3/24/16
I like to eat in the car. That is, I like to eat while I’m driving from one place to another. (Does anyone else share that habit? We’re a small minority: it does make for a grimier car.) I like to do this because it saves time: I don’t have to stop and eat somewhere: I’m multi-tasking. But I also like the feeling that I’m saving time. I congratulate myself that I’m saving time (I’m confessing something here.)
This comes from my childhood. In my family, we usually ate pretty fast: we never dawdled over meals (that’s how we saw it, as dawdling.) We enjoyed eating together, but there was always the sense that mealtime was time taken off from the real business of living - whatever that happened to be for each of us at any given moment – that we all wanted to get back to, and sooner rather than later. (This attitude toward mealtime was reinforced by the fact that cooking, in the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class in mid-20th-century America, was probably the most boring cuisine in the history of world gastronomy.)
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I began to understand that, in human life, eating a meal is about more than just getting fueled up; that, in its way, it represents what actually is the real business of living. That’s what Jesus was teaching his disciples on the last night of his life, which we remember on this night.
This is Maundy Thursday. “Maundy” is a corruption in English of the Latin word “mandatum”, which means “commandment”. In the days before the Reformation,when the mass was spoken only in Latin, that word was heard every year on this day: “I give you a new commandment [mandatum novum] , that you love one another.”
But in actual practice, and thinking, Maundy Thursday has been about what the church has long considered to be concerned other commands of Jesus. In the same passage from the gospel of John that we just heard, Jesus says, regarding the footwashing: “I have set you an example, that you should also do as I have done to you”; and it’s been a long Christian tradition that Jesus was, here at the end, commanding his followers to a life of selfless service, one of the main themes of his ministry: Jesus washing his disciples’ feet was just the latest example. (And a particularly extreme one: footwashing was a task normally performed by a slave, which is why Peter reacts so strongly when he sees Jesus, his Lord, doing it.)
So for that reason – and also because the activity is such a relic – we tend to think that’s the point of Maundy Thursday. But, of course, there’s another command here as well. The act of washing the feet of one’s dinner companions was a ceremonial recognition that eating and drinking together is not just about getting fueled up: it’s about sharing the experience of what sustains life, and what gives us joy: of the goodness of God’s creation; and about the enormity of that, happening, right now. It is the oldest Christian tradition of all, as we heard in Paul’s words to the Corinthians, that Jesus commands us to eat and drink together in remembrance of the Last Supper: in the bread that he calls his body, in the wine that he calls his blood. He calls us to share in his very being: a command so important that we do it every week.When Jesus says, this bread is my body, this wine is my blood, he is speaking the truth that our life, at its core, is the life of God.
And that – in the infinite ways God lives it – is a life of love. The true commandment of Maundy Thursday is, in fact, the new commandment Jesus gives us: that we love one another; and, as he said, that we do it as he loved his disciples. We do it in serving one another, without any thought of self. We do it in rejoicing with each other in the goodness of God’s creation, and in thankfulness at all of God’s great, infinite gifts to us. Let us – every day – remember, and live by, this new commandment. Thanks be to God.
I like to eat in the car. That is, I like to eat while I’m driving from one place to another. (Does anyone else share that habit? We’re a small minority: it does make for a grimier car.) I like to do this because it saves time: I don’t have to stop and eat somewhere: I’m multi-tasking. But I also like the feeling that I’m saving time. I congratulate myself that I’m saving time (I’m confessing something here.)
This comes from my childhood. In my family, we usually ate pretty fast: we never dawdled over meals (that’s how we saw it, as dawdling.) We enjoyed eating together, but there was always the sense that mealtime was time taken off from the real business of living - whatever that happened to be for each of us at any given moment – that we all wanted to get back to, and sooner rather than later. (This attitude toward mealtime was reinforced by the fact that cooking, in the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle class in mid-20th-century America, was probably the most boring cuisine in the history of world gastronomy.)
It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I began to understand that, in human life, eating a meal is about more than just getting fueled up; that, in its way, it represents what actually is the real business of living. That’s what Jesus was teaching his disciples on the last night of his life, which we remember on this night.
This is Maundy Thursday. “Maundy” is a corruption in English of the Latin word “mandatum”, which means “commandment”. In the days before the Reformation,when the mass was spoken only in Latin, that word was heard every year on this day: “I give you a new commandment [mandatum novum] , that you love one another.”
But in actual practice, and thinking, Maundy Thursday has been about what the church has long considered to be concerned other commands of Jesus. In the same passage from the gospel of John that we just heard, Jesus says, regarding the footwashing: “I have set you an example, that you should also do as I have done to you”; and it’s been a long Christian tradition that Jesus was, here at the end, commanding his followers to a life of selfless service, one of the main themes of his ministry: Jesus washing his disciples’ feet was just the latest example. (And a particularly extreme one: footwashing was a task normally performed by a slave, which is why Peter reacts so strongly when he sees Jesus, his Lord, doing it.)
So for that reason – and also because the activity is such a relic – we tend to think that’s the point of Maundy Thursday. But, of course, there’s another command here as well. The act of washing the feet of one’s dinner companions was a ceremonial recognition that eating and drinking together is not just about getting fueled up: it’s about sharing the experience of what sustains life, and what gives us joy: of the goodness of God’s creation; and about the enormity of that, happening, right now. It is the oldest Christian tradition of all, as we heard in Paul’s words to the Corinthians, that Jesus commands us to eat and drink together in remembrance of the Last Supper: in the bread that he calls his body, in the wine that he calls his blood. He calls us to share in his very being: a command so important that we do it every week.When Jesus says, this bread is my body, this wine is my blood, he is speaking the truth that our life, at its core, is the life of God.
And that – in the infinite ways God lives it – is a life of love. The true commandment of Maundy Thursday is, in fact, the new commandment Jesus gives us: that we love one another; and, as he said, that we do it as he loved his disciples. We do it in serving one another, without any thought of self. We do it in rejoicing with each other in the goodness of God’s creation, and in thankfulness at all of God’s great, infinite gifts to us. Let us – every day – remember, and live by, this new commandment. Thanks be to God.