Where We Meet God - 3-part Maundy Thursday Sermon - Service, Communion, and Prayer
Jesus Serves His Disciples
It is an absolutely astounding thing that Jesus would wash His disciples’ feet. Just imagine our discomfort with feet, having someone touch our feet or someone else washing our feet after a hard day, and times that by tenfold. The disciples’ feet would have been disgusting to us. They walked for long hours in the heat with open-toed sandals, in the dust, mud, and animal droppings that littered the road. The task of washing feet was usually for the servants or maybe the person themselves if they were not of a high enough station. You can understand why Peter didn’t want Jesus to take on this seemingly demeaning role - He would rather lift Jesus up.
Yet, Jesus, the Son of God, the King of the Universe, the creator of all, the Lord of the Heavenly host, He stoops down and washes their feet, getting His hand dirty with everything they have stepped in over the day. Why would someone so grand stoop down so low?
Well, Jesus is trying to show us that the truly mighty one does just this. God has always been stooping down trying to wash the filth from our feet and lives. At creation, He breathed His breath into mud to create life in us. After the garden, He came to us in the wilderness - where we toiled, sweat, and bled. He saved a people in Egypt who were persecuted and reviled. He served and lifted up a people that too often rebelled against Him. He was born as a little baby among us in a barn. He was baptized so that we too, might be washed and invited into His perfection. He served us in life. He died for us so that we might be washed clean in His blood. God has always been stooping down to wash our feet.
We are meant to do the same thing. We were never meant to Lord it over anyone - we were meant to be like our servant king. Our kingship, our dominion, our strength was always to stoop down and wash the other, or lift them up. We show our true strength by lowering ourselves and yet knowing in the act that we are never made weaker or lower - but rather we use our strength and Lordship to lift another with us.
Too often we don’t believe in our own strength enough to do this. We feel like we have to fight for it or to prove it. Too often we don’t believe in God’s love enough to know that He is continually lifting us up and we are even more loved when we act like him. We need to know and trust that we are special in God’s plan and that He loves us, so that we can have the strength and courage to serve like Him. God must be our master because then we can be as great as our master.
At the same exact time, we too often don’t let God wash our feet from the daily filth we have gained. We can too easily respond like Peter, “You will never wash my feet”. Yet, we get the same response from Jesus, “Then you have no share of me”. Most of us have been baptized, so we have been washed, but we know full well that every day we act in ways that aren’t like Jesus, or we refuse to act, or we come in contact with or consume things that aren’t good for us, we know that we step in it every day, and that often we don’t even realize it. We need Jesus to wash our feet. We need to be freed from the muck of the day so that we might join with Jesus. Repentance has a huge part in this because that is how we turn away from the filth and turn to God to be made clean, but being washed is also recognizing the Holy Spirit’s presence, turning to the Father in prayer, and seeing how Jesus is still kneeling to serve us.
Jesus Gives Us His Body and Blood
Jesus gives us his body and blood. Before Jesus dies, before His body is broken under the lashes, the weight of the cross, and the burst heart and collapsed lungs on the cross, before Jesus’ blood is shed through the whips, the thorny crown, the pierced hands and feet, and the spear stabbed in His side, Jesus sits down with His friends and serves them a meal. As He does so, he breaks the bread and tells us that this is His body which is broken for us, and He gives us a cup of wine telling us that this is His blood which is shed for us. This means so much. In a sense, He is warning them of what is to come, as He has already done 3 times, but He is also showing them why - He is doing it all for us. Jesus knows full well the kind of death He will endure and He is willingly approaching it - why? For us. So that we might be filled, so that we might be saved, so that we might live in a new promised hope of an intimate relationship with God.
We must also remember that the Lord of time and space is the one saying this. This IS my body which is broken, this IS my blood which is shed. This is not about some future moment for the disciples or some past moment for us, this is about this present moment when Jesus transcends time and space and so invites us to come to His Passover, we are also brought kneeling before the cross, we are watching as He is mocked, whipped and condemned at that mockery of a trial. We see as Jesus is sat on the judgment seat on Pilate's steps and lifted up on His throne of wood. You see in this simple moment of communion, something so mysterious and profound is happening that it transcends our normal human experience and allows us to enter into God’s experience. We are brought to these amazing holy moments, we are given something holy and so we become holy too.
Communion is the greatest act any human can participate in. It is a miracle beyond our comprehension. It is true communion, not just with everyone sitting here with us in this church, but it is communion with God as He feeds us with His sacrificed life, with the disciples at Passover, with those before the cross and as every moment of communion draw us together in those moments we also commune with every disciple who has ever gone before us and who will ever live.
As Jesus transforms this bread and wine to give us His body and blood, He is feeding us with His very life. His life is eternal, infinite, timeless, and is life itself. The power and mystery of such a life living in us, nourishing us, and strengthening us, is beyond our imagination. We would do well to dwell on such an amazing mystery.
Jesus Prays
Jesus had given them everything. He walked in service to them. He knelt down and washed their feet. He gave them His body and His blood. Now, He was preparing Himself for His ultimate sacrifice as He would suffer immensely in mind, body, spirit, and more. He wrestled with God as we all do, but He never wrestled to win, He wrestled with God in search of another way. Sometimes there is another way, we don’t always have to suffer or sacrifice to walk with God and so sometimes God will deliver us, though sometimes we end up choosing that option through our lack of courage, faith, and prayer - remember Moses saved all of Israel from death and suffering through His intercession.
However, this is not one of those moments. As much as Jesus, in all of His humanness, didn’t want to suffer and die, He knew this was the only way to save humanity, to save those God had given Him. Jesus knew this was the only way for Him to become the tree of eternal life, where people might look and find new life. Jesus knew this was the only way to overcome all sin and reclaim all life. He would give up an eternal and pure life that was greater than all others put together so that He could pay off our debt and buy us back from the grave, from the great deceiver's grip. Sometimes, the only way to show and prove a godly love is to make a godly sacrifice.
Jesus finds strength and courage from prayer. We even hear that the angels supported him in this as he became even more fervent and blood-like sweat dripped from His face. He is this diligent about prayer because he knows what He is going to face and He knows that He will need this prayer to guide Him through the next day. Remember, often through Jesus’ life, He stepped away to pray and connect with God. He knew as important as His work was and as much as He was capable of that prayer as a time of connecting with God had to be central to it or else all this work was nothing.
If Jesus Himself needs that moment of connection with God and that time of purposeful commitment then we all do. We all need prayer to support our every moment, to uphold us, strengthen us, and make our work meaningful and effective. You might not realize how true this is, but only start trying to support everything with prayer and you will begin to see the difference it makes. It’s not surprising then that Jesus is being very diligent in reminding His disciples to pray too. Sure, Jesus is going to go through the worst of it, but every one of His disciples is going to be put to the test. They might not be put on trial like Jesus, but they are in other ways, just as everyone else is too. Jesus knows that they need God’s strength to withstand it. Jesus knows that Satan is after every one of them. We will see them fail too as they respond with violence, as they run away, as they hide, as Peter denies Jesus, and as they watch on from a distance as Jesus suffers and dies, who knows what prayer would have done in this time - but we know it would have helped - as we know it helped Jesus. Let us pray that we might be saved from the time of trial, but if we do fall into the trap that we might be delivered from evil. Let us pray that we might have the strength and courage of Jesus to follow God’s will and live out His love through the joys and the struggles. AMEN
