The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
This night we find ourselves at a place in our Lenten Journey that is for some awkward and unbalancing. It is the night in which we live our liturgical drama in a way that challenges us to visit the story of Jesus and risk a bit of ourselves as Jesus has risked himself with us. Our Lenten journey is one that at its core is an opportunity to reflect on the deepest yearnings within us, that is the yearning to be connected with God intimately! Inviting God into the deepest parts of our beings, the broken parts of our beings, the parts of our beings that desire love and need love the most, for some of us that means dark and ugly parts!
There is no irony, just symbol and metaphor that on this night through our ritual we will expose (if we choose) in a spirit of vulnerability, our feet. Awkward as it may be, to deliver our feet, dirty and rough, or sensitive and smooth, or uneven and imperfect, is to lay symbolically a piece of our being bare! To lay ourselves bare in the end is what God desires of us, to open ourselves fully is to invite God intimately into our lives so that our lives are lived in the world as God would have them!
Intimacy! Intimacy defined means Intrinsic or essential. Belonging to or characterizing one’s deepest nature. Our ritual this night is found in the story of Jesus on the most intimate night of his life on earth. He gathered around him those he loved, among them one who would betray him. Jesus would seize the night before his death to give a sign (as John’s Gospel would have it) of what it would be for those who follow him to live as a community of believers in God’s dream for the world as they knew it. He would, in a moment of intimacy, wash their feet! Dirty and tired, aching and smelling, blistered and swollen, the master would engage in an act of servant hood, cleansing and washing their feet, inviting them once more into the fullness of what it is to be a follower of the dream! If they are to be keepers of the dream, they are to “love one another as Jesus loved them”! A “mandatum” is the Latin that gives us our title of this liturgy “Maundy,” a new commandment; to love one another the way Jesus loved them! How did Jesus love them – “intimately”! How will Jesus love us – “intimately”! The disciples’ “deepest nature” would be loved into being a “new community” that stood by the principles of servant hood and compassion, righteousness, and justice! The “deepest nature” of being loved so intimately would lead them not perfectly as a “new community,” but faithfully even as they would certainly watch the powers of the day execute their master! The “deepest nature” of being loved so intimately would lead them through what they would surely witness in the days ahead, that the dream would die on a cross on a hillside in Jerusalem, but that Christ himself would live with them in love as they loved one another and dared to live into Jesus “value system” of serving the most vulnerable and needy.
Raymond Brown, New Testament scholar wrote, “When we live into Jesus’ value system, we make him alive rather than just memorializing him.”
Tonight, our liturgy is a liturgy of intimacy! Our deepest nature yearns for God to love us “intimately”! We draw near this night to Jesus through the power of signs, feet laid bare to be washed in an act of servant hood and love! Our deepest nature yearning to be loved so intimately that God’s dream for our lives might live new, even in our brokenness and awkwardness. Our “mandatum” or commandment to love one another as Christ loved us perhaps draws us into an opportunity to make Christ alive by living into Jesus “Value system” of servant hood! St. Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” Come, draw near, and love one another as Christ has loved us.
