Thursday
John 13:1-17; 31b-35; 1st Cor. 11:23-26
Now we leave Isaiah’s Servant songs for a day, and concentrate on
“Maundy Thursday” – the day when John’s Jesus washes his disciples’
feet in an extraordinary demonstration of servant-leadership, and gives
the great commandment (the “mandate”): “I give you a new
commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you,
you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that
you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
John’s Gospel is exclusive because John’s early 2nd Century community
was in conflict with the synagogue authorities. John’s Jesus
speaks to his disciples, and presumably to no one else. John’s
Jesus does not talk about loving one’s enemies, or loving one’s
neighbor, as he does in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. When John’s
Jesus gives his “new commandment, that you love one another,” that love
is restricted to the community of Jesus’ disciples. Later, in
verses omitted by the Elves for this reading, he says, “whoever
receives one whom I send receives me; and whoever receives me receives
him who sent me.” For the people in John’s early 2nd Century
community, Jesus is God. The messenger and the sender are one and
the same.
Nevertheless, in John’s version of Jesus’ story, Jesus “loved his own,
who were in the world, [and] he loved them to the end.” As a
demonstration of that self-less love, Jesus takes off his outer robe,
wraps a towel around himself, and proceeds to wash his disciples’ feet
and dry them with the towel. In the normal course, as the master
teacher, Jesus would be justified in expecting that his disciples wash
his feet. But Jesus never does what would be expected in the
normal course. His kenotic action is a demonstration of how his
followers are to treat one another. Perhaps he does this in remembrance of her. After he has
washed their feet he says, “I have set you an example that you also
should do as I have done to you . . . I tell you, servants are not
greater than their masters, nor are messengers greater than the one who
sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do
them.”
As with much of the theology and practice of the past nearly 2,000
years of Christian hegemony, commemorations of the last night Jesus
spent with his disciples risk empty if not dangerous piety. Piety
is empty when it relies on the certainty of forgiveness without
accountability and unaccompanied by transformation; piety is dangerous
when it is aligned with imperial injustice. When John’s Gospel is
taken literally, it leads to dangerous piety, which aligns itself with
Empire, and results in holocausts against “non-believers.” When
the Church conflates John’s pre-Passover footwashing with the stories
of the “last supper” in the synoptic gospels, the result is a mixed
metaphor. When Peter objects, Jesus says, “Unless I wash you, you
have no share with me.” Rather than being an illustration of the
profound equality of power in the Kingdom of God, Jesus’ footwashing
seems to be a demand from master to servant. But power-with
others in the Kingdom of God means allowing others to realize the
certainty of who they really are. Jesus was never
humiliated. He never deviated from the certainty of who he
was. Only when we share in that certainty can we let go of
demands or assumptions, and act for justice-compassion.
There is no “institution of the Lord’s Supper” in John, and so the
Elves offer the original from Paul’s first letter to the
Corinthians. Paul declares “This cup is the new covenant in my
blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of
me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you
proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” These words are so
fraught with substitutionary atonement and apocalyptic second-coming
imagery that they are nearly impossible to reclaim.
But as Paul implies, and Mark’s story and John’s theology suggest,
Jesus is the new Paschal Lamb. Jesus is the willing sacrifice –
the one who willingly choses to give up his life in the process of
restoring God’s justice-compassion to God’s world. Borg and
Crossan in The Last Week say
it best (pp. 119-120):
Recall, however, the challenge of Jesus
in [Mark] 8:34-35: “. . . those who want to save their life will lose
it, and those who lose their life for my sake . . . will save
it.” Recall also [that] . . . Peter wanted no part of that fate,
the Twelve debated their relative worth, and James and John wanted
first seats afterward. But Jesus had explained to them quite
clearly that his and their life was a flat contradiction to the
normalcy of civilization’s domination systems. In other words it
was by participation with Jesus and, even more, in Jesus that his
followers were to pass through death to resurrection, from the
domination life of human normalcy to the servant life of human
transcendence.
The Maundy Thursday Tenebrae ritual, whether it includes footwashing,
or simply the re-enactment of Jesus’ last supper, sends us out of the
church in silence and darkness to contemplate our complicity in Judas’
betrayal, not because of petty sin, but because it is so much easier to
settle for survival.
Tenebrae Eucharist
One:
On the last night with his disciples, as they
lounged at their dinner, Jesus decided to try one last time to make
them really understand what he was doing, and what it really meant to
follow him.
Another: He
picked up a loaf of bread, and spoke into the hubbub of their
conversation: Listen! – he said – This bread is like God’s justice in
this world. Then he tore the loaf into two pieces. This is
God’s justice in the hands of the Romans and the Temple authorities who
collaborate with them. Believe me, one of you is going to turn me
in to them soon. If not tonight, then as soon as the Passover is
finished. Whenever you eat together after this night,
remember that, and remember me.
One:
Then Jesus picked up the jug of wine.
Another:
This wine is also like the Kingdom of God – it is the blood of the
paschal lamb, painted on the lintels and doorposts of our people as a
sign that they belong to God and not to Pharoah’s Empire. But now
the collaborators have made this wine into a corruption – a libation
poured out in honor of the Empire of Rome. – a repudiation of God’s
protection and deliverance.
One:
And he poured the wine into a cup and held
it up to them.
Another: He
said, “Let the one who has chosen this cup take his possessions and do
what he must.” And he dumped the contents into a bowl for
disposal.
One:
Several of the company began to leave quietly, and
he let them go. Then he poured a second cup of wine and said,
“But this cup that I drink is a new cup. It is a libation of my
blood poured out for justice for all those who chose to share it.
Drink it. All of you who are willing to commit to establish God’s
justice-compassion, and remember.
Another: He
passed the cup to them, and they passed it among themselves as a
pledge. And while they were doing this, one of the women –
perhaps it was Mary of Magdala – the one who Jesus loved – left the
room and returned with a tiny jar of essential oil of lavendar.
And she came up to Jesus’ couch and said, “You will die for what you
have done this week – perhaps tonight – and I know I will never have
the chance to prepare your body for burial. If they take you,
there will be nothing left.”
One:
Then she broke open the vial and anointed his face and hands. And
he took it from her and went to the one next to him and said, “She has
done what she could. She has prepared my body for death. Do
the same for one another in remembrance of her.” And he anointed
that one, and that one went to the next until all in the company had
been so ordained.
Back to Holy Week
2007