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Maundy Thursday, 03/24/2016
Sermon on Luke 13:1-17, by Paula L. Murray
We are very near the cross now, very near. Our yearly journey to Calvary and the horrible hill where Jesus was crucified and his precious blood spilled on the cross for our redemption will be over tomorrow. Everything in Jesus’ life, from his birth, to his playing hooky in the Temple with the scribes and priests as a young teen, to his baptism, to his testing in the wilderness, to his ministry of teaching and preaching, healing and forgiving, leads to the cross. The cross, as the Apostle John presents it, is more an enactment of the divine and salvic mercy of God than instrument of Jesus’ death. None of the four Gospels spend much time describing the misery of Jesus’ suffering or death; the accomplishment of God’s intent for our salvation through Jesus’ death on the cross is the focus of them all. But the Gospel of John goes farther even than this, and makes the cross the means by which Jesus glorifies the Father and, in turn, is glorified by the Father. So it seems strange that, for all that Jesus’ death on the cross is the culmination of his mission and the means by which our salvation was accomplished, Maundy Thursday is surprisingly devoid of references to the cross.
And that is astonishing, given that Maundy Thursday is like an overwrought mystery novel with too many confusing plot twists. You would think that at least one of those plot twists points us, even if in some convoluted way, to the cross on which Jesus dies. But all references to the cross or even Jesus’ death are veiled and indirect.
So, the first line tells us it is almost the time of the Passover. We remember that the Passover is the commemoration of the painting of the blood of a sacrificed lamb on the horizontal lintels and vertical doorposts of the homes of enslaved Jews so the Angel of Death might pass over them as the Lord prepared to take his people out of Egypt and bondage and home to the Promised Land and freedom. Jesus is the perfect Lamb of God, whose blood, shed on the horizontal bar of the cross and the vertical leg of the thing buried in the hard dirt of Judea, frees us from our bondage to sin and death.
Just as the lambs of the Passover are sacrificed prior to the start of the holiday, so “Jesus knew his hour had come to depart from this world” into which the Father had sent him and return to the Father. That departure is made by way of the cross. The language of his departure echoes the magnificent prologue of the Gospel of John, the first chapter of his book, where we are told that the Word, the pre-existent Son of God, through whom all things were made, is sent to the world to give grace and truth. Knowing, the text says, “that he had come from God and was going to God,” Jesus makes preparation for his death. The words, “the hour” of his departure sends us all the way back to the telling of Jesus’ first miracle in John’s Gospel. After some serious prodding from his mother, Jesus, denying that “his hour,” the hour of his sacrifice had come, nonetheless changed water into wine. Now, though, the hour has come, the time of sacrifice is upon him, and Jesus, the Lamb of God come to take away the sins of the world, makes of himself the last, perfect sacrifice for all of our sins. Going willingly to the cross, he is nailed to its rough beams, and is lifted up to his death and glorification. Through his wounds, we are saved.
But again, we don’t see that in the Word read on this so very odd day; we don’t see the cross, not yet. There is a detour on the road to Calvary. The ones in the world who Jesus loved, and loved to the end, are gathered for a family meal, the same meal we share tonight as those beloved by the Incarnate Son of God. One of the “plots” of Maundy Thursday is the institution of the Lord’s Supper, that meal we eat together at the forecourt of heaven with all those beloved of the Lord of every age. “During the supper,” we are told, not at its beginning, as one would expect, but during the supper, Jesus gets up from the table. Again, “knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God,” Jesus prepares himself with a towel, a pitcher of water, and an empty basin, to perform a servant’s task, to wash the disciples’ feet.
How odd this new plot would seem to these men and any other onlookers. How is it that this man, newly welcomed into Jerusalem as its deliverer and king with loud shouts of joy and the waving of royal palms, should kneel, take their calloused feet into his tender hands, wash them clean of the street’s leftover filth, and dry them with a brother’s compassion? Many a Maundy Thursday sermon talks about the humility of Jesus in the words of that great hymn from the second chapter of Philippians (6-7), that “…though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped,” but rather emptied himself of his divine glory and “taking the form of a slave,” turned the normal social order on its head so that the leader was servant to his followers. The language echoes an earlier lesson, Mary’s Magnificat in the first chapter of Luke (verse 53), where God will ensure that the rich go away empty, and the hungry “are filled with good things.” That should tell us that there is more at work than the promotion of humility in this act. Before he gives his all on the cross, Jesus willingly plumbs the depths of the human condition, becomes not just man but despised man, the lowest of the low, showing us that all humanity will partake in the salvation he wins us.
There is, then, no human creature so degraded by human society or sin that Jesus will not save. He is mercy incarnate, divine mercy wrapped in human flesh, the very personification of the forgiveness of God given freely and without reservation to all who turn to the Lord our God in repentance and sorrow for their sin. Even to Judas, soon to be on his way to betray Jesus to the authorities and to his death, Jesus makes real the mercy, the love the Father offers all of us.
Love is never an abstraction to God, nor is it mere feeling. Love is made real in concrete acts that foster the well-being of the beloved even in the face of betrayal, suffering, and death. Love is not just service to another either, as important as such service is for the healthy functioning of family and church and community. Love is the willingness to sacrifice ego, success, and even our own well-being for the good of another. Love is the willingness to be merciful, as God is merciful to us, to grant forgiveness, especially when that forgiveness comes hard. So important is this love to our Savior, that he would command us even now to “love one another, as I love you.” Maundy, from “mandatum” or command, is not just the name of the day’s liturgy, but the very real demand of God that we spend our lives loving others in ways that are real, concrete, and sacrificial. It is not our name that makes us Christian, or illuminates for others the grace of God and the depths of his love. It is our willingness to love always, in ways that do not necessarily benefit us, but which are visible to our neighbors and co-workers, families and friends.
The supper, the foot washing, were not a detour on the way to Calvary, a much welcomed respite from the journey that ends in Jesus’ death. No, the hour has indeed come, for the sinless Lamb of God gave his body and blood to rescue us from sin and death. And the hour has surely come, for us who participate in his suffering and death, in Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, to commit ourselves again, at the foot of the cross, to the life of the disciples of Jesus Christ. It is the hour, indeed, it is always the hour, to make a joyful sacrifice of our lives, that we may demonstrate in our own flesh the grace and truth of the Father’s love and mercy given us through his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.