Maundy Thursday sermon
Apr 09, 2009
Dr. Jana Strukova
JOHN 13: 1-17
As I was gathering my thoughts in reflection on this passage, one immediate idea came to my mind: How peaceful and ordinary the evening of table fellowship among Jesus and his disciples. The following day will be filled with the events that bring confusion, fear, pain, and ultimately death.
Jesus Christ will be crucified on the cross in order to fulfill the redemptive plan of the Trinitarian God for fallen humanity. And yet, this night-before the cosmic drama between God and evil-unfolds in such a serene and composed way. Jesus knows that his bodily time on Earth has been fulfilled and that he is going to God the Father. Jesus Christ knows about his imminent death-and what does he do? On the night before his death, Jesus gets up from the table, takes off his outer robe, ties a towel around himself and begins to wash his disciples' feet.
The nearing reality of violence, hassle, and suffering on the cross is juxtaposed with peaceful and banal rhythms of life such as eating a meal with disciples, talking, and washing their feet. The ordinary rhythms of life that precede, accompany, and follow death contrast death with life. As such they bring out the pain and the absurdity of death to full light. Horror of Christ's crucifixion, too, is heightened by the tranquil pace of the evening that precedes it.
My friend recalls a time when her mother passed away when she herself was only a teenager. She remembers going to a hospital to visit her mother only to find an empty bed after her mom lost her battle with cancer that morning. Returning back to a farmhouse where she, her father, and other siblings lived, my friend was struck by the picture she saw: Other women in the family were peeling potatoes and vegetables, making a soup for lunch. Seeing this routine lunch preparation in contrast to her mother's death and her own personal pain, my friend screamed inside her: "How can you? My mom has just died. How can you be making a soup!"
Her story reminded me of my own feelings. When my family laid a family member to his eternal rest, the sun was brightly shining on a clear blue sky. I looked at it and screamed inside me: "How dare you, to shine on the sky." The everyday routines of life or the everyday beauty of nature exposes the torpor which death imposes on living human beings. At the tragedy of death, we want everything to stop. The image of death threatens human spirit by paralyzing its sustaining beats such as the ability to feel, to move, to speak, or to think.
The night before his own death, Jesus Christ leaves his disciples life-preserving and life-sustaining practices. He also leaves our faith communities with spiritual and liturgical rhythms that revive human spirit from paralysis, and prompt believers to celebrate eternal life in Christ. Our text for today talks about washing feet. This particular spiritual practice and others are long standing legacies of Christ's actions that are made alive, remembered, and invoked through our communal participation in them. Such spiritual practices bind Christians into a distinctive body and a distinctive way of life.
Through spiritual practices, Christ shapes his followers into a distinctive body by reconfiguring their physical bodies. That is to say, a person cannot change his or her mental posture or attitude fully without changing one's physical posture as well. A straight posture with a chin up can reflect a confident attitude; head or eyes down can reflect the attitude of humility and respect. Body language is a powerful communicator of the values and attitudes one holds.
Through washing their feet, Jesus Christ reconfigures the bodies of the disciples. When his hands wash the feet of Peter, it confuses his friend who was used to kissing and bowing at the feet of the one he saw as the Messiah. After Peter initially refuses to have his feet washed, Jesus tells him: "Unless I wash you, you have no share with me." Unless Peter allows himself (both mentally and physically) to place his feet into Christ's hands, he is not able to share in Christ's body. For Peter, allowing his feet to be washed by Jesus Christ implies the surrender of cultural patterns of thinking and doing. Having his feet washed by Christ requires that Peter submits to Christ's will despite the cultural norms. We, too, humbly surrender to the will of our Lord when we allow our bodies to be reconfigured.
When we participate in the spiritual practices or sacraments, we submit ourselves to the playful work of the Holy Spirit who changes our physical and spiritual parameters. We sit, we stand, we kneel, we fold our hands in response to the Word of God. The Word of God orchestrates our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical movements. In doing so, it creates spaces for inviting others, whether neighbors or strangers, to come in.
Creating spaces for others-whether in the pew, in our neighborhoods, or in our hearts-is a result of our submission to the work of shaping by the Trinitarian God. Our ability to create spaces for others is a result of God closing spaces between God and us first. The space, the gap between divine and human is closed by Christ reconfiguring his body first-by offering it in service to disciples during the washing of the feet, and ultimately placing his own body as a target of mockery and killing on the cross. In this act of Christ's own bodily reconfiguration, Christ showed us how to continue to bridge the gaps and divisions among human beings.
The mandate of Easter is about changing our postures. The cruciform posture that we Christians are called to follow lies at the heart of our Christian identity. And the heart of our Christian identity can pulse with vitality and fidelity only insofar as it is sustained by the body and its rhythms. These rhythms stretch, transform, and incorporate us into the very body of Christ.
After washing his disciples' feet, Jesus returns to the table and asks his disciples: "Do you know what have I 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." In washing his disciples' feet, Jesus Christ does more than just setting the example of servanthood. Jesus Christ exchanges his bodylines with the disciples. In other words, Christ marks disciples as his own, as human beings who share of Christ's own holy and eternal being.
This wonderful exchange as Martin Luther calls it, during which Christ exchanges his purity and innocence for the stains of human sin, culminates on the cross. Christ's act of giving his own body to us calls Christian believers to a task. How do we preserve and pass this gift on-in what shape, in what beat, and in what story?
Christ's body becomes the body of faith, the body of voice, the body of cross and grace, and ultimately the body of eternal life. It is through Scripture, sacraments, and spiritual practices that we celebrate, embody, and pass on our new cleansed body and life in Christ. In doing so, we help communities, families, and individuals to withstand the paralyzing effects of death because we bind Christ's everlasting life into the body and its sustaining beats.
When we come to the cross tomorrow or in the future, death will not be able to paralyze us because Christ handed over his body to us, and the rhythms of faith that carry Christ's Spirit in us through eternity.
AMEN.
