304 Maundy, Maundy

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Maundy, Maundy”, originally shared on March 27, 2024. It was the 304^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.) 

   The familiar will, once again, become strange tomorrow. We’ll mark the day when God washed people’s feet, instituted the means of communion with him, and commanded people to love. It’s a weird day, but it helped build the foundation of our eternal lives. Today, we’ll see what it is.

   We had some weather the other day! Bursts of heavy rain, even hail, lightning bolts and thunder dropped into Southern California! It was unexpected, even if it was predicted.

   We will experience a series of massive events this week. They mark the time when the Creator entered creation in order to suffer. And die. And we do this in the midst of new life.

   Sally and I and our son went to a local Armstrong Garden Center the other day. I always feel good about the world when I’m there. Armstrong’s is filled with natural beauty and the things that preserve it. Especially now.

   It’s Spring, and people shopping there are thinking about the future. They are planting with the belief that they will harvest the food or enjoy the beauty of what they have planted even though they won’t see the results for some time.

   Today, we’re in the middle of Holy Week. It began last Sunday on Palm Sunday, and it leads up to Easter Sunday, the Sunday of the Resurrection.

   It describes the last week of Jesus life as a fully human being who was also fully God. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke average spending about 30% of their books describing this last week of Jesus’ approximately 33-year life. John spends 43% describing the last week!

   Good Friday in Holy Week is the main event. It’s the day that Jesus gave his life for us to restore the relationship with the one true living God for which we were created. Easter validates what happened on Good Friday. No Easter, no Christian faith. But the cross is the main event.

   Tomorrow is Maundy Thursday. Tomorrow, we will learn about the shape of the Christian faith we have received, and it involves both love toward God and love toward our fellow human beings.

   It’s the expression of Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:36-40,

36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

   “The law and the prophets” is a way of describing what we call the “Old Testament”.

   Tomorrow, Maundy Thursday, Jesus will give us a new commandment, and it will be all about the gospel.

   I’ve heard people call it, “Monday Thursday”, which seems odd to me. Though, some of us might remember the ‘60’s pop hit, “Monday, Monday”, by the Mamas and the Papas.

   It’s about a break-up, but some of the words are close to what’s happening with Jesus and his disciples on Maundy Thursday:

     “Monday, Monday, can't trust that day

Monday, Monday, sometimes it just turns out that way

Oh Monday mornin' you gave me no warnin' of what was to be

Oh Monday, Monday, how could you leave and not take me”

   On “Maundy, Maundy”, Jesus tells his disciples that he is about to leave them. They can’t process it, but Jesus is preparing them for his death and what would come after. And he describes to them that new commandment.

   In fact, “Maundy” is an Old English word rooted in the Latin word “mandatum”, which means “commandment”.  “Mandatum” is also the root word for “mandate”.

   The whole text is in the Gospel reading for Maundy Thursday that will be read throughout the world, John 13:1-17, 31b-35, but Jesus gives the new commandment at the end, in verses 34-35,

³⁴ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. ³⁵ By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

   And Jesus shows that selfless, sacrificial love to them by washing their feet, prefiguring the meaning of the cross in their community meal by instituting Holy Communion, and giving a new commandment to love one another.

   Why?

   Because that sacrificial love comes from that relationship of faith that only God can give.

   Jesus announces that he is about to leave his disciples. Thomas responds by saying that they don’t know where he’s going, how can they know the way. Jesus answers, in John 14:6-7,

6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

   Jesus is God? Yes. That’s the point of every moment of Maundy Thursday.

   Every religion has its wisdom and its wisdom traditions. They are everything in some other religions. They are the least important thing in Christianity.

   C.S. Lewis wrote, in his book Mere Christianity, “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

   The way of Jesus is the way of the cross. It is the way of our lives as well. It is lived as an outcome of a living relationship with the one true living God. It is the relationship for which we were created. It is selfless, sacrificial love in action. The way, the truth, and the life is Jesus.

   God made us for a living, perfect, and eternal relationship with God but without making us to be simple robots. That would be meaningless. We needed to be able to say “no” to that relationship in order for our “yes” to mean something. And the first people disobeyed God, they said “no”, and evil entered the world.

   People only came back to God when they needed something. So, God set them free by coming to them, in the form of Jesus Christ, fully God and fully human being, to show His love by suffering and dying for us on the cross, so that we might know the abundant eternal life for which we were created in the beginning, through faith alone.

   What does that life as the disciples of Christ look like? How do we love one another in obedience to the command of Jesus? How do we serve one another sacrificially as Jesus did on the cross?

   Years ago, there was a restaurant/drive-through in San Dimas, near where we live, called “Bravo Burgers”. There’s still one in Pomona, but I miss it being nearby.

   Most of their food packaging had “Phil 4:13” written on it. Philippians 4:13 says,

I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

   The owner said that he put that verse on his packaging out of gratitude to God.

