Saint Mark's Church

There is nothing in the Christian year like the Sacred Triduum, the three high liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Great Vigil of Easter, which, the church teaches, are really parts of one single liturgy, into which we've embarked. The Triduum doesn't just recall but engages us in the depth of Jesus’ experience in his last days and his first risen day. I've taken friends to parts of the Triduum at Anglo-Catholic Churches and even those people whose normal experience of church is diametrically opposite this liturgy - even the lowest of the low-church folks, always concerned about not going overboard - even they have tended to be floored by emotion, so moving are these days when they're done right. There is nothing like the Triduum, from the things God does to our hearts in these liturgies, to the things God engraves in our minds.

Today Jesus engraves in us the 'maundy,' meaning 'mandate', 'maundy' being a Middle English word derived from the Latin 'mandatum': commandment, rule. Today we accept anew and celebrate the new mandate of Jesus, the New Commandment, given just before his death. Jesus tells his disciples, after washing their feet: "love one another as I have loved you." Love one another as I have loved you. It fits that this 'mandate' and maid-like, servant-like washing of feet occurr during the sharing of a meal, the first Communion. It makes sense, because in the history of salvation, from the Passover meal described in our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures, to the altar from which we’ll receive communion today, a table establishes unity. A table is a place where you can't hide, but where diverse people sit down and eat the same things, becoming one, inside and out. This is just the setting Jesus chooses to make an example of love in an unloving, imperialist world ('love during wartime'): love each other in a self-giving way; love each other in mutual service, not 'working the system' to get something out of it at someone else's expense. There's no emptier reward for love than crucifixion, hence the inescable altruism of Jesus' saying 'love as I love you.'

In Seminary many of us, especially foreign students, found ourselves far away from family on days traditionally associated with a family meal, such as on Christmas, Thanksgiving or Easter. So others who lived near the Seminary would invite us over to their homes. That was the case with me one Easter afternoon - I was invited by a friend to her family’s house in Virginia for a traditional Easter meal. They say Northern Virginia is technically the North, but this family was far enough below the southern suburbs of DC as to be identifiably Southern, and I'll leave it to your imagination what was there to be 'identified.' I loved it. As we drove to the old family homestead, not a colonial but a frontier-style house surrounded by beautiful rolling hills and farmland, my friend briefed me on some of the family dynamics I was about to see played out.

The elephant in the living room would be one of the younger, college-age cousins, who had recently gotten pregnant 'out of wedlock.' This had happened in her second year at one of those tiny, private Southern colleges where everyone knows your business and most definitely judges you about it. She was keeping the baby. Certainly the family knew this girl’s business, too, and they were uncomfortable with it. As we took our places at the table and were served, conversation began – and it all danced merrily around without touching down anywhere near this pregnant cousin. I was extensively grilled on my upbringing, education, family, interests, pets, and on and on; and the other family members boisterously caught up with one another, too. Not a word to the pregnant cousin. Finally, silence began to set in, as people ate. The silence loomed especially large over this woman, the one person to whom I hadn’t been introduced (a big deal in a Southern home), though I knew her name from my friend, and I’ll say it was “Annie.” After dinner, conversations become shorter and quieter than they had been before, and an awkward silence seemed to separate each sentence from the next. It was as though we’d delved into every possible subject of interest except the obvious.

Then, as older children sometimes do, the oldest cousin couldn't help but recognize what was wrong there and he, rather than the matriarch or patriarch of the family, jumped in and took action. “Annie,” he said, “you know, this is bittersweet and all, but it’s nothing my friends haven’t dealt with well, and the good part is that we know this kid’s gonna have an excellent Mom.”

Deeply ingrained unspoken rules prescribing what should and shouldn’t be discussed at that family's Easter Dinner table had been torn in two. In some ways it had to be this oldest cousin to have broached the subject so bravely and carefully, because within the structure of a traditional family, he had the credentials to say what he wanted to say. The pregnant cousin did not. For credentials, this guy had a wife and kids, he was the oldest of the cousins, he was a successful partner at the biggest local law firm. It shouldn't be this way, but the fact that he was male definitely had something to do with it. He used his unspoken social power in the family to express that this cousin was one of them, come what may. Annie smiled. One of the two grandmothers present asked her if she’d been thinking of baby names.

That got people thinking and talking in a more open, human way. It was a crucial barrier passed over into friendly territory, and possible for that family only because one of their (rightly or wrongly) highly esteemed members had made himself a servant of the least-esteemed. In other words, he girded up his loins and loved his cousin like Jesus would have loved her. That's the maundy, the mandate we celebrate today, the truth behind the symbolism of Jesus washing everyone’s feet. In authentic Christianity, the exalted are called to humble themselves completely, sparing none of the needs of those the world wants to call lowly. Make no mistake, there are always moments when you or I have social credibility, or money, or other forms of power, which someone else lacks. Those moments are opportunities to love each other as Christ loved us.

These, then are the implications of our simple mandate: no person is too strange, too new, too guilty, too disagreeable, too conservative, too liberal, to be served as one of us at our family table. But more than that, in fact it is the most cast off, the most misunderstood, the most sinful, the strangest, the most obscure, even the most offensive, the hardest to understand, whom we are blessed to do our best to serve. In such territory it bears remembering that Jesus loves as a close, though anonymous friend the man who nails him to the cross. That is a great part of the sadness of the cross which we'll encounter tomorrow. Jesus is killed by people he cares for as we care for our own parents, lovers, friends - though these people don't know him has he knows them (which is to say, as God knows them).

That same piercing love extends to us, and through grace alone we cultivate that almost absurdly resilient love toward each other. It is a love which extends to all, which never ends, to which we're called beyond defense, beyond all walls; a love which sings of day when all sound ends, when darkness falls - as it must. This is a love which follows us even when we don't trust it, when we run from it - because Jesus practices his own mandate, and as our own servant, never gives up on us.

Preached by Dcn. Paul Francke
Maundy Thursday, 2008
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia