April 17, 2025, Maundy Thursday, John 13:1-31 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ April 18, 2025 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to this homily, click the link above. The text is below:

Last Sunday Bruce and Susan led us in a Seder dinner. The Seder is the Jewish ceremonial feast observed every year at Passover to remember the great work of God in bringing his people out of slavery in Egypt by the hand of Moses, and in miraculously parting the waters of the Red Sea to give them safe passage but destroying the armies of Pharoah. As faithful Jews, Jesus and the disciples grew up observing the Passover, and eating the Seder together, since they were babies. The Haggadah, the story of the Passover, was the central story of their faith as Jewish people, and this night, once again, as their people had done for more than a thousand years, as Jewish people continue to do now, after another two thousand more years, they gathered around the table to eat and to pray and to remember together.

But none of the disciples were prepared for what Jesus revealed to them on this night. They knew that God was all-powerful – the one God over all earthly powers and authorities. Every year they told one another the story about how the God of Israel had defeated Pharaoh and made a mockery of all the gods of Egypt. They knew that God was faithful to his people. Every year they told one another, and they told their children, how the God of Israel had brought them out of slavery and made them into a great nation. The told the story of the plagues, and as they shared the Paschal lamb they remembered how the children of Israel painted the blood of the lamb on their doorposts, so that the Angel of Death passed over their houses. And they recalled the wailing of the Egyptians, whose first born children died on that night, from the first born of the lowliest slave, to the firstborn of Pharaoh in his palace.

But on this night, Jesus wasn’t there to recite the great acts of God in the past. Jesus was there to reveal God to his disciples in the present, to let them see the God that no human being had ever before seen, God with flesh and bones; God face to face; Emmanuel, God with his people. “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen my Father,” he told Philip. And on this night Jesus gave them a sign of his presence, a sign that he would be with them always, and with everyone who believed in Jesus through their witness, right down to us, tonight – and that was the sign of the bread and the wine, the sign that we share tonight, and almost every time we gather together in his name.

The disciples knew about the Almighty God to whom sacrifices were made in the Temple. They knew about the blood of sheep and oxen and goats that was sprinkled on the people every year for the atonement of their sins. But not one of them knew, until the night of that last Seder, about the God who became the sacrifice, the God whose own blood cleansed his people, not year after year, but once for all. Until Jesus revealed him, no one had ever before seen the God who was himself the Paschal Lamb, given for the salvation of everyone who believed in him.

But there was more.

Because at that Seder that was not like any other Seder ever, Jesus, the Teacher and Master, shocked and offended every one of his disciples by doing the work of a slave. He got up from the table and took a basin of water and he began to wash their dirty feet, one by one. It’s hard for us, I think, to wrap our heads around how strange that would have been for the disciples. To us, it’s an odd ritual we perform once a year – but only if we want to. But for Peter and John and the rest, and for us if we are really listening tonight, it is the sign of the shape that our lives will take on if we follow Jesus.

It’s the shape of the cross. It’s the shape of sacrifice. It’s the shape of humility. It’s the shape of willing service. And it’s the shape of love. Now we belong to Christ, and he makes his home in us, and we’ve seen where that leads. It leads to shame, and it leads to suffering.

And it leads to the heart of the Father.

Before Jesus came, no one had ever seen God. When Jesus came, we saw the God who is not only powerful, but humble; who not only rules but serves. We saw the God of radical, unconditional, sacrificial love. And that is the God we follow.