Good Shepherd United Church of Christ

Is There Love among You?            Gospel of John  13:1-17, 31-35
April 1, 2010, Maundy Thursday
Metairie, LA

On the night before the Passover celebration, we hear from the Gospel of John, Jesus is a man of downward mobility.  He literally stoops to wash the feet of his disciples.  It's an action of self-humbling.  It's the action of a servant from the One who has just been declared the King by the crowds on Palm Sunday.  They greeted him as the new David, come to restore the fortunes of the nation of Israel.

It is also the action of downward mobility performed by Mary of Bethany on Jesus' own feet only days before as her act of homage.  So Jesus takes the lowest place in the room when he washes disciples' feet;  he adopts the position of a woman, a servant.

And no wonder they object, his disciples.  They object strenuously to Jesus' action of downward mobility.  The disciples are planning on a Messiah who lifts them all up and they are not at all anticipating the manner of Jesus' lifting up, his glorification.  He will glorify his Father by being lifted up on a tree.  They were thinking a throne of upward mobility, not the cross of downward mobility.

When he bends down to wash their feet, Jesus displays himself as the humble Lord to teach them how they are to treat one another.  They are to love one another as he has loved them.  They are to love one another by serving one another.  That is the new commandment.

The new commandment, "love one another", is an activity not a list of words posted somewhere.  The old commandments still stand but they are insufficient.  The new commandment, "love as a servant, as I have loved you", is the enactment and fulfillment of all the old commandments.  Jesus illustrates the path of downward mobility.

If you stay with him on his journey through Holy Week, you will be travelling even farther down this path.

Before the Passover Supper he stoops to wash disciples' feet.  On Good Friday, even his friends will desert him as he prays in Gethsemane.  His lonely walk takes him to Golgotha and then in the words of the ancient creed, after his body is laid in the tomb, he descends into hell.  And in all this he glorifies God.

Only in the Gospel of John do we hear this version of the events before Passover, the act of foot washing.  And seldom do we practise this ritual- we are more inclined to practise communion in remembrance of Passover.  Like the first disciples, we are disinclined to the path of downward mobility, which goes ever so much against the grain of our national values of upward striving.

Jesus' action is a correction to our tendency to imagine that the path to glorification is to be upwardly mobile.  In the case of the church, we think wrongly if we imagine that a 5000 pipe organ is any better than a piano.  That's irrelevant to glorifying God.  What counts is:  do we perform the love-activity?  Do we stoop to serve?

Recently, there have been reports of abuse of deaf-children by a priest.  And reports of failed systems to respond to abused children in Germany.  People are rightly outraged that a Christian system as rich and powerful and sophisticated as the Catholic Church could fail so abjectly to protect the treasure of their children.

Let us not use this occasion to deride Catholics.  Let us rather use this occasion to alert us to our own failures to keep the Jesus mandate, "love one another", and our won failures to walk with him the downwardly mobile path.

Let us use this occasion to mourn and repent and to run quickly for purification.  On Maudy Thursday we share a communion meal and we are nourished to companion the least and the lost among us.  On Good Friday we will gather to join Jesus on his journey to the cross.  This pathway will strengthen our resolve to face our own failures to obey the love mandate.  On Holy Saturday some of us will walk a labyrinth remembering Jesus' descent into hell.  This walk serves to comfort all who walk through a hellish circumstances.  All this to glorify God, the enactment of downward mobility.

Do we know what he has done for us?   For us and for our salvation he took that path of downward mobility and now, there is nowhere we can go that God has not gone before us.  There is no circumstance, no matter how degrading, how lonely, how fearsome, how desolate, where God is absent.

See how Christ Jesus loves his disciples and may we, his little children, be known as those who love without measure, as he commands.

Amen.