Holy Thursday 2023
St. John 13:1-15, 34-35
“Before the Feast of the Passover.” Passover commemorated the deliverance of God’s ancient people. By the blood of a lamb, God rescued His people from death. Yet it imaged what was to come. The greater liberation by a greater Lamb.
“Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come.” St. John consistently emphasizes that Jesus knows what will happen to Him, and He willingly moves toward it. That is to say, the cross doesn’t so much happen to Him, but it is something He does.
“When Jesus knew that His hour had come … having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.” Here is the great mystery of Christ’s passion! Here is the great mystery of world redemption! “He loved them to the end.”
In the beginning, humanity had an end, a goal, a purpose: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” “Through holy marriage and family, fill the earth with a community of love, a church of self-giving. As I have built a garden for you, so bring order to the wild places, beautify the cosmos and fill it with music.”
Instead, our first parents grasped for what God had not given. They sought to become as God, supposing that God is God by knowledge or power.
Jesus, the enfleshed God, shows them what it is to be God. And at the same time, He shows them what it is to be truly human. He loves. He loves them to the end.
John’s Gospel gives us no institution of the Lord’s Supper. Instead, we get a mention of the Supper, and then the footwashing. Why? The footwashing shows us who Jesus is and what He does to us sacramentally.
Jesus, the enfleshed God, stoops down into our filth. The emperor becomes a servant. The earth is a graveyard filled with innumerable rotted corpses. Their dust clings to the soles of our feet. The ancient sin corrupts our hearts. But Jesus, the enfleshed God, cleans us and feeds us, as a father cares for his children. This is love. Not mere sentiment, but bold action. Action that costs.
Jesus, the enfleshed God, pays that cost. To the end.
He asks, “Do you know what I have done?” Who can fathom what He has done? Isn’t it easy to abstract love into an idea or an emotion? Dietrich Bonhoeffer insisted we not devolve Christ’s love into a philosophy or a doctrine. He said,
It is not a general idea of love, but the love of God really lived in Jesus Christ, that accomplishes [our redemption]. This love of God for the world does not withdraw from reality back into noble souls transported away from the world but rather experiences and suffers the reality of the world in the severest way.
In His betrayal, public humiliation, brutal torture, and execution, Jesus experiences the reality of the world. By experiencing the reality of the world, He also experiences your reality. He sweat great drops of blood anticipating His arrest. He felt the forsakenness of the Father. He knew the desertion of disciples. He felt the lies of those who feigned friendship. He felt the bite of thorns pressed into His skull. And He loved all those who treated Him thus. He loved them to the end.
“Do you know what I have done?” Jesus asks it about the footwashing, but it applies to the entire passion, and to the Supper itself.
The Small Catechism has two important questions about preparing to receive the Supper. They directly relate to tonight’s Gospel.
17. What motivated Christ to die and make full payment for your sins?
His great love for His Father and for me and other sinners….
18. Finally, why do you wish to go to the Sacrament?
That I may learn to believe that Christ, out of great love, died for my sin, and also learn from Him to love God and my neighbor.
We can summarize it like this: “What motivated Christ to die? His great love. Why go to the Sacrament? To learn of His great love, and to learn how to likewise love God and neighbor.”
That’s how tonight’s Gospel relates to the Supper. The Footwashing shows us what happens in the Supper. “Do you know what I have done to you? … If I … your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example…. A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you.”
Christianity is founded on the love of Jesus for mankind. He reconciles us to the Father.
The life of the disciple of Jesus is lived in imitation of this love. It is a love that craves reconciliation.
This is why the holy communion is never done alone (or online, or with just a very select group of close family or friends). The communion is communal. The communion, oriented towards love, calls us, demands that we love particularly those disciples with whom we have had difficulties.
Have you harbored a grudge against someone? Do you lack forgiveness in your heart? Do you have resentments? Are you angry, bitter, sad at the divisions with other disciples of Jesus?
In the Supper Jesus established, He shows His love for His disciples, and calls us to forgive our grievances, relinquish our claims against each other, and come together not just in a common room but with a common heart and mind, a heart of love.
This love forgets what is past, and implores the God of all mercy to wash, as it were, our feet, and give us delight in scrubbing away the stench of our neighbor’s feet as well.
We rightly stress, with the Apostle Paul, that the Sacrament binds us together doctrinally. It also binds us together in love. It should be unthinkable to abandon, for example, your child when things get difficult. It should likewise be unthinkable for us to abandon each other; for we are brothers and sisters—blood brothers and sisters—bound together through the common participation in the blood of Jesus.
This also is not sentiment or metaphor. Jesus, the enfleshed God, is deadly serious when He says of the bread, “This is My body,” and of the cup, “This is My blood.” By this Sacrament the Lord brings us into participation, koinōnia, communion with His body and blood. Just as we confess that He rose in His body, and in the resurrection blood flows again through His veins, so by this Sacrament His body nourishes our body, His blood begins to flow through our veins. His love goes to this extent, that He is transforming our dying bodies into His immortal body. The Apostle Paul declares that “we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones.”
As His body is joined now to ours, and likewise His blood, let His mind also be in us. You are the Father’s dearly beloved. The Son has loved you to the end. In Him we live with each other to the end, in Him we love each other to the end. In Him shall we live, in Him shall we love, in Him shall we die, and His shall we be forever. +INJ+