Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles by Meister des Hausbuches, 1475
Maundy Thursday
6 April 2023 7:00 p.m. Sung
Mass with Foot-washing and the Stripping of the Altar
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)
Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14 ; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35 ; Psalm 116:1, 10-17
God, give us hearts to feel and love,
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
And so with this evening’s service, we begin the sacred Triduum or Three Day Liturgy—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, so central to our faith. It traces a great arc from fear through darkness and despair into light and the bliss of the Lord. Its deep mystery is passed on to us in the stories read, the songs sung, and the prayers said, not in any homily proclaimed. It’s all too great, too ineffable. We are reduced to actions and not words: washing feet, eating and drinking the bread and wine offered by Jesus as his body and blood, stripping and washing the altar, sitting and praying in the night, then on Friday touching and praying before the Cross upon which our Beloved died. At the start of Sunday in the darkness on Saturday evening we light the new fire of hope, listen to the stories of God’s saving acts since creation, renew our baptism, and then light and flower the church, singing joyous alleluias after the acclamation, “Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!”
We can be overwhelmed by this rich matrix of symbols. We sometimes tend to focus on one or two less important details whose symbolism is truer than perhaps their historical reliability: the True Cross, the True Crown of Thorns, the True Burial Shroud, and the ever-elusive Holy Grail.
But the stories of the Last Supper clearly are not focused on the peripherals. They are not even really about the meal itself as such. One of the great glories of having four Gospels is that they each give a differing view. The synoptics say it was a Passover Meal, where Jesus said, instead of "this is the bread of affliction, this is the wine of blessing," the following: this bread here is my body and this wine, over here, is my blood (a separation that means his certain death). Yet John says it was one last meal before Passover, where Jesus does not institute the Eucharist, but rather gives a long intercessory prayer on behalf of his followers, a new commandment that we love one another, and the example of how we do that by washing their feet.
The bread and wine of the Last Supper became the central Christian act of worship. I wonder if the foot-washing had become the central act, what our Church services would look like? What if offering bread dipped in the gravy to even those who betray us, or if prayers the length of those found in John’s Last Supper (3 whole chapters full) had? Would we have had the same level of controversy and division over these things that we have had over the Eucharist and its elements?
To be sure: the consecrated Bread and Wine are what Christ called them, his Body and Blood. But the community gathered together at Jesus’ call is also his Body, his arms and feet in the world. These two are not in contradiction—as if the Body of Christ were either the bread offered on the altar or the beloved community gathered at it. Rather, as Paul teaches, these two things are one and the same: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body” (1 Cor 10:16-17).
It's always bothered me that Jesus here commands us to love each other. How can you command a feeling? It’s kind of like my mother ordering my brother and me as boys after a fight, to kiss and make up, and—here’s the kicker—really meaning it. But the love Jesus models and commands is not disembodied sentiment and feeling. Rather it is a series of actions, a state of the will. It is putting the well-being of the beloved above ourselves. It is giving them the benefit of the doubt. It is sacrificing oneself, accepting hurt, to help them. Jesus washes the feet and loves even the one who will betray him. Later in the night, he will wake his sleeping friends at Gethsemane, but will not scold them for not being able to watch and pray. Rather, he has compassion and empathy, “your mind is willing, but you're just too damned tired!”
As we go forward through these next days reflecting on the texts of terror, albeit with a luminous ending, let us remember that these stories and rites use metaphors, limping and imperfect, to express what is beyond our ability to understand or express.
When my second son David was about nine, he asked me: “Why did God have to kill off his Son Jesus to pay for our sins? Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we’re sorry?”
I parroted an answer something like that of the Evangelical Alpha Course: "God is holy and justice demands that sin be punished. We are sinners. It was God’s mercy and love that sent Jesus to suffer such punishment in our stead if only we have faith in him." I sid this all with a straight face, because I didn't know any better.
David would have none of it: “If God is really boss of everything, he can make things any way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill off his own Son? It’s barbaric. It just isn’t fair, and it certainly isn’t loving.”
I replied that Jesus and the Father enjoyed unity in the Godhead, and this meant that actually God himself was volunteering to die for us on the Cross because of his love. No go: “Then why does Jesus pray in the garden, ‘Please don’t let this happen to me?’”