   But, he said, “There isn’t a day that goes by when someone doesn’t come in and ask, ‘Who’s Phil?”

   Philippians 4:13 is often seen and quoted as meaning that, in anything I want to do or don’t want to do, God strengthens me. But that’s not what it says.

   The context of that verse is this, Philippians 4:11-13,

¹¹ Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have. ¹² I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. ¹³ I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

   Paul is writing to the Church at Philippi to answer their concern for him by saying that serving Jesus Christ is all that matters. Our personal need, or lack of need, is irrelevant to our service in Jesus Christ.

   How can that be? Because of what happened on Maundy Thursday.

   It’s because Christian behavior is not rooted in the requirements of the law, but in the new Creation we have been made to be in Jesus Christ.

   Our behavior is rooted in the love for one another that comes from God’s love for us and from our love for God. Our relationship with God is how we can be commanded to love. It’s not about what we do, but about who we are. And because who we are comes from Whose we are.

   The mandate, the new commandment of which we are reminded on Maundy Thursday, is to love selflessly, and sacrificially, like Jesus.

   This is at the very core of what it means to be a Christian. Paul nailed this down in an earlier part of his letter to the Philippians, in chapter 2, verses 4-8, from the passage we read last Sunday, 

⁴ Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. ⁵ Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
⁷ but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
⁸     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

   On what we call Maundy Thursday, Jesus removed his outer robe and washed the feet of his disciples, the job given to the lowest servant in the household, the job that nobody could mess up. He modeled who he is and what we, his disciples, are to be to one another: servants, even as Judas went out to betray Jesus to the authorities.

   Maundy Thursday is a weird day.

   But it points us forward in hope as we seek to model the good news of Jesus Christ to the world, to plant the seeds of faith in others, and to await the beauty that results, and the final harvest of God.

   It’s kind of like what Church reformer Martin Luther said when he was reportedly digging a hole for an apple tree in his back yard. A man came by to talk about the man’s belief that they were living in the “end times”. He asked, “Dr. Luther, what would you do if you knew that the world would end tomorrow?” Luther replied, “I’d plant my apple tree.”

303 When Mobs Rule

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “When Mobs Rule”, originally shared on March 20, 2024. It was the 303^rd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Jesus entered Jerusalem with crowds shouting “Hosanna!” A few days later crowds were shouting “Crucify him!” What happened? And what does it mean for us? Today, we’re going to find out. 

   The Rancho Cucamonga “Quakes”, a LA Dodgers farm team near us, recently changed its name temporarily to the “Jackets”. Management wanted to find a fun way to connect with its Spanish-speaking fans for a few games. It was a reference to the jackets worn by Mariachi bands, but they later, unfortunately, discovered that it is also a sexual slang term. They had already promoted it and supported the name with merchandising though, so they decided not to change it.

   I understood that.

  When I came back to my hometown, Manitowoc, Wisconsin, after my first year of college, I realized that there wasn’t much for college-age youth to do other than to work in our summer jobs, go to one of the three movie theaters in town, or to hang out at the beer bars.

   I gathered a bunch of friends (and friends of friends) to open a coffee house.

   A board member of the YMCA in town loaned us a building that had been a drug store. We swept it out and found $1.65 in the floorboards, and that was our starting budget.

   We got cable spools from the power company to use as tables. We furnished it with donated chairs, cups, an old Mirro Aluminum (a local company) coffee making urn, a stage, and a cobbled-together sound system of donated or loaned parts. We painted the interior in a way that college kids in the late ‘60’s liked.

   But we needed a name. Someone on our board suggested “Laputa”, the name of the island in the sky in Gulliver’s Travels, and that was it.

   Oddly, we thought, Spanish speaking seasonal workers would walk in occasionally, laugh, and walk out. We later found out that Laputa, separated into “la” and “puta” meant “the whore”. Something none of us or, apparently, Jonathan Swift, had picked up in Spanish classes.

   We decided to keep the name, though, since we already had become known by it, and to promote it in its original context.

   Why?

   Why do we continue behavior even when we know that it’s problematic?

   One reason is that we’ve become invested. We have something to lose.

   Plus, everyone passes the tests they write for themselves.

   As Proverbs 21:2 reminds us,

           All deeds are right in the sight of the doer,

    but the LORD weighs the heart.

   But, when groups of people do this, when they overcome conscience and civility and character, they can easily become a mob.

   This coming Sunday churches around the world will celebrate Palm Sunday, the day Jesus entered Jerusalem as a hero. All four of the gospels describe the event.

   It begins the last week of Jesus life as a fully human being who was also fully God. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke average spending about 30% of their gospels describing the last week of Jesus’ life. John spends 43% of his gospel on the last week of Jesus’ life!

   It’s the week that includes Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, which lead up to the Sunday of the Resurrection, all pivotal events in human history. It’s called Holy Week.

