Sermon: Maundy Thursday

Preacher:

Date:

Thursday 28th March 2013

Service:

Eucharist

Tonight is a time of few words. In the washing of feet, the breaking of bread and the outpouring of wine, we see the breadth and depth of God’s love for us.  In what we touch, taste and enact, we are given a model for how we are to love.

Here, is love: embodied, enacted, felt, tasted, heard and seen.

Tonight love is: remembered in liberation, service and sacrifice.

It is love that stills our fears and satisfies our longings, which bears sorrows and shares joys.  

 

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

 

Human beings are fragile.  Our hearts are easily broken and our hopes frustrated.  We also have a tremendous potential to act with compassion; yet become brittle and defensive.  Our vulnerability is our greatest gift, with its capacity for empathy, and service of the other. It is also, apart from God’s assurance, our greatest weakness.

We build walls of pride and selfishness, of certainty and prejudice. We slide into patterns of thought, speech and action which despise, mistrust and undermine.  Then, in the presence of Love, our soul draws back; we see ourselves as unworthy or inadequate; guilty of dust and sin. 

 

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack’d anything.

 

God knows us fully.  He knows our capacity to wound and be wounded; to be self-reliant and self-serving.  He knows our lack: of assurance, of trust, of faithfulness; he knows too our deepest desires: for healing, for hope, for purpose.  We long for what we lack: to  be fully who we’re called to be. God reaches out to us and calls forth honesty about our human condition.

 

‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here.’

Love said, ‘you shall be he.’

I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,

I cannot look on Thee.’

 

Often our own self-perception creates a barrier.  Our flaws re-direct our gaze away from love; we both long for and resist that refining, intense love. As Peter experiences so keenly, pride gets in the way, frustrating our response to love poured out for us in humble service 

 

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

‘Who made the eyes but I?’

 

We are welcomed, met with a tender touch and perceptive smile. We are reminded that we are made in the image of God and are full of potential.

‘Truth Lord; but I have marr’d them; let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.’

‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’

 

We are reminded that our shame and blame are born for us by the servant king.  The body of Christ is broken for the world.  Tonight we touch, and taste and see what love looks like; how it transforms us and reverses the status quo. 

When human weakness and vulnerability can lead us to be defensive, angry, selfish and arrogant, we see an alternative.  God’s love is the first and final word.  Our capacity for generosity, acceptance, forgiveness and compassion is expanded as we receive those gifts of love.

‘My dear, then I will serve.’

‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

So I did sit and eat.

Jesus does not only point us to actions – acts of peace, of shared food or acts of kindness.  He embodies God’s love and forgiveness in the midst of betrayal, humiliation, suffering and death.  The cost of that love serves as a challenge to us – when we condemn, or judge or disappoint. The cost of that love stands in solidarity with us – when we are condemned, or judged or disappointed.

Love bade me welcome.

There is nothing manipulative or coercive about such love. Its strength is in humility. When Jesus breaks bread and shares the cup of wine, he points to his own self-giving love. He enables our communion with God to be renewed as we become one body. As he washes his disciples’ feet he enacts generous, compassionate service.  He restores human dignity.

‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’

Tonight, as we watch and wait, we find ourselves drawn ever more deeply into the tragic, painful, destructive contingencies of our own world.  Yet as we watch and wait, we are with the one who bears the pain and cost  in love, and sets in motion a momentous movement of our salvation, of freedom and justice and reconciliation.  And we leave this place tonight with an imprint on our hearts and minds of divinely inspired sacrificial lifestyle. 

‘Who made the eyes but I?’

Here is a place where we bring our whole selves; here is the place of acceptance, forgiveness and transformation; here we are commanded to remember and imitate that love.

Love bade me welcome... quick-eyed Love... Drew nearer to me

There is no place where God’s love is not. Love is. The beginning; the end.