March 28, 2024, Learn by Example on Maundy Thursday, John 13:1-20 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell
The recording is above and the text is below.
Tonight we gather to do what Jesus and his twelve disciples were doing on the night of his arrest: we gather to share a meal. They were in Jerusalem on the first day of the Passover, and they had made preparations to eat the Passover Seder, as we did last Sunday. For Jews, the Passover was and still is one of the central festivals of the year. It is a commemoration of God’s powerful deliverance of the people of Israel, who had been living as slaves in Egypt for almost four hundred years. At the Seder, the Passover story is read: how God raised up Moses to lead his people, and how God sent him to stand before Pharoah and demand that Pharoah let his people go.
It is that story that Jesus and his disciples remembered on their last night together. It was tradition, a perpetual ordinance, the ancient story they had all heard from the time they were babies, every Passover, because it was the story of God’s powerful act of deliverance for his people.
As Christians, we read the story of the Passover as a foreshadowing of a greater story of deliverance – the powerful act of deliverance that Jesus was about to do on the night he shared his last Seder meal with his friends. Jesus was about to set the whole world free, not from the oppression of a human tyrant, like Pharoah or Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, but from the oppression of the age-old tyrants of human sin – selfishness and greed and violence – and even death itself. And the blood that would protect people from destruction was not the blood of sheep or goats painted on the doorposts; it was his own blood, shed on the cross. And the firstborn who was about to die was not the firstborn of enemy princes or peasants; it was the only begotten Son of the One Almighty God. It’s that great and wonderful Passover that we celebrate every time we share the bread and wine of Communion.
But on that night, at that very traditional meal, Jesus did something entirely non-traditional. It was so non-traditional that his disciples were shocked and offended by what he did. Jesus got up from the table and took off his outer garment. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist and he got a basin of water, and he knelt down at the feet of his disciples and began to wash them. You know the story; it isn’t shocking to you, or offensive, because it’s so familiar – though maybe it still seems a little weird, because we tend to not like touching other people’s feet. But for the disciples, it was offensive, not because feet are gross, but because Jesus, their teacher and master, was doing the work that a slave should do. To them, it was just wrong.
And I think Jesus meant to shock them, because it was a way of hammering home something absolutely essential; something he had been teaching them for three years, but they still hadn’t quite gotten it.
He had told them, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”
He had said to them, Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
He had taught them that if they didn’t become like little children, they couldn’t enter the kingdom of heaven.
He had called them together and admonished them, You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
But they didn’t yet understand.
And so, on that last night with his disciples, Jesus gave them an example, one they would never forget. It took something tangible, something sacramental, for them to really understand what he had been teaching them. Because humility and servanthood didn’t come naturally to them, any more than it does to us. No one wants to kneel at the feet of another person, whether they live in the first century or the twenty-first century. We all have trouble, sometimes a lot of trouble, letting go of our own rights, shedding our own dignity like Jesus took off his outer garment. None of us are very comfortable with humiliation. Most of us have a tendency to measure ourselves against other people. And we like to measure up well; we like to get the respect that is due to us. We’re none of us fond of being treated like servants. And for all those reasons, it has often been easy for Christians to forget, or to ignore, or to deny, that when God sent his Son to give us a flesh and blood picture of who God is, to make God himself known to us, he came in humility and weakness and poverty, not in power and glory and wealth. He came to serve, not to be served. And he called us, his people, to be like him, to walk in his footsteps.
Jesus got up from the table, and he wrapped a towel around his waist. He knelt down at the dirty feet of his disciples, and he began to wash them. The only way they would ever understand what he was trying to teach them was just to do it. And so, on this night each year, we follow his example, too. If it is awkward or embarrassing or uncomfortable, we can take comfort in knowing that it was awkward and embarrassing and uncomfortable for Peter and the other disciples, too.
But when we find ourselves in the posture of Jesus Christ, kneeling at the feet of our brother or sister, we will begin to understand, too, what it is to be his disciple. We begin to see how we are being formed, literally, into loving servants, like our Teacher and Master.
The disciples had been raised knowing the power of God, his vengeance against their enemies, his watch-care over them. But they had never yet understood the sacrificial love of God, or the depth of God’s humility – because who would ever have imagined a humble God? On this night, they were seeing that with their own eyes. And they were learning how to practice loving with the kind of love God had for them. Because it was that kind of love that would be the mark of the followers of their Lord, who said: “Love one another as I have loved you. All people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
St. Philip's Episcopal Church 