Maundy Thursday 2009

Ps 116:16 O GOD, I am your servant; I am your servant, the child of a servant mother. You have freed me from my bonds.

Today we gather around one of oldest traditions in human history, the sharing of a meal. We will confess our sins to each other. We will hear the story of Passover in our religious heritage. We will hear both Paul and the Gospel of John narrate the Last Supper—where Jesus washes his disciples feet, shares a meal with them, and gives them a new commandment. Some of you today may choose to participate in a footwashing rite. We will share a meal together. And I hope we all hear this new commandment with fresh ears.

The new commandment sounds quite simple, almost naive: “As I have loved you, you should love another.” This Jesus tells to his disciples upon gathering them in Jerusalem. The simpler the commandment, I think, the harder to follow…It is this which gives Maundy Thursday its name—Maundy coming from the Latin word for commandment. But in this text we remember today, describing Jesus and his disciples sharing their final meal together, we find not only the commandment, but the pattern for its radical effect on our lives, and all whom we have contact with. The pattern is a servant.

The servant theme is crucial to Maundy Thursday, and the way we encounter God…the way we encounter each other. But, to be sure, the servant is a complicated image for 21st century Americans. In the month that we remember the assassination of Martin Luther King; at a time when a First Lady can trace her recent ancestry to slaves, bought and sold like the ones who built the house she now lives in…we cannot hear “servant” without painful memories of the American institution of slavery. And rightly so.

But our language is not the language of the Gospel of John. For its original community, the idea of servanthood was assumed and absolute across society. In the biblical worldview, a person is always enslaved to something—the concept of a free individual was just not possible. In fact, the entire concept of an individual was very much different from our modern concept.

Identity in the Biblical world comes from others, never from a sense of individual self. In a collectivist society, like that of Jesus and the disciples, each person is embedded in the larger group. You are who your group is, and who others say you are. Servant identity, then, is established in the eyes of others, not as a sense of one’s self.

Servanthood for Jesus does not directly address a person’s worth as an individual. It addresses the interdependence of the group. The servant may be completely dependent on the master, yes, and but so is the master on the servant. The intimate interdependence is nowhere more visible than the rite of footwashing. We will hear from John’s Gospel that Jesus washes the feet of his disciples. As their teacher, this is an unusual scenario, but Jesus insists. Imagine Jesus, stooping to wash the feet of the disciple who will soon condemn him to death. Jesus, who came up out the water’s Jordan to God’s own voice declaring him beloved, now sits on the floor baptizing the callouses and dirty toenails of disciples who have followed him from town to town.

In Atlanta, at the Church of the Common Ground, the doors are opened each Monday afternoon to the city’s homeless. Chairs are set up. Church members and volunteers stand by with water and pumice stones. The footwashing begins. Footwashing for those who participate is not symbolic: it is necessary for the health of those who battle on their feet for survival. For all, it makes relationships real.

Footwashing and the entire servant theme is challenging to so many of our modern ideas that put the self first, and others second. The consequences of a society which holds dear the phrase “greed is good” are now becoming quite evident. “Every person for him or herself” is the opposite of the servant lesson of Jesus. The interdependence that Jesus commands to his disciples questions why there are homeless streaming into that Atlanta church at all. How do we rest as individuals when members of our own community struggle every night for survival?

Maybe this group-centered biblical worldview is a good way to describe reality after all. Aren’t our lives completely dependent upon one another’s? The race that each of us runs to become a complete autonomous individual can lead to isolation. When we put all the emphasis on the self, life’s problems become our problems.

Listen to the danger: Lost my job? I must not have been good enough. Relationship with a loved one dissolved? I must not have been lovable enough. Find it hard to pray? I must not be worthy enough to God.

It is tempting to fit our idea of servanthood into this same faulty logic: Missed the mark as a servant of God? I must be doing it wrong.

If our isolation is a cause of economic and spiritual crises, then it is also a result. For many, the prospect of losing a job, and the inaccessibility of the resources needed for survival mean further isolation. John tells us that Jesus is preparing for his own death. But in the very midst of betrayal and fear, Jesus gathers his disciples for a meal.

Maundy Thursday invites us to resist the idea that we are on our own in this life. God’s Word to us in this place, in this culture is this: servanthood is a GIFT. Servanthood means intimate connection with and dependence upon the community. That’s us. Of course, it’s not always easy to be so intimately interdependent with each other. It is uncomfortable to take another’s feet in our hands, for example. But our interdependence is what makes us strong.

Maybe you celebrate our interdependence in the rite of footwashing…In a few moments you will have the opportunity to participate in the same act that the disciples shared with each other.

Maybe you celebrate our interdependence in the shared meal at the table…

Maybe you’ve found this at the Welcome Center, here, where the lives of many are woven together. Interdependence is just as constant in our lives as servanthood was in the biblical world.

So, Welcome to the servant community! God’s love has connected us with each other. The love that Jesus commanded has brought us into intimate connection with the One who knows human suffering. In the midst of betrayal and fear, we are gathered at one table, not to reenact an old-fashioned ritual. But to be the church. To be shoulder to shoulder, or even hand-in-foot, with the neighbors we have in Jesus. In the face of crucifixion and death, we gather for a meal.