Leave it to Jesus to simultaneously raise and lower the bar. What do I mean by that?

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1 Text: John 13:1-17, 31b-35 & Luke 22:24-48 Date: April 2, 2015 (Holy Thursday) Title: A World Worth Saving > For the Sake of Love Theme: Jesus shows us what a life of love means, both in the universal and the particular. Leave it to Jesus to simultaneously raise and lower the bar. What do I mean by that? Well, the traditional name for this night Maundy Thursday comes from the Latin mandatum novum meaning new commandment So that should tell you something about what we aim to celebrate tonight: the new commandment that we should love each other as he has loved us He interprets the other commandments, but this is the first and only one he gives: Love one another as I have loved you I doubt the disciples realized it at the time, but in those eight words, Jesus issued an incredible challenge He was raising the bar How could we possibly love another human being as much as someone willing to die on a cross for them? Ponder that for a moment. What we preach is that Jesus died on the cross not just for them, but for the whole world. To John, the gospel writer, this is Jesus mission The reason he came into the world was the cross This is his hour the moment of truth when the world would be saved through him that s how our reading starts Jesus knew that his hour had come As incredible as it seems, I would willing to wager that most of us can think of at least one other person in this world for whom we might be willing to die But I guarantee that if someone asked me, would you be willing to die for someone you don t know? I d struggle with that. And I imagine you would too. 1

2 So Jesus has raised the bar. He s raised it beyond loving individuals Mom, Dad, my wife, my kids to loving humanity as the whole. This is what it means to be like God to love all people. Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, reminds us that God sends rain on the just and unjust Those who want to be like God need to learn to love humanity despite our ugliness Despite our sin and orneriness Sometimes despite even a lack of the most common decency, kindness or fairness Still, Jesus says, This is who you need to be: Love one another as I have loved you We are ok most of the time with loving when one another means people we are close to And clearly, even Jesus had special relationships with individuals Think about his connection with Peter, James, and John leaders among the apostles Or his ties to Mary, Martha and Lazarus Jesus wept outside Lazarus tomb! Or think about how, at the cross, Jesus commended his mother into the care of someone only known as the disciple whom Jesus loved Jesus knew how to love individuals But I think his love for individuals flowed first from his love for ALL people He was able to love from the universal to the particular We are exactly the opposite We can love the people close to us very well (though it s not always easy) But we struggle to carry that love into a broader context We don t know how to move from the particular to the universal To people who annoy us, who mistreat us, who are at odds with us When we try to go beyond our inner circle of friends and family certainly when we move outside the walls of the church we have trouble picturing what love means Elie Wiesel, the Jewish scholar, Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, said this: the opposite of love is not hate, it s indifference. 2

3 That s where we often end up when we try to move from the particular to the universal stuck in a fog of indifference We can read about what s happening around the world, we can see it on TV, but it doesn t affect us And maybe it shouldn t I suppose if we let what we see every day affect us, we d be unable to function I remember about 10 or 15 years ago, I went through a period of cable news addiction I imagine some of you know what I m talking about I watched all the time My mental health definitely suffered as a result. Stephanie finally told me to turn it off. It s hard to be concerned about everything and everyone everywhere all the time Indifference is a kind of protective mechanism that keeps us sane And yet Jesus says, reach higher, care more: love one another as I have loved you Some might argue that he never meant this to extend beyond the local Christian community that Jesus here was speaking as one man to his friends But to me, that makes no sense If Jesus is the Savior of the World, then somehow that means his followers are also called to be part of what he s doing to love everyone, and to want to see everyone know that God loves them So how do we bridge the divide? How do we enlarge our hearts so that we can love not only those we know, but even people we don t even people we don t want to know? **Jesus has two suggestions: try a towel and a basin.** To wash feet was the job of a servant and not just any servant, but a non-jewish servant. One Jew could not ask another Jew to do this. It was too demeaning. 3

4 And yet Jesus went to every single one of his disciples and washed their feet presumably even the feet of Judas, who would betray him. Afterward he told them: No servant is above the master. In other words, If I ve been willing to do this to lower myself to this don t ever think that anything you do out of love for another is beneath you. It s not. There s nothing beneath you. Somehow, Jesus has succeeded in lowering and raising the bar at the same time. The disciples needed to hear this message. Luke reports that even at the Last Supper, they argued about who was the greatest. Jesus just shakes his head. So this is how we learn to love not only the people closest to us, but even the unlovable, those whom we reject. We commit to serving them We remember that we are not above serving them All the disciples were flawed Judas betrayed Jesus for money Peter disappointed Jesus with his failures of faith James and John frustrated Jesus with their out-of-control tempers The beauty of the footwashing is this: You cannot hold another person s feet in your hands and NOT think about the heart and soul connected to those feet And so you learn in that moment, not only to love Judas, or Peter, or John But you begin to learn to love all those like them: The betrayers The deniers The irritated and irritable 4

5 I ve been watching the news out of Indiana this week And I m wondering: what if those photographers who oppose gay marriage were to go ahead and take pictures And what if those pictures were the best pictures this couple had ever seen? Wouldn t that be closer to what Jesus was getting at by washing the disciples feet? He showed us what a life of love means not only in the universal but in the particular It s a life of love in action, a life of humble service to others Jesus has simultaneously raised and lowered the bar But in so doing, he s given us the space to walk as he walked Let s go forth to do that tonight. Amen. By Joe Monahan, Medford UMC, Medford NJ 5