From the beginning, we Christians have seen the death of Christ on the cross as not simply a case of miscarried justice or persecution, but something much more. St. Paul, writing just 20 years after Jesus’ death, quotes the apostolic tradition that he received from others and affirms, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3-5) and “in Christ, God was reconciling the world unto Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). But Paul never says exactly how this was so.
The idea that the Cross was transferred punishment to placate the anger of a Deity demanding violence and blood as punishment for sin, is never taught as such in the New Testament, nor defined by any of the early Councils of the Church. The idea first arose in the late Middle Ages in the writings of St. Anselm of Canterbury. In Anselm’s society, a feudal lord’s honor could only be upheld by a social equal. For him, God became man because man couldn’t satisfy the debt of honor to God caused by human sin. Anselm’s theory of Atonement is known as “satisfaction”; this later during the Renaissance, with its emphasis on law and individual responsibility, evolved into a doctrine of judicially transferred punishment. But the feudal idea is still at its core. The idea is not biblical, but it became a cornerstone of Calvinist and Evangelical doctrine.
The praise hymn “In Christ Alone” puts it this way, “… on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied, for every sin on Him was laid, here in the death of Christ I live.”
Now I confess to you, sister and brothers, that I reject this doctrine, root and branch. It sees God as bloodthirsty and unrelentingly demanding violence as a way of fixing what is wrong with the world. Further, it corrupts the idea of the self-sacrifice of Jesus.
The ancients never viewed ritual sacrifice as a transfer of deserved pain and suffering onto the sacrificial victim. Sacrifice was never about suffering. Rather, it was food offered to God to create a common sharing and reconciliation. Jesus’ self-sacrifice in his pursuing the kingdom even at the cost of his own life is far from the idea of transferred punishment. Early Christians felt it was like a ritual sacrifice because in it God in Jesus shares with us and we humans in Jesus share with God, all as a means of creating communion and reconciliation between us and God. Calling Jesus’ death a sacrifice was never intended to be some sort of sick expression of a Mel Gibson-esque sado-masochism and suffering for suffering’s sake.
I would prefer that hymn read, “...on that holy cross so blessed, God’s love for us was manifest: our savior died as one of us, here in the death of Christ, I live.”
The Christian Testament uses many differing metaphors to try to get a handle on what Christ accomplished for us and in us:
· justification (declare or make morally upright),
· salvation (rescue on the field of battle),
· reconciliation (restoring a personal relationship),
·
expiation (driving away ritual impurity or
‘covering
over’ guilt),
·
redemption or ransom (purchasing someone
back from
slavery or prison into freedom),
·
liberation to freedom (restoring full-citizenship
to someone)
· new creation (being made anew)
· sanctification (being made or declared holy)
· transformation (changing shapes)
·
glorification (being endowed with the light
surrounding God)
None of these are completely adequate descriptions of what “Christ died for our sins” means. But they all agree that Jesus’s death and resurrection is the great victory over what is wrong with us and the world, a mystery just too glorious to reduce to a single image.
The fact is, the “wrath of God” describes more how our relationship with God feels to us when we are alienated from God than it describes God’s heart. And it is we human beings who tend to think that violence can make things right, not God.
In this light, our belief that Christ “died for us” takes on deep meaning. In Jesus on the Cross, we see God suffering right along with us, dying as one of us; in Jesus in Gethsemane, a human being alongside us, praying fervently with us, and, with us, not getting what he desperately asks for.
Christ’s death on the cross rescues us not through substitution, but through
participation: his participation in our messy human life, and our participation
in his human sufferings and in his divine life.
That’s why Jesus says “Take up the cross and follow me.” As we participate in his sufferings, picking
up the cross, we follow him to the joy of Easter morning, the splendor of his
resurrected life. And we can have that
even here, in this cruel, crazy, beautiful world.
I invite all of us to come to participate in Christ. Let us wash each other’s feet as a sign of our love. Let us partake of the bread and wine he offers us, both sweet and bitter, and pray with him in Gethsemane even as we are nodding off. I invite us all to come to the rest of this single Church service—by returning tomorrow for the grim Good Friday part, and then for its glorious culmination on Saturday evening and Sunday Morning. And most of all, I invite us, with Jesus, to love each other as he loved us, to serve the world selflessly, as he showed us.
In the name of God, Amen.
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