SUPPER AT SUNDOWN

(This is the first of three sermons preached at Hope during the Triduum—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. I actually did not preach THIS sermon. I should have. But since so few people were there to hear what I did preach, I think it is best that I offer this one instead. It's a better sermon than the one I preached.)

In recent years on Maundy Thursday we have focused much attention on the event which is at the heart of the gospel lesson appointed for the day in the Gospel of John, chapter 13. That story is John's equivalent story to the accounts in the other three gospels where Jesus institutes the sacrament of Holy Communion.

In John's Gospel, instead of hearing the Words of Institution which we use in every eucharistic service as the bread and wine are consecrated, we hear Jesus giving the "New Commandment" gave to his disciples and we see Jesus humbling himself to wash the feet of his disciples. Curiously, John makes no mention of the elements of the meal itself, the institution of the sacrament, or the promise of the forgiveness of sins—all of which have been the central elements of Christian worship for twenty centuries.

I'm not sure what the motivation is behind placing the focus on the act of feet washing, and I wonder whether worshipers understand it any better understanding than I do. One thing, however, has become perfectly clear to me over the past 27 years at Hope after having offered the invitation to people to come forward so I can wash their feet. That is that people much prefer coming forward to receive the body and blood of Christ and clearly do not have any interest in having their feet washed.

Their reluctance to coming forward is no mystery to me. In fact, I wonder why those who do come for the feet washing do so. Is it just out of compassion for me as the pastor, to avoid embarrassment?

In fact, I wonder about the ceremony itself. It is obviously a "symbolic" ceremony, but when we do it the symbolic values of it seems to go unheeded. The ceremony could quite easily be carried out totally apart from a worship service, and certainly apart from the context of the Lord's Supper or even Maundy Thursday altogether. After all, John himself didn't see any need to mention the nature of the meal they were celebrating that night at sundown. In John's gospel the event is actually a "pre-Passover" meal he says they shared "before the festival of the Passover" (John 13:1). From his perspective it was not a Passover meal, as all three synoptic stories all seem to presuppose.

Don't misinterpret what I am saying,. I'm not against washing people's feet (at least not as much as nearly EVERYONE ELSE who came to worship on Maundy Thursday seem to be.) I just wonder whether continuing to offer people a chance to take part in a ceremony that they don't take part in is a good way to conduct a public worship service.

To state it differently, what would it be like if, when the time came for people to come forward to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion, everyone decided to stay put instead of coming forward? How would we make sense out of continuing to celebrate Holy Communion? Would we keep offering it?

There are two sad implications coming out of our current practice of offering to wash people's feet. First, the lack of participation negates the very message Jesus was trying to get across in the original context. If no one is willing to even allow their pastor to wash their feet, a rather passive, non-labor intensive action, then how can we believe that they are more willing to do the harder part of what Jesus was demonstrating by this action, i.e., to keep the "New Commandment" he gave? Actually can we even call the "New Commandment" a "commandment" if no one actually obeys it? Like the old question "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make any sound?"

The other sad implication of continuing to offer unwelcome invitations for feet washing is that it diverts attention away from the one part of the Maundy Thursday story that we actually DO take seriously, the Lord's Supper. That part of the Event of Maundy Thursday gets more-or-less relegated to the "Let's get this long service over" portion to the evening instead of serving as the climax of that sacred hour.

How different we might feel like at our Maundy Thursday celebrations if, instead of doing something no one wants to do, we offered people a whole, real meal with real food, and then brought it to the high point of "re-membering" the new covenant by sharing significant pieces of bread and real cups of wine and giving people enough time to eat, drink, and then reflect on the meaning of THAT, as I am sure those bewildered disciples must have done. I wonder whether the "sleepiness" of the disciples might have been caused by what they had just experienced, and not just by the busy-ness of the day.

Something important happened that night at sundown. Yes, Jesus gave a new commandment to his followers, and we would do well to focus long and hard on how good a job we do on keeping that, although I wonder whether the best time to talk about that is when the vast majority of the congregation isn't even present. But the other thing that happened is that these disciples who gathered there that night left that upper room much different from the way they began the evening. By eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ at that supper at sundown they were transformed into the very Body of Christ themselves for the sake of the world. They became what they ate (and drank) and the world has never been the same since.