April 9, 2020
/Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12: 1-14
Psalm 116: 1, 10-17
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-17,31-35
The Rev. Jimmy Grace
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.
At the end of the day, when everything is taken from us, when we have nothing left to give or to offer. We have love.
That’s the point of Maundy Thursday, at least to me.
A question sometimes asked about today is why is it called Maundy? The word Maundy comes from the Latin “mandautum” which means “commandment”
In the reading from the Gospel today, we hear Jesus offer a new commandment to those gathered around the table with him.
They break bread together, they share the Eucharist, and Jesus takes a towel around his waist, and begins to wash the feet of the disciples.
I imagine that there was a lot of anxiety in the room at that moment. Jesus is about to be arrested, the disciples knew that their time with Jesus would be short.
And Jesus in fact tells them “I am not going to be with you much longer. My time with you is coming to an end.”
It was not what they wanted to hear. There was nothing uplifting about it. It was bad news, no way around it. The sense of dread the disciples felt might have been similar to the sense of dread we feel even now, wondering what the final death toll will be from this virus.
How many will die, how much will we lose? What else is going to be taken from us?
“A new commandment I am going to give you – that you love one another,” Jesus says to the disciples the night before his death.
In other words, Jesus was saying, “Look, I am not going to be with you much longer. But this is how I am going to remain with you – you will know my presence and that I am with you by the love you show one another.”
There is nothing easy about this. If you live in a home with another person, or five other people, in my case, weeks of sheltering in place has a way of challenging Christ’s commandment to love the other person. I drove by a person in a wheelchair on a street corner asking for money, and I did not roll my window down, I did not offer this person anything in the way of assistance or help. I fail to love the way Jesus instructs us to love on a daily basis.
But here’s the thing about love which we all know. If we reach out, if we love another person, that love will always come back to us. In our isolation right now it might seem as if the phone weighs a 1,000 pounds – it’s too heavy to pick up to call a friend or family member. It does to me sometimes.
But that’s what tonight is all about – remembering that Christ’s love that he left his disciples with, that new commandment that he proclaimed is with us all tonight. It is our commandment – to love in spite of all the odds.
Jesus did not say “love one another except in times of a pandemic, or love one another except when your 401k is depleted.” The strength of Christ’s love will be truly known to us when everything around us falls and withers away. Because in the end, that is all we will have anyway.
In a few moments, we will remove what is left of the altar appointments – this is called the stripping of the altar. And it is meant to represent to us the abandonment of Jesus in his final moments – he was alone – everything taken away from him except one thing. His love. His love will remain. No matter how dark, how uncertain, his love will always be. AMEN.