Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Maundy Thursday
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Do you understand what I have done for you?
John 13:12b

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In Judaism, during the Passover Seder, there’s a section at the beginning known as The Four Questions. The most famous one being the one asked by the youngest child who is able: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”  The four questions all have to do with the meal, at least on the surface.  However, the answers point to how the meal brings to mind the time of the Exodus.

Holy Week is our Exodus. The Triduum (trid-you-um) or three great nights of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, our Passover.  It’s fitting, therefore for us to have a question of our own. Jesus asks, “Do you understand what I have done for you?” We might also ask it this way: what do we receive tonight?

When Jesus gave the cup to his disciples, he said to them “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”  Our liturgy, drawing from a different text says, “ Drink this, all of you; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you, and for many, for the forgiveness of sins: Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.”  The thing that is important for our purposes tonight is that word “covenant.”  In Greek, it is diatheke, and if you look it up, the definition is perhaps more precise. It is a certain kind of covenant- one declaring a person’s wishes regarding the disposal of their property when they die.  Like a Last Will and Testament.  This is why the old King James Version says “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.”

Now, if this meal is Jesus’ Last Will and Testament, what do we receive? An inheritance- and what an inheritance it is. He bequeaths to us his life, his perfect submission to the Law, and his merits, for we are accounted as adopted daughters and sons.

The story is told of Paul Brand, a missionary doctor in India. When an epidemic of measles spread through the town where he lived, his daughter came down with a very bad case of it. Since he had no vaccine to treat her, Brand located a person who had recently recovered from measles. He drew blood from them and injected the plasma from their blood into his daughter. She was healed with blood that was borrowed from a person who had overcome the measles. We, too, are healed with borrowed blood.   As Lutheran theologian and Pastor John Kleinig writes:

Full remission! That’s what Jesus provides for us by the blood he shed for us and now offers us in his Supper. He grants us full remission from the spiritual sickness of sin, the malignant cancer that infects us in our souls and bodies, for which there is no natural treatment or human remedy. The wages of sin—its outcome and cost—is always death (Rom 6:23). Jesus reverses this by giving us his blood to drink in his Supper. Through it we have the eternal remission of all our sin.

Free to live without condemnation, guilt or fear.  That would be food enough.  Yet, in this meal, we receive even more.  In our Epistle tonight Paul asks us pointedly, “The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16) It is not just that this meal grants us the inheritance of our remission from sins, it brings us into communion- a common union- with our Lord.

“Just as by melting two candles together you get one piece of wax,” St Cyril of Jerusalem writes, “ so, I think, one who receives the flesh and blood of Jesus is fused together with him. And the soul finds that he is in Christ and Christ is in him.”

In our eucharistic liturgy we pray for God to use the sacrament in this way, praying that we may “be made one body with him, that he may dwell in us and we in him.”  God answers that prayer. As we take the Sacrament , what we eat is what we become- and that changes us gradually, from the inside out. We become more and more spiritually alive as we feed on Jesus. We draw our life from him as we remain in him and he remains in us. By the means of  the bread and the wine we consume, we become his body.  We grow up into him who is our head.

At the end of the dinner, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet.  He does this, per his own words, as a teacher- showing us just what kind of a body we are now.  We receive clarity as to the nature of our identity as the Body of Christ.  It involves giving ourselves away in love, just as our benefactor and our head, Jesus did.

After washing the feet of his disciples, Jesus says “I have given you an example – you should do just as I have done for you.”(John 13:15) Later, after the meal, he will be even more direct, saying:

I give you a new commandment: love one another; as I have loved you, so you are to love one another. If there is this love among you, then everyone will know that you are my disciples. (Jn 13:34–35)

To be Christ’s body is to love as he loved, to put into practice what he taught. Commenting on this, Anglican Bishop NT Wright says:

…we should be looking away from ourselves, and at the world we are supposed to be serving. Where the world’s needs and our vocation meet is where we ought to be, ready to take on insignificant roles if that’s what God wants, or to be publicly visible if that is our calling. And, as with Jesus, the picture of footwashing is meant to serve not only as a picture of all sorts of menial tasks that we may be called to perform, without drawing attention to them. It also points towards the much larger challenge…the challenge to follow Jesus all the way to the cross, to lay down life itself in the service of God and the world he came to save.

Now, none of this is earning our salvation. It’s also not a hidden catch in the deal – two things we receive and a command to get busy.  It’s all one thing.  As the three great nights of the Triduum are all pieces of one whole, just as the Lord’s Supper and and the Footwashing are one act of love, so it is that our inheritance, our identity as the Body, and our service in Christ’s name are all one piece. One inevitably leads to the next and to the next.  Set free from sin, condemnation, guilt and shame, free from the need for power, esteem and control, made one with Jesus, what is there left to do but to wash feet, to be the physical extension of Christ’s body in the world?

Now, perhaps, we begin to understand what it is that Jesus has done for us- and to us. What do we receive tonight? Love in tangible form. Body.  Blood. Water. Hands. Towel. His love for us, love that we can trust in, rest in, take root and grow in.  His love for the whole world, now expressed- however imperfectly-  through us, inviting all the wayward sons and daughters to come home. Love that would go to a cross, love that will prove itself stronger than death.  Such a love is why this night is not only different than other nights, it is also the beginning of all the days and nights to come.