A new commandment, the mandate, the Maundy:
to love one another in a certain way.
And that certain way is the same way that Jesus does it.
And the Jesus way of loving is as a servant, washing the feet, serving one another.
Love.
It isn’t about feelings.
It isn’t even about understanding one another.
It isn’t about agreeing with one another.
Love is about action, the action that attends to someone, that pays attention to someone, that considers and is considerate, respectful, looking out for ahead of time. To be able to see another life as separate from our own and to see the miracle that it is. There is a great vow from our old marriage liturgy: with my body I thee worship.
Live like that, with that kind of love. That is the Gospel community, the Gospel way of being in the world, always keeping the first thing first of loving the way that Jesus loves, of taking care of each other.
Washing the feet, it was almost another sacrament. Imagine a Church whose liturgical heart isn’t the altar or the bread or the wine, but rather a basin, a towel, a pitcher of water, and people kneeling not at the altar rail but rather before one another as they wash one another’s feet, with my body I thee worship.
It is a different picture.
Tonight we celebrate both, the sacrament of the last supper and the sacrament that almost made it- the washing of one another’s feet.
God worships us with his body.
It is a striking juxtaposition, sounds not right, even perverse, but there he is bowing before us, washing our feet. The body of God worshipping.
No wonder he was betrayed this night, no wonder he was taken away, that kind of love is just too much, it messes with our sense of reality, the foundations of the earth as we know it are shaken.
The altar is stripped and we are left alone, disturbed by what we have seen, as the boundless love of God is bound and thrown in prison.