. It has always been about forming and maintaining groups. The worst part of the traditional Arabian punishment of cutting off the right hand of a thief is not the loss of the hand, as bad as that may be. Since meals in traditional Arab culture were eaten from a common dish with the right hand, the real punishment of a thief was that he or she would never again be able to eat with others.
This meal is a shared experience. It’s a social experience rather than a psychological one. It’s an exterior rather than interior event. It’s about us not about me.
It’s even about more than us. It’s about the world and humanity’s future in the world.
All five of the stories point to the future. Paul says that we do these things to “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”1 In Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus points the disciples toward the coming reign of God. Even John’s story is about Jesus showing us how we are to live with each other after his death.
What this meal does is to present us with a dream made real, the dream of God’s future for us. In this future men and women, adults and children, gather around one table. There they become “companions,” a word refers literally to those who eat bread together. All of Abraham and Sarah’s children come from east and west, north and south, and are made companions: Jews, Christians and Muslims. The whole human family joins in this reunion. The walls that keep us separated from each other, that allow us to imagine each other as less than human and therefore as enemies that we could or even should harm or kill, those walls have collapsed and it is no longer possible to “exact the work of war.”2 The wealthy and the poor will look at each other and see brothers and sisters. The poor will come and their wants will be satisfied. The rich will come and lay down the burden of having more than they need. Our communion will not be just with God, but with each other.
John saw this clearly. So the story that John tells is about menial service that Jesus gives to his disciples, who by rights should be washing his feet, not the other way around. But this is an example for us and a new commandment. John knows that this business of loving each other is not an abstraction, a pretty idea. I once saw a poster that read, “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand.” And that’s exactly it. It’s easy to harbor warm feelings for people who are far away. It’s our neighbors we have a hard time with. They are close enough to keep us awake with their loud music at night, close enough that their unraked leaves blow into our yards, close enough to get on our nerves.
John saw this clearly. So instead of giving us a meal that might already in John’s time have become a little abstract, John’s Jesus takes a towel and a basin of water and washes the feet of each of his disciples. John’s Jesus knows that whatever this meal is, it is about love. The love that John’s Jesus is talking about is about real people who have real and possibly unwashed bodies and growling stomachs and smelly feet.
So, in the name of John’s Jesus, I invite all of us to this table, to eat and drink, to share this meal, to remember ourselves as members of each other, to step into this dream once again, to get a glimpse of our future, the future that God is giving us.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
11 Corinthians 11:26.
2John McCutcheon, “Christmas in the Trenches.”
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