Sermon For Holy Thursday

The Table, the Towel, and the New Thing He Has Done

Tonight we enter the most intimate room in the Gospel of John. We have been moving through Lent, through the long preparation of these forty days, and now the liturgy has brought us here, to the upper room, to the night before everything breaks open. The collect for this evening has already shaped our prayer, and in a few moments we will come to this Table and receive what Christ gives. But before we arrive there, the Gospel sets before us something that the disciples did not expect, something that still has the power to stop us in our tracks if we let it.

John 13 begins with a sentence that deserves to be read slowly. "Before the Passover Festival, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end." That phrase, to the end, carries more weight than a casual reading suggests. In the Greek it is eis telos, which means not simply until the final moment but to the uttermost degree, to the fullest possible measure. John is telling us before a single action takes place that what we are about to witness is not a gesture. It is the complete expression of who Jesus is.

So we should pay close attention to what he does next.

The Setting And What It Reveals

Jesus and his disciples are gathered for the Passover meal. This is the defining feast of Israel's memory, the night when God acted to deliver his people from bondage. The disciples would have understood the weight of the occasion. What they did not understand was that the one reclining at table with them was himself the fulfillment of everything the Passover pointed toward. John tells us that Jesus "knew that the Father had given everything into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God." This is the extraordinary theological frame John places around what follows. The one who holds all authority, the one who knows his origin and his destination, the one in whom all power resides, rises from the table.

He lays aside his outer garment. He ties a towel around his waist. He pours water into a basin. And he begins to wash his disciples' feet.

In the ancient world, foot-washing was the work of the lowest household servant. It was not a task assigned to a peer, certainly not to a teacher, and absolutely not to someone of higher social standing. Rabbis were honored by their students. The relationship moved in one direction. And here is the Rabbi, the one they have been calling Lord and Teacher, doing the work of a slave.

We should not rush past the scandal of this. We have seen images of foot-washing so many times in Christian art and liturgy that the shock has been domesticated. But John intends for us to feel the strangeness of it. Peter certainly does. When Jesus comes to him, Peter pulls back. "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" The question is not really a question. It is a protest. This is not how things are supposed to go. This is not the order of things.

And Jesus says, in effect, you do not understand what I am doing now, but you will understand later.

That word later is doing quiet but important work. Jesus is not simply performing an act of humility for the disciples to admire and imitate. He is enacting something whose full meaning will only become clear when they see him on the cross, when they understand that the one who knelt with the towel is the same one who will be stripped of his garments and lifted up. The basin and the cross belong to the same logic of love. The towel and the passion are one continuous gesture.

Peter, characteristically, swings from refusal to excess. If washing is what I need, then wash all of me. And Jesus gently corrects him. A bath has already been given. What is needed now is the washing of the feet, the ongoing cleansing that belongs to those who are already his. This is a distinction worth holding. Jesus is not suggesting that his disciples must earn their place at the table by repeated moral performance. He is describing the life of those who belong to him, who return again and again to receive what he gives, who are cleansed not by their own effort but by his.

The New Commandment And What It Demands

After the washing, Jesus returns to the table. He explains what has happened. "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, that you also should do just as I have done for you."

Now we must be careful here, because it is easy to hear this as a lesson in general niceness, a call to be more considerate and less proud. That reading is not wrong, but it is far too small. Jesus is not simply encouraging better manners among his followers. He is reordering the entire structure of their common life.

In the ancient world, honor and shame governed social relationships with enormous force. You knew your place. You maintained your dignity. You did not lower yourself unnecessarily, because to lower yourself was to lose standing, and standing was everything. Jesus is not merely asking his disciples to be humble in a private, interior sense. He is asking them to inhabit a completely different social imagination, one in which the measure of greatness is service, in which the one who leads is the one who kneels.

And then, in the passage that follows the account of Judas's departure, Jesus gives the commandment that names what all of this is about. "I give you a new commandment: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

The word new here is worth pausing over. The commandment to love was not invented on this night. It runs through the whole of Scripture. But Jesus calls it new, and the newness lies in the standard. Not love one another as you wish to be loved, not love one another as the law requires, but love one another as I have loved you. The measure of the commandment is the measure of his own love, which we have just seen demonstrated on the floor of the upper room, and which will be demonstrated in full on the hill outside the city the following afternoon.

This is a demanding standard. It is, in fact, an impossible standard if we are left to generate it from within ourselves. Which is precisely why it must be received before it can be given. The disciples cannot love one another with the love of Christ unless they have first been loved by Christ. The washing must happen before the going out. The Table must come before the towel.

What This Night Asks Of Us

So what does Holy Thursday ask of us, gathered here tonight?

It asks us first to receive. There is a temptation, especially among people of faith, to move too quickly to the doing. We hear the commandment to love and we begin immediately to calculate what that requires of us. But Jesus does not begin with the commandment. He begins with the act. He washes first. He gives first. And the disciples are asked to be still and let him do it. Peter's resistance is understandable, but it is also instructive. We too resist being served by Christ. We prefer to come to him with something in our hands, some offering, some record of effort. And he asks us to sit down, to extend our feet, to let him do what only he can do.

This is what we do when we come to this Table. We do not bring our worthiness. We bring our hunger. We receive what he gives, the bread broken, the cup poured out, the body and blood of the one who loved us to the uttermost. The Eucharist is not our achievement. It is his gift. And it is given to us precisely so that we might be formed into people who can give it to others.

It asks us second to be honest about the Judas question. John tells us, with a kind of quiet devastation, that the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas to betray him, and that Jesus washed Judas's feet too. He knew. He knelt before the one who would hand him over and he washed his feet. We do not know the full mystery of Judas's choices or his end. But we know that Jesus served him, and that the love of Christ is not withheld on the basis of what he knows about us. That is both a comfort and a challenge. If Christ loved in full knowledge of betrayal, then the love we are commanded to show one another cannot be conditional on the other person's worthiness.

It asks us third to take the towel seriously. The love Jesus commands is not a sentiment. It is a practice. It is particular and inconvenient and sometimes humbling. It means showing up for the person who is difficult, serving in the place where no one notices, giving without keeping a record. The Church is not recognizable to the world by its correct theology alone, though theology matters. It is recognizable by this, that the people in it love one another with a love that does not come from them.

That love comes from tonight. It comes from the upper room, from the basin and the towel, from the bread and the cup, from the one who knew his hour had come and loved his own to the end.

We will come to this Table in a few moments. And then we will go out into the world that does not yet know what happened in that room. The question this night leaves with us is simply this: will we carry the towel?

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus, you have loved us to the uttermost. Wash us again tonight. Feed us at your Table. And send us out to love one another as you have loved us, not because we are sufficient for it, but because you are. Amen.

Sources Consulted

Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2017.

Raymond E. Brown. The Gospel According to John XIII-XXI. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

C. K. Barrett. The Gospel According to St. John. Second edition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1978.

The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Publishing, 1979.

N. T. Wright. John for Everyone, Part 2. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.