Maundy Thursday, Year A
April 17, 2014
This week I was listening to a podcast out of Luther Seminary about the Maundy Thursday texts and one of the presenters described the Judas material- vs. 18-31a, which as you may have noticed has basically been cut from the lectionary, as being all about betrayal… she said “look around the room, at the people your life, your family, friends, the world… who among you is the betrayer?… who doesn’t really believe?
I sat with this for a moment and then quickly shook my head because betrayal is not always laced with embittered embers of disbelief in the “other” like perhaps we might expect. I think the root of even Judas’ betrayal of Jesus handing him over to the authorities in exchange for 30 pieces of silver- rather than being about his unbelief or disloyalty to “Jesus”, was more about self-betrayal, a fear-based rejection of self which ultimately led to The Unwinding of not only his own soul, but eventually just as the powers and principalities had so deemed, became a ticking bomb and just like explosives, created collateral damage: the life of Jesus of Nazareth included…
Betrayal is no lonesome party of one, however, as it rides on the coattails of our allegiances, waits patiently dancing over our shoulders just in time for the ‘big reveal’, the inescapable truth that our loyalties are only as authentic as our word is good. Betrayal and the new commandment to Love one another… These themes traditionally at odds with each other could be no more incestuous to us than in these very moments when we find Jesus gathered at table with his closest of allies, indisputably loyal to the rabbinic lifestyle…people of deep and formed GRIT, having left their families to learn from their great teacher and friend, the self-proclaimed Son of Man, gathered even now as players in a game of moral aptitude, “Are you in or are you out?”
I think the truth about betrayal could include a rewinding of this text, a re-make even where rather than handing the bread to Judas… Simon Peter whispers to the Beloved Disciple, coaxing him to ask Jesus “who is it”… and Jesus with tear-filled eyes, looks away and then directly back into the eyes of this one called Beloved and says, “My brother, it is you.” Or perhaps, he would lean across the table dragging his sleeves through plates of food, offering Peter himself a piece of bread dripping in his own life-giving blood… “It is you, Peter, who will betray me”. I can see myself seated at this table with my friends, my family, those I know and don’t know… those I would easily deem unworthy, and capable of betrayal… and then, without warning before me, upon my plate, the bread freshly dipped in the cup.
Of course this evening meal, the gathering and sharing of love and friendship is not about finger-pointing or character assassination for Jesus, but truly it is about busting wide open the seems of limited understanding to the kind of love necessary to carry on the work of reconciling the world in love to one another, carving out space and time for love to fully grow. Bringing light to the low-lit spaces of their lives where greed, envy, uncertainty, anger, fear, and doubt had the potential to further unravel these men and women from the inside out…where relationship decay was as threatening to this community as the very cross upon which the Body of Christ would hang. Jesus knew the importance of humble transcendence as it was the gateway for his lived life and ministry, an opportunity for a force greater than the evil that befell the church under the guise of Roman authority to turn the tides. Thus, taking on the very nature of a Servant he humbled himself and… as we witnessed earlier, he washed the feet of those he believed could endure in his stead.
In his book, The Unwinding: An inner history of the new America, George Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker describes a similar kind of self, and communal betrayal, the kind that would bleed the conscience from our country relying so heavily upon corrupt institutions to feed our insatiable appetite to consume. The kind that would drive us to disavow our communal allegiance to our moral and ethical commitments of being human, one to another…
He writes,
“No one can say when the unwinding began- when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way. Like any great change, the undwiding began at coutnelss times, in countless ways- and at some moment the country, always the same coutnry, crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different.
If you were born around 1960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape- the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools. And other things, harder to see but no less vital in supporting the order of everyday life, changed beyond recognition- ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York trading desks, manners and morals everywhere. When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.
The unwinding is nothing new. There have been unwindings every generation or two”, writes Packer. “The unwinding brings freedom, more than the world has ever granted, and to more kinds of people than ever before— freedom to go away, freedom to return, freedom to change your story, get your facts, get hired, get fired, get high, marry, divorce, go broke, begin again, start a business, have it both ways, take it to the limit, walk away from the ruins, succeed beyond your dreams and brag about it, fail abjectly and try again. And with freedom, the unwinding brings its illusions, for all these pursuits are as fragile as thought balloons popping against circumstances. Winning and losing are all-American games, and in the unwinding winners win bigger than ever, floating away like bloated dirigibles, and losers have a long way to fall before they hit bottom, and sometimes they never do.”
