Love is the Only Answer 3-28-24, Maundy Thursday
Love is the Only Answer
Ps 116: 1-2, 12-19; John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Ps 116:1-2, 12-19
I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my supplications. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live. What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord, I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones. O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant, the child of your serving girl. You have loosed my bonds. I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice and call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the house of the Lord, in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the Lord!
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.” After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 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.”
Prayer – Lord Jesus, we gather with you this night around a table – an inviting table based on love for all people. So much of your life, so much of your ministry was about showing us that your love, God’s love, is boundless, gracious and truly, the only way. Remind us this night perhaps more than any other night what love looks like – crouching before your closest friends and colleagues, gently and lovingly washing the dust from their feet, and then sharing in the most meaningful meal of the Jewish faith – Passover – whereby Jesus took on the role of the Passover lamb. All to show us, once and for all, that love is the only answer – amen.
When Jesus sat down to eat for the last time with a handful of his closest friends, he knew it was the last time, and he didn’t have to be the Messiah to know it – they all did to a degree or another. The Romans were out to get him; the Jews were out to get him; and for reasons only can be guessed at, one of his own friends was out to get him, and Jesus seemed to know that too. He knew, that his time had all but run out and that they would never gather as this group ever again.
It is an unforgettable scene in that upper room – the shadows, the stillness, the hushed voices of people speaking very carefully, very intently, because they wanted to get it all said while there was still time and to get it said right. You can only imagine the way it must have haunted them for the rest of their lives as they looked back on how they had actually sat around that table, eating and drinking and talking; and through the various accounts as recorded in scripture and by word of mouth, and through all the paintings of it, like the great, half ruined da Vinci fresco in Milan, and through the two thousand years of the church’s reenactment of that night, it has come to haunt us too. When I reflect on this night some 2000 years ago, the Last Supper is as haunting of an event long past but also as a kind of foreshadowing of an event not all that far in the future, by which I mean our own last suppers, the last time you and I sit down with a handful of our closest friends.
It’s hard not to believe that somehow or other there’s always going to be another time with them, another day, so the chances that we won’t know if it’s the last time, and therefore it won’t have the terrible sadness about it that the Last Supper of Jesus must have had. But not knowing is sad in another way because it means that we also won’t know how precious this supper is, how precious these friends are whom we will be sitting down with for the last time whether we know it or not.
Jesus marked that night in a different way – he took on the role of a servant, a person who will give it all for those friends. As he knelt before them to wash the dust off their feet and care for them in a most intimate and precious way, little did they know it was just another self-less, love-filled act that Jesus shared to show the depth and breadth of God’s love. Jesus’ entire ministry showed his disciples, the people he met on his long journey from Bethlehem to Egypt to the wilderness to Jerusalem that love is the only answer. Nothing can stop love, not hatred, not oppression, not civil or religious authorities and not even death – love is the only answer.
So as we gather tonight to remember Jesus’ love, in fact, God’s love for his friends, I wounder who are the friends for you, who are they for me? We have to picture them for ourselves – to see their faces, hear their voices, feels what it is like to be sitting with them one last time. They are our nearest and dearest – a wife, a husband, children, grandchildren and maybe even great grandchildren, a few people we can’t imagine living without or their living without us – and I wonder if the swelling and sweeping emotions of love can overcome the sense of sadness that this may in fact be our last supper.
You know every one of our suppers points to the preciousness of life and also to the certainty that we can’t escape death, which make life seem all that more precious in itself because under its shadow we tend to search harder and harder for light. There in that shadowy room with clean feet and a shared last meal, each of the disciples turned towards Jesus, who was their light, perhaps with greater urgency and passion than maybe ever before because maybe they had no other place to turn. They had drunk the wine he had poured out and told them was his blood; they had put into their mouths the bread he told them was his body. Little did they comprehend the love masked in those very elements.
As if they didn’t know. As if they didn’t know. AS if you and I don’t know – both where he was going and where all of us are going too. He was going down the stairs and out the door. He was going into the night. He was going to a garden to pray to the God he called Abba Father not to let the awful thing happen to him that he knew was already happening, and the Gospels don’t record that he got so much as a whisper in reply. He was going alone, and he was going against his will, and he was going scared half out of his wits, so much so, that he sweated blood as he thought and prayed that love could be shown in a different way.
The Last Supper not only prefigures our own last suppers wherever and whenever they are to be. We can’t read or hear the account of that last gathering between Jesus and his closest friends without in some measure being there ourselves, sitting around that table where he sits with his friends as it becomes our table, and as they drew close to the light of him, we too try to draw close as if maybe in the last analysis he is the one who is our nearest and dearest – or our farthest and dearest because he is always just too far away to see very well, to take hold of, too far away to be sure he sees us. If we have any hope at all, he is our hope because for Jesus, love is the only answer.
Jesus says, “You will seek me,” and no word he ever spoke hits closer to home. We seek for answers to our questions – questions about life and death, questions about what is right and wrong, questions about the unspeakable things that go on in the world. We seek for strength, for peace, for a path through the forest. We Christians are people who maybe more than anything else seek for Christ, and from the shabbiest little jerry-built meeting house in the middle of nowhere to the grandest cathedrals, all churches everywhere were erected by people like us in the wild hope that in them, if nowhere else, the one we seek might finally somehow be found.
We gather tonight to remember, to perhaps ponder, to perhaps hope that as believers, Jesus will show us that love is the only answer. That’s why we are here – at least would-be believers, part-time believers, believers with our fingers crossed. Believing in Jesus is not the same as believing things about him such as the was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him just as he has given his heart for us. Jesus says to us tonight in his words and his actions – Love as I have loved you, love one another just as I have loved you.
So as you prepare to come forward in just a few minutes to receive the bread and cup, be mindful of what Jesus is saying to us tonight, to love, love one another just as he has loved us. Love one another, even when the other is cranky and unlovable, even when the other is smelly and sweaty and addicted to something you would never consider putting into your body; love one another, even when the other may betray you behind your back, or deny your friendship of years and years. Love one another, because love is the only answer – thanks be to God – amen.