Maundy Thursday

John 13.1-17, 31b-35

With thanks to the late Anthony de Mello, Jesuit Priest and mystic and his book 'Awareness', for the inspiration for this and for the story (adapted)

"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. As I have loved you, you also should love one another."

This sentence from today's gospel reading is a golden thread that reaches through all the events of Holy Week and Easter. This time, these last days and hours of Jesus's life, is a time packed with so much action, a time of high drama, of grief and sorrow, betrayal, torture, murder and death; of fear and wonder and joy and resurrection. 'Heights and depths beyond description',  to quote words from a well known hymn.

And that golden thread of love reaches back to the dawn of creation and forward to this present day. Oh, that we could be aware of it. Oh, that we could simply see it and then maybe understand it. Then all our problems would be as nothing.

But we get stuck and we don't see; and we don't understand. Just as Peter couldn't see what was happening and didn't understand. And Jesus said to him "....later you will understand". Maybe, later, we will understand too.

You see, we can come away from today with the idea that love is about acts of service, love is about sharing bread and wine, love is about sticking together. And that's where we get stuck. We are bewildered by all these things going on in the lives of Jesus and his disciples and we get stuck there. Peter got stuck because what Jesus was doing was unthinkable.  All he'd been taught, all he'd learned in his religion and in his culture bumped up against this action of Jesus washing his feet. And it was his beliefs, his opinions, his ideas and values that blinded him to the love present there, the love that was always present and always would be present.

And we get stuck because we can't understand Jesus either. All that we learn and are taught in this world, all our ideas and beliefs and opinions, and theology, stop us seeing and hearing Jesus; stop us seeing and hearing love.

And so we find ourselves asking how Jesus can say "love your enemies", "pray for those who persecute you," "if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other to him also". How can he wash the feet of the man who was going to betray him? How can he pray, as he's being nailed to the cross, "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing?" How can Jesus do and say these things? And even worse, how can he ask us to say and do the same?

Well, it's because what Jesus means by love isn't the same as what we might mean by love.

The difference between Jesus and us is that Jesus sees people beyond any thoughts, feelings, ideas, opinions and beliefs he might have about them. His love, the love he asks us to have, he casts on the good and bad alike, equally, as the sun shines on good and bad alike. And that's a problem for us too isn't it?

What we call love for someone is shaped, by our thoughts, feelings, ideas, opinions and beliefs about them. And we get attached to those thought, feelings and ideas, stuck fast to them. Its that attachment we call love. It's that that we love, not the person their self.

Let me explain what I mean if I can. It's not easy. A baby is born into the world and all it gets to know about the world is shaped by, first the child's parents, then its teachers, then relatives and friends and employers and colleagues and on and on in its life. So as the child grows up he or she is filled with all sorts of ideas and opinions and beliefs and values that it thinks are its own, but are really other peoples. We call that "education"!

And when the child grows up to be a man he's in the pub one evening enjoying a drink with a friend after work, and the friend asks him, "Are you voting Conservative in the election on 7th May?" "Oh no," he says, "I'm voting Labour. My father voted Labour, my grandfather voted Labour and my great grandfather voted Labour. So I'm voting Labour."

"That's stupid logic", says his friend. "If your father was a horse thief and your grandfather was a horse thief and your great grandfather was a horse thief, would that make you a horse thief?" "Oh no", he says, "then I'd be Conservative."

But you'll say, all these ideas and beliefs and values I've taken on are what make me, me. These are my life. Well no, actually. What is truly you, the you made in the image of God lies beyond or beneath all of that.

And that's why Jesus could say "Greater love has no man than this, that he lays down his life for his friend." That quotation isn't about going to war to fight for your country or stopping a bullet for your friend. It's about dying to, dropping your attachment to all your ideas, thoughts, beliefs, values and opinions about your friend so that you can truly love your friend.

That's the 'life' Jesus says you've got to lose so that you can gain life. When you drop all your attachments to your beliefs and opinions about someone then you truly love them and in truly loving them that's when you truly live, that's when you are raised to eternal life.

When you drop these attachments, when you die to this stuff, these ideas, opinions, beliefs about yourself and others, is when you begin to bear fruit, the fruit of love.

And that's what Jesus meant when he said to Peter, "....you will understand." And I have a suspicion that he finally began to understand when the cock crew.

And when you do see, finally; when you do understand how Jesus could wash the feet of his disciples or at least begin to see, that's when Jesus begins to make sense. That's when all he did and said begins to make sense. And you see then too that this sense that it's making is THE Truth and truth not just for Christians but for Moslems, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and every person and religion in the world. because this Truth is maybe the only truth; the Truth of the love of God, the golden thread reaching back to the dawn of creation and out into eternity and eternal life.

And, one last thing, notice the word 'should'; "As I have loved you, you also should love one another." You can't make yourself love like Jesus loved, you have to die into it, just as a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies so that it bears much fruit
.

"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. As I have loved you, you also should love one another."