It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
John 13:1
Tonight we are remembering the words and example of Jesus at his last. What we do with the water basin for washing feet and at the altar for receiving the bread and wine, we do “in remembrance” of Christ. The Greek sense of this word “remember” is not so much to jog the memory, like tying a string to our finger so we don’t forget what Jesus said. No, it’s a much more profound remembering. It’s to remember like a surgeon “re-members,” when a surgeon re-attaches and sutures some membrane of the body that has been severed. It’s to take something that otherwise would be cut off, broken, lost, detached from our own life, in our relationship with God, to be reattached, reconnected, remembered. To re-member or be remembered in this way is to quite literally get in touch with Jesus, and at the deepest possible level.
The name for this Maundy Thursday remembrance, “Maundy,” derives from the Latin word, mandatum, from which comes our English words “mandate” and “command.” We will remember several of Jesus’ commands this evening. One command has to do with the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. We remember tonight how Jesus was sitting with his disciples at table, how he took bread and wine, held it before them, and said that it was to be for them his body and his blood. He told them they (and we) are to do the same, in remembrance of him. In remembrance. It’s not so much to remember Christ in our head but to be re-membered by Christ in our whole being by quite literally “taking him in.” That’s one command. “Do this,” Jesus says. And we will take Jesus at his word, believing him to be really and tangibly present as his body and blood becomes part of our own body and blood, both symbolically and physically as we “take him in,” in the form of bread and wine.
Another of Jesus’ commands we re-member this evening is to love one another as Christ loves us. We will do that this evening following Jesus’ example in foot washing, which is quite an unusual experience for us in our day, but not in Jesus’ day. In first century Palestine, with people wearing sandals while walking the dusty roads, feet became very dirty. A householder would have a servant wash the feet of an arriving guest. This evening we become like servants in washing one another’s feet. But Jesus goes one step further, much more radically. Jesus says, “but I do not call you servants any longer; I now call you friends,” which invites a tender reciprocity.
So we will have our feet washed and we will wash one another’s feet. We all are being invited to serve and be served, like friends. This levels the field, because Jesus presumes a kind of sameness about us all. We eat the same food from the same eucharistic table; we wash one another’s feet and we have our feet washed by one another. This is a template for how Jesus relates to the world, and he commands us to do the same, because we are so much the same, and in need of the same Savior: not some of us dirty and some of us pure; not some of us better, and some of us worse; not some of us more important and some of us less important; not some of us lost and some of us found. We’re all found, and what Jesus finds in us all, he loves. Jesus said, I have called you to one another as friends, to love one another as Jesus loves us.
