Maundy Thursday,
St. Matthew’s,
Chandler
Remember.
The word, and the
concept, of remembering, of memory recalled and made present once again, echoes
like heartbeat through the readings tonight.
Remember.
Exodus: God has acted decisively in our liberation,
and we will return to this night every year.
Remember.
The psalmists
sings:
How shall I repay the Lord *
for all the good things he has done for me?
for all the good things he has done for me?
I will lift up the cup of salvation *
and call upon the Name of the Lord.
and call upon the Name of the Lord.
… I will fulfill my vows to the Most High.
Remember.
Paul to the
Corinthians: The story of this supper
was given to me, and now I give it to you.
Remember.
Jesus to the
disciples: “I have set you an example, that
you also should do as I have done to you.”
Remember.
Here we are.
To hear the stories.
And remember.
Remembrance—how and why we remember—particularly the story of this
night in Christ’s life, and the life of the disciples, is inseparably linked to
the mystery of Christ’s work of salvation.
And when I say mystery, I do not mean that we are talking about
unknowable conjecture and theological meandering; I mean that we are talking
about an everlasting truth that eludes comprehension, yet still illuminates the
very depths of God’s inexhaustible power and love. The night brings to us a remembrance of God’s
nature, revealed in Jesus.
You see, memory and remembrance has particular meaning in a Christian
context.
We—all of us—are held in the memory and care of God.
All of our pains, all of our joys.
All of our wounds, all of our woundings of others.
We are responding to the work of a God who carries the weight and
memory of every pain and trauma and joy and mundane moment of existence.
As God says to the prophet Jeremiah “Before I formed you in
the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.”[1]
Jesus himself reminded us that the one
who grounds all of existence is also the one who has also counted every hair of
our head.
And as the psalmist sings
of God:
Lord, you have searched me out and
known me; *
you know my sitting down and my
rising up;
you discern my thoughts from
afar.
You trace my journeys and my
resting-places *
and are acquainted with all my
ways.
Indeed, there is not a word on
my lips, *
To God, no one is forgotten. No injury is overlooked.
God knows the messiness
of our lives and the difficulties of human existence. He remembers that we are dust, given to decay
and sickness and death.
But our Lord did not die
of disease or old age. He died on the
cross through a deliberate set of political considerations and schemes and
betrayals. As such, it is worthwhile to
consider over these three holy days what Christ action saves us from and brings
us toward.
And given the nature of
Christ’s death, it is worth considering especially the violence which we are so
good at visiting upon each other, not to mention the apathy we are disposed to
show in the face of overwhelming human suffering. There are so many ways in which humankind so
often goes beyond not showing love to our neighbors, or even as regarding others
as of little consequence, but instead we tend more often toward mutual
rejection of each other.
Hate so often goes both ways in our broken relationships, both individually and corporately, with us feeding off of the violence of each other in a twisted inversion of the Golden Rule. Instead of heeding the word to “Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” we live in a world that teaches “do to others as they do to you, because it is only fair.”
Violence spirals in vicious circle as victim and oppressor visit yet even more violence upon each other. In such an inversion of the Golden Rule, the moral bar is continuous set lower and lower. We may say “We have gotten our hands dirty, but at least we are not as bad as our enemy.” We may hope that fact alone absolves us from the responsibility we actually have to treat others as we hope to be treated. We dismiss the hope that we are capable of such a loving regard of our enemies as impractical. We prefer our cold calculations of cost and benefit, power and security, on the level of our private relationships, and in our national lives.
We are all victims and oppressors.
We are wounded, we fight back.
We call it a law of nature.
Hate so often goes both ways in our broken relationships, both individually and corporately, with us feeding off of the violence of each other in a twisted inversion of the Golden Rule. Instead of heeding the word to “Do unto others as you would have them do to you,” we live in a world that teaches “do to others as they do to you, because it is only fair.”
Violence spirals in vicious circle as victim and oppressor visit yet even more violence upon each other. In such an inversion of the Golden Rule, the moral bar is continuous set lower and lower. We may say “We have gotten our hands dirty, but at least we are not as bad as our enemy.” We may hope that fact alone absolves us from the responsibility we actually have to treat others as we hope to be treated. We dismiss the hope that we are capable of such a loving regard of our enemies as impractical. We prefer our cold calculations of cost and benefit, power and security, on the level of our private relationships, and in our national lives.
We are all victims and oppressors.
We are wounded, we fight back.
We call it a law of nature.