So, why wash the feet of his disciples? Why worry with getting his hands dirty with feces and excrement, dirt…and disgust? Why lose bigger when his losses could not be trumped? -His fate determinably held by the illumined artifices of dominion and organized money, co-opted by a system infested with greed and ravaged by corruption —of such an unwinding that neither ancient allies nor loyal conspirators could superimpose a new way in the face of such incredulity. Why not spend his last moments organizing his political allies, forming a coup, throwing stones at the one whose betrayal would cost him his life, fighting back? Why not?
Jesus’ commitment to love, for the sake of peace and justice drove him, probably obsessively so, to a place of all-consuming compassion- where his sole focus was to impart an incarnational sustenance that could sustain a beloved community of people, across oceans of betrayal, one after the other, after the other after the other…. the kind of spiritual sustenance that would outlast the deceptive forces at work, breeding self-betrayal and desertion, in spite of the fact that his very last breath was both cause and cost of the inevitable unwinding of humanity, the kind of life-giving love that could change the course of history … So kneeling in the dirt that night, around the dinner table, he demonstrated, instead, a new way to be human, a new way to be clean.
As George Packer insists, in the unwinding “everything changes, and nothings lasts, except for the voices”…the voices of the community, remembering together, persevering together. These voices- he says, are those “alone on a landscape without solid structures. [They] have to improvise their own destinies, plot their own stories of success and salvation.”- not unlike those 12 gathered at table with Jesus that night.
Well, there are more anecdotes out there to success and happiness than we care to give credence, I know, but I think at the heart of all of these self-help strategies, or personal salvific formulas, lies a common element, an intrinsic belief that within one’s spirit and “person” lies the potential for something greater. Potential to be “more” than who we are living into. More than what our lives reflect, just “more”… no matter whether the more is for everyone of a spiritual substance or not, a deep well-like source of our atomized energy, a mindfulness, a physical or chemical underutilized property, or something else entirely, most would agree that gaining access to this “more” is only possible with an authentic belief in it’s existence, as a source for life, for overcoming self-betrayal and ultimately betrayal of creator and community.
In the grand scheme of our lives I believe that “belief in this more” is vitally important to our overcoming the forces that both killed Jesus and that kill us every day, the self-betrayal that that tells us we are less than who we are rather than inviting us to a deep pursuit of living more fully into Jesus command, to love one another as I have loved you. Judas, a follower of Jesus, a man committed to learning and studying, giving and serving, teaching and preaching, listening and “trying”, over and over and over, again…. showing up when you or I may not have. The vulnerability of this man speaks not of an evil indwelling as the texts reads, giving an obtuse evil entity the power to control his life, our lives, but more readily points to the susceptibility of a Jesus follower, one striving for covenantal relationship, one bathed in the rites of Christian practice, baptized in the waters of the Jordan, and washed with the very hands of his teacher and beloved Lord, Jesus himself- a susceptibility to selling out to the powers that be, to the lie that seeks to permeate our lives even now, telling us that we are all right, that living for ourselves, in pursuit of our dreams without being inconvenienced is the height of our calling…regardless of the collateral damage along the way.
For the church, the Judas material… is not only the “it” of this Maundy Thursday passage, but is the “it” in our lives as well, the anecdote for our understanding of reconciliation, of the fullness of God’s love for us, for this community, for our families, for the world…for this New America…. On this night Jesus not only demonstrates this love for us by being servant among all servants, but he challenges us to accept it through self-examination congruent with that of the man who one minute took bread from the very hand of God and sold his soul to the devil the next…
Whether our prescribed treatment for self-betrayal is to hide beyond a wall of success- bartering the very lives of those around us for personal gain, to loathe those who live just under the bar- feeding ourselves the lie of comparison, or to give up before even attempting to live life….or maybe we’re “trying” harder and harder each day to live into this new commandment…Regardless, we will all find ourselves at one time or another with a pocketful of silver, faced with an opportunity to live and love, or fall victim to the lie of the powerful forces at work within the unwinding of humanity, one person at a time.
The truth of Maundy Thursday, the message Jesus was willing to die for wasn’t about eternal life, wasn't about power and victory or prestige and honor… it was about dirt. The dirt on your feet and mine, the dirt that became life that holds our bones in the ground even now, the dirt that threatens to keep us from a life of hope and joy and peace. The dirt that he said, would never keep us from God’s love, the dirt that would become for us a pathway to forgiveness and grace. So, let’s Embrace the dirty…let Jesus wash it away and be clean, my friends, for life is more than what we have done, or where we have walked… this life, this promise of life is about the voices, your voices and mine, which are left standing today on a lonesome landscape with only the beloved community of God’s children at our side, and it’s’ about where we are going next… Come, let us go there together.
Thanks be to God! Amen.
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