What can we say Maundy Thursday?

   Maundy Thursday, such a lovely night. I can't talk long, for they come, not for the sermon, but for the tangible experience, the bodily encounter. Just a little bread and wine – maybe, given Covid restrictions.

    I don't usually focus on the footwashing in John 13, although it's theologically provocative, especially in this season when hygiene, sanitizers, etc., are huge. But it’s way too easy to flatten it out: Jesus served humbly, so go and serve others humbly (although Pope Francis sure revolutionized how we'll forever think about footwashing after doing it to women, and Muslims!).  I’m not sure John would say that was his one-liner takeaway… and we have so much all year long about serving anyhow that Holy Week, for me, needs devotion to Jesus and his literally sacramental death. 

   I'm thinking I might share and linger on Sister Gee's words to Kevin Mullen in James McBride's great novel Deacon King Kong - as they've just met and she's flirting in a fascinating way, finding a bond in "We both clean dirt."  That’s my job, Officer. I’m a house cleaner, see. I work in dirt. I chase dirt all day. Dirt don’t like me. It don’t set there and say, ‘I’m hiding. Come get me.’ I got to go out and find it to clean it out. But I don’t hate dirt for being dirt. You can’t hate a thing for being what it is. Dirt makes me who I am. Same with you. The fellers you seek, crooks and all, ain’t saying ‘Here I am. Come get me.’ Me and you has got the same job, in a way. We clean dirt. We collects other people’s mess, though I reckon it’s not fair to call someone living a wrong life a problem, or a mess… or dirt.

   We hide - from ourselves, from God, from others. The "hidden places" aren't fond of Jesus! But he goes there - and there we discover we're just dirt, dust, mortal, even holy. And as who we are, we making Jesus who he is: some dirt, some dust, mortal, even holy.

   Jean Vanier: before I learned of his abusive relationships, I'd loved his thoughts (and can we still?) on the mystery of the footwashing. "Jesus loves us so much that he kneels in front of us so that we may begin to trust ourselves. As Jesus washes our feet, he is saying 'I trust you and I love you. You are important to me. I want you to trust yourself because you can do beautiful things for the kingdom. You can give life; you can bring peace. I want you to discover how important you are. All I am asking is that you believe in yourself because you are a beloved child of God.'"

   The Synoptics, of course, narrate what as celebrant I’ll narrate in the words of institution. Rote for us, but as Amy-Jill Levine and Ben Witherington point out, Jesus’ words would have been “shocking, provocative, and ultimately obscure. Cannibalism? Blood out of the body made one impure.” How close does Jesus as God down here want to get to us? Not merely in the same room, or bumping up next to us. He wants to get inside us, so he lets himself be fed on by us.

    I don't usually re-envision biblical scenes at length, but on Maundy Thursday I invite my people to imagine that first Holy Thursday night. Maybe like Palm Sunday, the disciples were in a buoyant, expectant mood (it was Passover, after all, an evening of jubilation!), while Jesus was mired in a more somber apprehension of what was to come. They sang Psalms - any or all of 113-118. What did their voices sound like? Did Jesus or one of the others lead? Did they harmonize? How did "Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints” (in Psalm 116, our lection for the day!) or “This is the day the Lord has made” (from 118) resonate with Jesus and the rest of them? This is the preaching angle I often suggest: instead of asking about takeaways or relevance to me today, I just ask people to marvel over what happened then.

   Beyond any doubt, Jesus stared at that bread and caught a vision of what would happen to his own flesh the next day. And then he peered into the wine and glimpsed an image of the blood he would shed. How haunting, lovely, gripping, poignant.

   When they ate, what did they think?  We quiz candidates for ordination about their theology of the Eucharist; just to be clear, a struggling seminarian and even the frankly less than average churchgoer today understands more of what was going on that the disciples did.  Austin Farrer (in his unfortunately out of print Crown of the Year) put it beautifully:

   “Jesus gave his body and blood to his disciples in bread and wine. Amazed at such a token, and little understanding what they did, Peter, John and the rest reached out their hands and took their master and their God. Whatever else they knew or did not know, they knew they were committed to him… and that they, somehow, should live it out.” I like that. We are mystified – but we know we receive Jesus himself, and we are thereby committed to him, come what may. As N.T. Wright rightly suggested, when we eat and drink at the Lord’s table, “we become walking shrines, living temples in whom the living triune God truly dwells.”

   What do our people think as they shuffle forward? I remind them regularly of what Martin Sheen said to Krista Tippett in an On Being episode, hoping the feeling will catch on: “How can we understand these great mysteries of the church? I don’t have a clue. I just stand in line and say Here I am, I’m with them, the community of faith. This explains the mystery, all the love. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed, just watching people in line. It’s the most profound thing. You just surrender yourself to it.”

   While we include or exclude and feel noble about it, Jesus was utterly inclusive – and he makes that shrine thing happen for everybody, even those who don’t believe or have a clue. Jürgen Moltmann (in The Church in the Power of the Spirit):  “The Lord’s supper takes place on the basis of an invitation which is as open as the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross. Because he died for the reconciliation of ‘the world,’ the world is invited to reconciliation in the supper.”

   In my book which came out a year ago, Worshipful:Living Sunday Morning All Week, I quote these words and then turn to the lovely interview Krista Tippett (again!) had a while back with Father Greg Boyle, whose ministry with gang members in California is impressive and moving:  “We’ve wrestled the cup out of Jesus’ hand and we’ve replaced it with a chalice because who doesn’t know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup, never mind that Jesus didn’t use a chalice?”  Then he told how he asked an abused orphan and former gang member in his program, “What did you do for Christmas?” The young man said he cooked a turkey “ghetto-style,” and invited six other guys to join him. When he named them, Boyle recognized them as members of warring gangs. As he pondered them cooking together on Christmas day, he wondered, “So what could be more sacred than seven orphans, enemies, rivals, sitting in a kitchen waiting for a turkey to be done? Jesus doesn't lose any sleep that we will forget that the Eucharist is sacred. He is anxious that we might forget that it’s ordinary, that it’s a meal shared among friends.”

   A few years ago, it occurred to me that my reflections on something as stupendous and tender as Maundy Thursday were growing stale.  How to find a new wrinkle?  I tend to forget that Maundy Thursday includes Jesus bolting out into the dark to pray in Gethsemane – and being arrested.  On that prayer of agony, I am always moved by Jesus Christ Superstar’s “I Only Want to Say.”  I’ve made a point over the years of correcting a popular image of Gethsemane – that of Heinrich Hoffman’s “Christ in Gethsemane” (hanging in the Riverside Church, NY) – Jesus praying placidly, well-coiffed, almost as if saying his bedtime prayers.  Willem Dafoe captured that searing agony in Martin Scorsese’s “Last Temptation of Christ,” and I’d refer you also to the very interesting take in Mel Gibson’s gory “The Passion of the Christ.”

   And then, of course, the poignancy of Judas’s kiss, and the arrest – and I am continually mentioning the detail that I can’t and don’t even want to explain:  in John 18:6 Jesus says, “I am he.”  What happened next?  “The soldiers drew back and fell to the ground.”  Wow.

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   My book, Worshipful: Living Sunday Morning All Week, has a whole chapter on the Lord's Supper and all of our meals - with focused time on this Maundy Thursday.