We
call this day “Holy Thursday” and it is certainly that. Other
Christians have a different name for it - “Maundy Thursday” - and that’s
a good name for it, too, because Maundy echoes the Latin word, mandatum,
which means commandment. This Holy night has at its heart a
commandment: Jesus’ amazing new commandment, “Love one another as I have
loved you.”
In the Scriptures,
commandments are associated with mountaintops. Think of Moses on the
heights of Mt. Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments from God amid peels
of thunder and flashes of lightening. Or think of Jesus proclaiming his
New Law on the gentle hillside above the Sea of Galilee we call the
Mount of Beatitudes. Commandments come from high places where earth and
heaven seem to meet. It’s no different tonight as we gather on this
hilltop overlooking Seattle, yet another high and holy place, which
becomes for us the Upper Room on Jerusalem’s Mount Zion. We gather here,
and we hear Jesus proclaim his New Commandment and we watch him bring
that commandment to life in the washing of the feet of some of our
friends – as if to say, ‘love is like this;’ ‘God is like this;’ ‘we
must be like this;’ ‘we must do like this.”
Tomorrow, on yet another
mountain, the one called Calvary, Jesus will proclaim his New
Commandment of love in a way that will leave us speechless. He will open
his arms on the cross in a loving embrace so wide that no one,
absolutely no one, will be excluded, an embrace so vulnerable that love
will get its ultimate definition. And love will give its ultimate
challenge on that hill, too, and we will be left wondering mightily. For
how are we ever to love like that?
But that’s tomorrow.
Tonight, Jesus’ kind of love seems more within our reach. We can, after
all, get down on our knees and wash each other’s feet, can’t we? We can
be that loving, that caring, that self-forgetful.
We can, but not easily.
What comes more easily to us, more instinctively, is serving self, not
others. What comes more easily to us is the power trip – walking over
others instead of kneeling before them. Power, after all, is the way to
get ahead. It’s the way to assure us of our importance, the way to
make life bearable – to dull its pains and smooth its rough edges.
Controlling others seems to come more naturally than humbly serving
others, and too often it’s the way of our world, the way of those with
political and economic power. Too often they only care about advancing
the narrow, vested interests of the privileged few instead of the good
of the many, the common good. In the process the poor are marginalized,
the weak trampled upon, and the vulnerable forgotten.
All of this is far from
the way of Jesus, of course - miles away from his Gospel. The way of
Jesus is the way of the New Commandment where self-emptying, humble
service is the measure. The way of Jesus maintains – against all
common sense – that it’s the peacemakers, the poor, and the persecuted
who are blessed, not the powerbrokers.
But, my friends, can we
really walk the way of Jesus? We can. Holy Thursday, the day of
the New Commandment, makes it possible. Jesus makes it possible. He
shows us the way and he also gives us the way. He shows us the way when
he sets aside his tunic, pours water into a basin, gets down on his
hands and knees, and washes his disciples’ feet. That’s how he shows us
the way. And he gives us the way when he takes bread, blesses it,
breaks it, and shares it with his friends along with a cup of wine.
“This is my body given for you,” he says. “This is my blood poured out
for you.” It is as if he is saying to them and to us, ‘the only way you
will ever be able to keep my New Commandment, the only way you will be
able to love one another as I love you is by doing this: breaking the
bread and sharing the cup in my memory. If you do, and as often as you
do, you will become my Body, and then you will begin to do as I do, you
will begin to love as I love, you will begin to allow your own body to
be broken as mine was, your own blood to be poured out in the selfless
service of others.
Dear friends, tonight we
are on one of those high places where earth and heaven meet. This night
is holy unlike any other. This is the night of the New Commandment. This
is the night, more than any other, when Jesus is in our midst as “one
who serves.” This is the night when we become what we receive.
This is the night when the impossible becomes possible, the night when
we learn to love one another as He loves us!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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