   Oddly, the Gospel reading in the Revised Common Lectionary for this coming Sunday will not include Palm Sunday. It will be the story of Jesus’ betrayal, judgement, and death (the Passion) in Mark 14:1 - 15:47 or the shorter Mark 15:1-39, with 40—47 as an option.

   The Palm Sunday text from Mark will not be heard on Palm Sunday (now called Passion/Palm Sunday). That’s right, you read that correctly. 😊  

   I guess it’s in response to the fear that most people won’t be at Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, or the night-before-Easter Easter Vigil services, so we need to put all those things into the Gospel reading for the Sunday before.

   Or maybe they will hear the Palm Sunday text in Mark 11:1-10 read as part of an add-on in the congregational procession into the church before the service starts.

   It will describe what is sometimes referred to as “The Triumphal Entry”.

   Jesus enters Jerusalem hailed as a hero, the crowds shouting “Hosanna!”, an expression of adoration or joy that means something like “Pray, save us! “.

   The events of Palm Sunday fulfill scripture, but they also foreshadow a dramatic turn.

   Jerusalem had a significant population for the times in those days, about 25,000 people normally and around 125,000 or much more during festivals, such as the Passover that was happening at the same as what we call Palm Sunday. So, it is reasonable to think that, five days later, some of the same people were shouting “Crucify him!” as we’ll see in the Passion Sunday text.

   What made the difference between being a hero and a zero? One letter, of course. 😊 But, though no one took Jesus life, he gave it willingly and then took it back again (John 10:18), the placement of that letter to describe what happened to Jesus came as the result of a very small group of people: the Jewish leaders.

   The best of the best incited a mob.

   How could that happen?

   I often think of a philosophy course I took in college where the professor observed that most of the world’s evil, and probably all of its worst evil, has been done by people who in their heart of hearts sincerely believed that they were doing good.

   Perhaps the religious leaders engaged in their behavior knowing, at some level, that it was problematic.

   They were invested in what they believed God had done among God’s people. They required it to maintain their position. There had been false-Messiah’s before. It’s not too hard to believe that they thought they were doing God’s will. Except that they were in the presence of God, Jesus, and didn’t recognize Him.

   Given all of that, and more, I don’t think that it was very difficult for them to turn a crowd into a mob.

   People make up crowds, and people want to feel important. They are easily filled with righteous rage.

   They will feel what they are told to feel by someone they see as one in authority, even if that authority is self-proclaimed and merely loud. Mark Twain once said, “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”

   They will believe what they are told to believe by someone who makes them feel right and personally important, that they alone have secret knowledge hidden from others, that describes what it really happening in a world that is increasingly diverse, changing, and complex to them.

   They will do what they are told to do, or even just what they think that someone in authority wants them to do. They want to please those who say, “it’s us against them”. They want to feel that they belong to a group, even if that group is a gang.

   The religious leaders had some concerns about Jesus. I’m guessing that their own insecurities stoked an outsized response.

   And the crowds were easily provoked. For many it was just the right thing to do, and they fed on each other. Mobs operate on group think. That’s why people who have been caught in a mob describe it as being so scary. At some point things turn and no one is in control, not even those who put it into motion. That’s what’s meant by the expression “mob rule”.

   Author and Methodist pastor Tex Sample, who wrote several books like, Hard Living People & Mainstream Christians, observed that some people, especially “hard living people” will say things like “I don’t take no _ _ _ _ _ from anybody” as self-talk, while the reality is that they have to take it from everybody, their bosses, the police, their family, government officials, debt collectors, everybody.

   Some people will continue with beliefs and behaviors that are increasingly problematic just because the ideas have become their identity. They have become rooted in them, and in their communities, and it is just easier to go along to get along. Some will even abandon the reality of their faith in order to seek the false promises of a counterfeit community.

   I am sometimes discouraged by how quickly some Christians will abandon the very thing that brings genuine hope and comfort to their lives in order to appease their “friends” and their position in and with the world, those outside the faith, that God so loved.

   There is a presence in the universe that is real: God. God is both independent of human experience and revealed to us personally.

   As sci-fi author Philip K. Dick wrote, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

   That reality has remade us, our whole selves, into a new creation so that we can say with Martin Luther, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God!” Word, with a capital “W”. Jesus.

   How do people go so far afield? We are broken. We bite the hand that saves us. That is human nature.

   How does Jesus respond? He suffers his trial and physical torture almost without a word.

   And when he is dying on the cross his response is, in Luke 23:34,

Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

   Jesus is not vindictive. He does not seek revenge. He seeks only forgiveness, which is the good news of the cross.

   We live on the other side of the cross in time so that, when the mobs seem to rule, we have an answer: Jesus.

   We say, as in Mark 11:9b-10,

^9b “Hosanna!

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

¹⁰     Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!

Hosanna in the highest heaven!”