(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Maundy, Maundy”, originally shared on March 27, 2024. It was the 304th 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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment