1 Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The devil had already decided that Judas son of Simon Iscariot would betray Jesus. And during supper 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4 got up from supper, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” 9 Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” 11 For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
12 After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had reclined again, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for that is what I am. 14 So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. 16 Very truly, I tell you, slaves are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. 17 If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”
31b “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. 32 If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. 33 Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me, and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 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.”
My sermon from Maundy Thursday (April 17, 2025) on John 13:1-17, 31b-35.
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The summer after my first year in seminary, I was part of a small group of other clergy-in-training who worked for ten weeks as a chaplain at a hospital in Manhattan. It was our responsibility to provide pastoral care to people regardless of their religious beliefs who found themselves going through all kinds of medical experiences. Some had been admitted for a simple overnight observation because their doctors noticed something on a recent scan while others needed the ICU to become their home. The hope was that we could provide a little comfort and care for those who were going through stuff they never planned for. Yet the primary goal of this work was for seminarians to realize the parts of themselves that stopped them from being the kind of people God has called them to be. People who are living through a crisis respond to their situation in a variety of ways. And while their feelings of anger, frustration, confusion, grief, and sorrow are completely normal, those who are around them might not know what they should say or do. Watching someone express really difficult emotions can bring up, for us, old experiences and feelings we’ve never properly processed. We end up falling into old patterns of behavior, sometimes completely unconsciously, because we’ve lived through our own experiences of anger, sorrow, and fear. If, for example, we had a parent who yelled in ways we never understood, a patient raging at God for the diagnosis they just received, might cause us to unconsciously act as if we were a frightened eight-year-old child. Recognizing what triggers us is one of the ways we learn how to be for each other. And the feedback mechanism my group used to learn that about one another is by presenting a transcript, each week, of one of our visits that maybe didn’t go so well. Sharing within a group setting is never easy because others could easily see the many different ways we failed to hear what the other person was trying to say. Our assumptions and expectations made it incredibly difficult to bring comfort to those who needed to know they were valued and loved. And in tonight’s reading, when Jesus gathered his own small group of friends together, he pushed them to move beyond what they knew and into the new future that was already on its way.
Now the word we use to describe this worship – Maundy Thursday – comes from the Latin word, mandatum. Mandatum, at its core, simply means “commandment” which Jesus called his friends to embrace at the end of the reading. Jesus and those around him were in the city of Jerusalem – preparing for the festival of Passover. They spent their time talking and eating and teaching and preaching within the Holy Temple and in the marketplaces. The disciples expected this holy festival to be a little different since Jesus had a history of causing trouble whenever he visited the city during some kind of holy event. He had, in prior years, tossed out the money changers who changed currency into the type that could be used for religious offerings in the Temple while stampeding the animals used for sacrifices into the marketplace. Healing people on the sabbath, arguing with other religious leaders, and getting in the way while folks participated in some of the holiest moments of their lives was a real part of Jesus’ ministry. His reputation as being a kind of destabilizing force while large numbers of people flooded into the city was one of the main reasons why he became a target for the Roman Empire. This should have made the disciples a little afraid of being associated with someone who seemed to be such a problem. Yet the power Jesus expressed gave them a kind of self-assurance and confidence. They expected that Jesus would, during his stay in the city, escalate what he had done in the past. And they wanted to make sure they were there so they could receive whatever power, authority, and opportunity Jesus would dish out to those who truly followed them. They didn’t know exactly what Jesus was up to but they felt like it had to be pretty spectacular. And if Jesus was already willing to toss merchants out of the Temple, he could be ready to even push out all the Roman soldiers who were patrolling the city.
That assumption was one of the things stopping the disciples from hearing what Jesus was trying to say. His friends couldn’t imagine that what they assumed was faithful, holy, and true might be anything but. Their world – and our world – often acts as if there’s only so much love, hope, or blessings to go around and so power is defined by those who can get others to do their will. We assume everything, including life itself, is painfully limited so we need to hold tight onto whatever we have. Grace, hope, mercy, empathy, and even love are always in short supply. And if someone else has access to what we want, they’re denying it to us. The future, from this point of view, is bounded by a sense of scarcity that can only celebrate violence and pain. What the disciples needed, then, was an opportunity for a different kind of feedback that would break through the assumptions weighing down their souls. And so Jesus, during the Last Supper, did exactly that. He wouldn’t do what they expected him to do because God’s future will never be limited by our own. This caused the disciples to feel scared, worried, uncomfortable, and completely anxious since the future Jesus was painting didn’t match the one in their heads. Jesus could have decided that their expectations would be what kept them from experiencing the fullness of the kingdom of God. But what he did instead was to remind them of the promise at the heart of who they are – that God knows them, that God loves them, and that Jesus will carry them into God’s future no matter what came next. Moving through our expectations and into God’s promise is a life-long project we’ll never get exactly right. The responsibility that comes with following Jesus often includes being held accountable for the ways we let scarcity, anger, and fear shape our lives instead. We assume that we already know what goodness and faith are meant to look like. Yet God has a habit of troubling our expectations so that we can grow into the people God knows we can be. And when we don’t know what to do or say or be in the world, we can lean onto the commandment that Jesus embodied through the life he’s already given for you. We can love each other; we can listen to one another; we can have the courage to show mercy and care even when no one else does. We can act as if God’s future is already here and because we are the ones Jesus gathers together around his table, we get to be the imperfect vessels of God’s holy grace for our friends, our neighbors, and our world.
Amen.