Needing Jesus

Maundy Thursday, Year C
The Rev. Linda Campbell
1 Corinthians 11: 23 – 32; John 13: 1- 15
Needing Jesus

Baby Nelson is a joy to all of us here. He is passed around from grandmother’s to teen’s to uncles and aunts. We have watched him begin to eat solid food …. Reaching out with delight for more Lenten soup every Wednesday evening.

But what happens years from now… when he’s a big strapping teen age boy and beginning to make his own decisions … when it is possible that the trailing clouds of glory that are so easy to see now, may not be quite so easy to see. I trust that in this congregation, he will be just as loved and precious to us as he is now. But that is not always the case. It can happen that the trials and tribulations of life scar us in ways that make affirming our preciousness much more difficult – if not impossible.

Several year’s ago, I read Corelli’s Mandolin - a novel about World War II, set in the Greek islands. The story revolves around the engagement of a young Greek girl to a local boy. He is an innocent, beautiful young fisherman who cavorts with dolphins and swings on olive trees. And then he goes off to war. He returns unrecognizable.

“His muscle was gone, and the skin hung about his bones in flaccid sheets. His stomach bulged, either from starvation or parasites, and his ribs protruded as sharply as the bones of his spine. The shoulders and back seemed to have bent and crumpled, and the thighs and calves had shrunk so disproportionately that the knees seemed hugely swollen. The worst of it was what they beheld when they peeled off the encrusted bandages upon the feet; they were a necrotic, multi-hued pulp. A shell of pus and scab lay upon the inner windings of the abandoned bandages, and yellow maggots writhed and squirmed in flesh that was all but dead. The stench was inconceivably stupefying, and at last Pelagia felt herself flood with the sacred compassion whose absence has previously so appalled her. “Wash him all over,’ she said to the boy’s mother, ‘and I’ll do the feet.’ She looked up at her lover with tears brimming in her eyes and said, “Agapeton, I’m going to have to hurt you. I’m sorry.’” After picking away the maggots, “she fetched a bowl of clean water, salted it heavily, and as gently as she could she washed the terrible mess. Mandras flinched as he stung, but said nothing. Pelagia found that the most gruesome patches fell away as she washed them, and that there was living flesh beneath.” (Pg. 135 – 137 Corelli’s Mandolin, by Louis De Bernieres)

All the gospels include Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples. But in John’s gospel, foot washing takes the place that the other gospels give to the institution of the Eucharist. In all the other gospels, Jesus takes the bread and the wine and imbues them with the new symbolism of his body and blood. But in John’s gospel, Jesus wraps himself with a servant’s towel, and kneels in the dirt lavishing each of the disciples’ feet with his attention, one by one, as though there was no one else in the world.

And as Jesus gathers up the disciples crusty, calloused feet into his large strong hands, and gently bathes them clean – he insists that unless he washes them, they can have no part in his community.

That is as hard for us as it was for Peter. We want to be the social directors - jump up and get Jesus a chair, assure him that we’re with him all the way. We do not want him to kneel at our feet, like a slave. But Jesus insists that we need to receive his ministrations before we can take our place at his table. And to be able to receive his ministry, we have to admit in some corner of our heart that we are broken and needy and fragile. When we are obviously well-fed, well-clothed, well taken care of compared to the rest of the world – it is even more difficult to discern our brokenness and lack. But it is true. We are not completely human until we can receive as well as give. The catch is that admitting that we are in a fix, that we need help, that we need divine cleansing, takes humility, and we are so attached to self-sufficiency.

Thankfully, the church remembers and still proclaims the language of old fashioned religion - We have sinned and erred and are lost. That’s the truth.

Indeed, we are not all that different from the church in Corinth to whom Paul wrote. The church in Corinth had been coming together for the Eucharist, but not sharing their food with each other. Paul chastised them for showing contempt for the church of God and humiliating those who had nothing. He reminded them that he had received from the Lord what he had handed on to them – that on the night in which he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took a loaf of bread and broke it, saying “This is my body which is broken for you.” Paul warned the Corinthians not to eat the body of Christ without discerning Jesus’ brothers and sisters, lest they eat judgement upon themselves.

It does not take much leap of the imagination to understand that, like the Corinthians, we are very broken. We do indeed, eat and drink judgement upon ourselves. We are Cain’s descendants, visiting violence upon our brothers and sisters daily….through gossip, through war, through hoarding resources that are needed to feed and clothe and house the poor, through the coffee we drink, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive. We are complicit in deceiving ourselves about the fundamental truths of poverty and environmental realities on this planet. We are both burdened with too much knowledge and not enough. And we are desperately weary with the ambivalence and uneasiness that comes from being the fortunate ones in a rich country. In short, we are sinners.

And the truth is that we cannot heal ourselves from the unholy plague of violence and envy and rivalry that sickens us. We are helpless to save ourselves, just as the young soldier returned from war could not save himself. But just as the young woman did for him, the sacred compassion of Jesus does for us. Jesus is able, through God’s overflowing love, to take our wounded souls, and bathe them in the salty water of divine tears. And as the gruesome patches of our falsehood and enviousness and betrayals fall away, we find the living flesh that is our true heart, the heart God gave us at our birth, the heart that can enter into Holy Communion with all of creation.

The simple truth is, we need Jesus. And Jesus comes to us. In the paradoxical vulnerability of our wealth and power and fortune, Jesus kneels before us taking our dung caked feet into his hands. Let me wash you clean, he says. Let me love you. Let me show you the way to life, the way to lasting peace, the way that leads through the cross and on into resurrection.

Amen.