Friday, April 14, 2006

Thurs, April 13, 2006 - Maundy Thursday

Exodus 12:1-14
Psalm 116:10-17
1 Cor 11:23-26
John 13:1-35

What kind of friends do you have? Close friends? Acquaintances? Friends is sort of a catch-all phrase that we use to describe our relationship to non-related people who are more than just passers-by. But even within that designation, there is a wide range of types of friends. There are the friends who we talk to only once in a while, and when we do talk, it's only about little stuff. There are the friends who only call us when they're in need of something. There are the friends we've had for years and years who know all the stupid things we did as children. And there are the friends who are closer than family - the ones who, through thick and thin, are there for us no matter what, and would drop everything to give us a hand. Those are the friends we treasure, and those friends are very, very rare. If someone asked us to describe people who are loyal, their names would be the first on our lips.

Jesus had a group of close friends. The Bible describes them as disciples, which means that they were students of a teacher, but I imagine that they were also friends. After all, Jesus and this group had spent the last three years together, day in and day out, had gone hungry together, had looked for shelter together, had walked all over Israel together - so I imagine that friendship had developed. I imagine that the disciples considered themselves to be loyal to Jesus, and thought of themselves as his circle of friends.

Now if you've ever had a circle of friends, that is, friends who are all friends with each other and with you, you know how nice that can be. You all stick up for one another, you spend all your time together, you worry about each other, you enjoy the group dynamic and the security of knowing that you have a band of people who are loyal to you and always there.

But sometimes it happens that you and that group start growing apart, and you realize that you're not walking down the same path anymore. Maybe it's because your friends don't understand why you've decided to live your life a particular way. Maybe they don't agree with a decision you've made. And what happens is that things start to get a little cold - you can't talk about things the way you used to, your friends stop telling you everything they're thinking, you still spend time together, but it's just not the same. It gets tough and you realize that you can't depend on your group of friends the way you did before. The tightness, the loyalty, that was there before starts to fade.

Well, that kind of thing was going on the last night that Jesus spent with his disciples, with his close friends. There was a gap, a distance, between Jesus and those he was with. Although they'd spent the last three years with him, they didn't seem to understand what he was doing or where he was going - they certainly didn't understand why he would kneel down and wash their feet. They didn't understand the strange vibe between him and Judas. And for sure they didn't understand that when Jesus was referring to being glorified he was talking about going to his death. It's most likely that Jesus' disciple-friends thought he was going to lead them to some kind of military victory over the Romans, or to some kind of religious reformation. Even though he had told them over and over again that dying was a necessary part of God's plan for him, they still didn't seem to get it. And so there they sat on that last night, confused, in denial of what Jesus was saying, and probably wondering just what Jesus was getting them into. They were trying to be loyal, but they just couldn't manage it. It must have been difficult for Jesus.

So what do you do when you and your friends grow apart; when they stop really getting who you are, when they stop being as loyal as they once were? I would guess that most of us let the relationship dissolve. We might make one last effort to stay together, maybe go out for some get-together and try and rekindle the old relationships, but after that, most of us stop trying. We might slowly stop returning calls, or we might abruptly cut these former friends out of our life. Either way, though, we don't stick it out - we tend to put into a relationship what we get out of it, and when our friends are no longer as close and as loyal as they once were, we find ourselves behaving the same way towards them, too. Generally speaking, the amount of loyalty we've been shown is the amount we show in return.

So is that what Jesus did when his friends began to turn away from him - and in one case even turn on him? Did Jesus slowly but surely distance himself from them, did he respond to their waning loyalty by becoming less loyal himself? Well, since this is Jesus, we know that the answer is no. In fact, since this is Jesus, we can expect that he went even farther than just refusing to let the relationship with his friends go - that he actually took steps to strengthen it.

"Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end." It's interesting - according to the Gospel of John, Jesus knew everything that was about to happen to him. He knew that his friends were about abandon him and deny him, he knew that Judas would betray him, he knew that he was going to die - and yet knowing all of this, Jesus did several things.

First, he performed for his disciple-friends a significant act of care. He washed their feet. Now this is not such a big deal, in and of itself. Foot-washing was something that was regularly done in Israel during a time when people walked around dirty roads in open-toe sandals. Yes, it was unusual and shocking to the disciples that Jesus would wash their feet when it should be the other way around, but really, they should have been used to Jesus doing that kind of thing by this point. But for Jesus, the foot-washing was about more than just hygiene. In the Gospel of John, the foot-washing was meant as a symbol of forgiveness. It is meant to draw out for us images of baptism, and of God's covenant with us through water. So when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, his friends who would soon abandon him, even the feet of Judas who was about to betray him, Jesus was forgiving them their sins. He was making the point that even though they couldn't remain loyal to him, he was not going to abandon them. He was not going to turn his back on them and return their lack of loyalty with his own lack. He washed their feet, he cared for them, and he forgave them.

And then Jesus went even farther than that. Although the Gospel of John doesn't refer to it directly, the other gospels and Paul's letter to the Corinthians that we heard refer to Jesus instituting the Lord's Supper on his last night with the disciples. And as we know, the Lord's Supper, along with baptism, is the ultimate agent of God's forgiveness of sins. Even now, almost two thousand years later, when we celebrate Communion, as we will tonight, we continue to experience the forgiveness that the Son of God brought to us. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to that first communion, the last supper Jesus had with his increasingly less loyal friends.

Again, knowing everything that his disciples were about to do, or were about to fail to do, knowing that their loyalty would be put to the test and that they would not pass, Jesus gave them his own body and blood - that is, he gave them his life as forgiveness for these things. He fed them, nurtured them, forgave them, because he wanted them to remember, when everything was over and they were consumed with guilt over how they had treated him, that his loyalty to them was not about to become any less simply because they let their own loyalty lapse. That his love for them was not based on their love for him.

And that is where we are left this evening, on the night of Jesus' betrayal. The group of disciple-friends is fracturing - they are about to abandon him, one of them is already betraying him - and yet Jesus continues to remain loyal. He washes them clean, he feeds them with his own life, he forgives them in advance for how loyal they are about not to be. Reflecting on all of this, we move towards tomorrow where we will discover just how far our own disloyalty runs, and just how far Jesus' loyalty will carry.

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