"Love one another"
A Sermon for Maundy Thursday
We’re doing a lot tonight.
Sharing a meal.
Washing each other’s feet.
Remembering the Last Supper.
Stripping the altar to prepare the church for Good Friday tomorrow.
Waiting with Jesus in prayer through the night.
When I started writing this sermon, I struggled to pick one focus. Everything we’re doing tonight is important, but it didn’t all seem to hang together very well.
But then I remembered what we call this day. Maundy Thursday. And I realized that everything we do tonight does actually have one purpose, one focus.
Maundy is one of those odd and churchy words that I had to look up when I first started learning about liturgy. The word Maundy in Maundy Thursday comes from the Latin mandatum, which means commandment. It refers to the very end of tonight’s Gospel reading.
Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Love one another.
We started this evening with an agape supper downstairs, sharing food and prayer, bread and wine and other simple foods, friendship and fellowship.
The word agape means love, the kind of self-giving love that Jesus lived out in the world.
In early writings, we find references to love feasts celebrated by the first Christians. We don’t know exactly what they looked like, but they certainly included prayer and song and coming together around a table. They were at least something like the meal we just ate.
One thing we do know is that these meals didn’t always look like scenes from a Hallmark card. But a family dinner without a crazy uncle or a decades-old feud hardly seems complete, does it? Imperfect or not, agape suppers were a sign of the community’s love for one another and of God’s love for them.
Love one another.
In a few minutes, we’ll wash each other’s feet. It’s messy. It can be embarrassing. I started worrying about the state of my toenails about two months ago.
In fact, I have a confession to make. For many years, I “accidentally” wore heavy stockings to church on Maundy Thursday so that I’d have an excuse not to participate. I was willing to wash the feet of others, but, like Peter in tonight’s Gospel reading, I didn’t much want anyone to wash mine.
But tonight I’m going to take part, grubby toenails and all, because I think it’s important. Think about the people you have loved in your life, and those who have loved you. Doesn’t love always come with at least a little bit of mess—and if we’re honest, isn’t it usually more than a little? Love walks hand-in-hand with dirty diapers and upset stomachs. Uneven toenails and a few stray callouses are the least we can expect to see if we seek to follow Jesus’s path of love.
Love one another.
Tonight we also remember the Lord’s Supper and the institution of the Eucharist. We hear again the story of the night Jesus met in an upper room with his friends.
And they were friends.
He broke bread and he blessed wine and he told them to do the same in memory of him.
In the moment of the Eucharist we see brought into the present the story of God’s love for us in history. We see this love week after week, Sunday after Sunday—but with particular focus on this night.
Tonight, the first Passover feast, the last supper of Jesus and his disciples, and the sacramental moments of our own lives all come together in piercing clarity around this table.
Love one another.
After the Eucharist, we’ll strip the altar in preparation for the one day of the church year when the Eucharist cannot be celebrated.
We’ll take away the candles and linens, and we’ll turn down the lights.
But as we look ahead to the pain and emptiness of Good Friday, to cross and tomb,
we remember the love of God for all of us.
Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends, the scripture says.
And so Jesus did.
Love one another.
When the Feast is finished and the Table is bare, all we have left then to do is to wait with Jesus through the night in the garden of Gethsemane.
And here at last there is something concrete that we can do to live into our own call to love.
Even if you’re not able to join the watch in the chapel tonight, try to find some time for prayer. Think about the story we tell this week. And remember again Jesus’s last commandment.
“Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”