Our human history is one
of violence. We are all of us, in some measure, shut off from one another: Our
own options for cruelty, violence, and apathy fade into...
"...a background of raging endemic violence. We are born into a world where there are already histories of oppression and victimizations: our moral and spiritual growth does not occur in a vacuum. And so, before we are even conscious of it, the systems of oppressor-victims relations absorb us. This state of being is the ‘already” and “always” which theology refers to (sometimes unhelpfully) as original sin—this sense of a primordial inheritance of violence, of being born into systems of enforced hierarchy and violence that undergird all human relation before we are capable of understanding or choice." (Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel.)
This violence which constricts our openness to
communion or to relationship. In our
world, memory is weaponized, and becomes our source for the stories of our
various separations.
“We are always
innocent.”
“They have always been at
war.”
“He can never be trusted.”
“She will never trust again.”
This is our world, which
Jesus entered as a peasant of an oppressed minority under violent and brutal
imperial occupation. He quickly got the attention of this all-too-human system.
And on this very night, he will be led away to a sham trial and the beginning
of his suffering. He will give himself
freely to his fate, waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane for his arrest. He will go to his death, the victim of a
tug-of-war between religious leaders who see him as a blasphemer who must be killed
before he brings revolution and Roman wrath upon them, and an occupying
governor who would rather not deal with this issue at all.
But he does not simply die
as a sacrifice to the bloody human system. He will conquer the cross through the
resurrection, and in so doing, Christ passes judgment on the ways of our
world.
Apologies if it seems
like I am skipping ahead, but here is why it matters: On this night, in which Jesus washes the
disciple’s feet and institutes the sacrament of his body and blood, he was
dealing with disciples still bound in the ways of this violent passing
world. He washes the feet of his own
betrayer, knowing precisely what was going to happen. He recognizes the false bravado of Peter, who
vows to be faithful no matter what.
Jesus this night knows he will be rejected by the very ones he serves
and considers his closest disciples.
But still Jesus
gives. He gives his service. He gives his life. He gives his flesh and blood as food and
drink. And when Jesus will visit the
disciples after the resurrection, he will do so in a body bearing the wounds he
suffered—yet he will come breathing forgiveness and communion.
Every time we celebrate
the Eucharist, we recall the events of this night, of this institution of the
Eucharist. And in the shadows of this
celebration is also the remembrance that Christ was betrayed by those who were
with him at the table. The Christ who
comes to us in broken body and shed blood confronts us with the memory of our
propensity to offer up others as a sacrifice to our own needs for power and
control and safety. And yet, Christ
returns to us as a victim who offers victory through resurrection, not violence. He continuously shows that there is a power
beyond the worst violence that the world can muster, a power from God grounded
in love, communion, and healing.
When Christ appears to
the disciples after the resurrection, he heals the memory of the disciple’s
betrayal. The memory of the disciple’s
shame and guilt—their memory of the betrayal—is not canceled out by Jesus
showing up and by his “being okay,” but because the truth is that God will set
all to right in due time. And our
memories of pain, ours and others, are the points of our lives where Christ the
Victim invites himself in to heal memory—to transform our failures and our
betrayals and our desertions into stories of redemption and grace. Pay close attention to the stories we read as
a Church together in the weeks after this coming Sunday and you will hear of
the healing of memory and the redemption of betrayal.
Just like that night, in
which Jesus served his own betrayers and deserters,
and yet will forgive and reunite
them,
we come to this rail, and
this altar to remember something precious.
Tonight we remember that
the story we tell ourselves
about how the human use
of power is naturally lorded over others
is overturned by the very
one who created the world.
Those who follow the Lord
of all creation are not called to rule, but to serve.
And so let us do as Jesus showed us, and upend our own notions of power
by becoming servants to others
and momentarily obliterate the hierarchies we live in.
let us be vulnerable enough to risk putting ourselves in another’s
hands
let us give up the lie that we have no need of one another,
and in so doing glimpse the world God calls us to.
Tonight, we remember that
those who did not measure up because of their desertion and betrayal, found
solace and strength first in Christ’s presence with them on this night, then in
his returning, and then in his promise to be with them to the end of the ages.
Then, as now, those who
follow the Lord are invited to bring our betrayals, our guilts, our pains, and
joys, and our memories, and find our restoration through Christ’s presence in
His body and blood.
Let us come to the table and find ourselves re-knit into communion with
each other,
and with God through Jesus’ Body and Blood.
Let us find ourselves re-membered as one belonging to Christ in his
body.
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