Maundy Thursday

John 13:1-15 - Maundy Thursday - April 5, 2012 

Here Is Where We Learn of Love

Jesus loved His disciples.  He spent three years teaching them what He had come to teach us.  He taught them that the Son of Man must be betrayed and suffer many things, and that He must be lifted up and draw all men to Himself.  He taught them what it meant to love by teaching them what it meant to be loved by God.  Jesus is loved by His Father.  This love extends before time and into eternity.  But it is grounded in time in the hour that Jesus had waited for.  “Therefore My Father loves Me,” Jesus said, “because I lay down My life that I may take it again.”  Think of what this means!  This means that the love that the Father and the Son had shared from eternity was from before all time wrapped and bound in that singular act that Jesus had been born to do.  God’s boundless love that knows neither beginning nor end cannot be known at all apart from what happened once and for all on the cross.  HERE ALONE IS WHERE WE LEARN OF LOVE. 

But this doesn’t keep people from talking about love as though they were experts on the subject.  Poets redefine love as some sort of romantic feeling.  Hollywood treats love at best like a benevolent impulse in the heart of man, but more often as a passing urge or lust.  Instead of self-giving and sacrificial, people turn love into something that is self-seeking and greedy.  Scarcely has the word love suffered more shameful assaults than in a culture where people are actually taught that before they can love others they must first learn to love themselves.  What a lie!  And because of this lie we see marriage routinely disparaged as confining; we see motherhood avoided and mocked as oppressive and stifling; we see charity measured by the tax-break it provides rather than by the mercy from which it ought to flow.  What damage the noble virtue of love has suffered among us.  This is what happens in a sinful world. 

And yet despite such tragic desecration of the beautiful word love, still nowhere does the word suffer more than where sinners try to talk about God’s love apart from where God’s Son bore our sin on the cross.  HERE ALONE IS WHERE WE LEARN OF TRUE LOVE.  But again, this doesn’t keep people from talking about it as though they were experts on this subject too. 

Spiritual speculation regularly replaces divine instruction.  Sinners are always redefining the love of God according to their own fancy.  Just look at what happens.  In His revealed word, God threatens death and hell to those who transgress His commands; and how do folks respond?  “Oh, but God wouldn’t do that.  God is loving.”  But what is this love?  Instead of pointing to what God in love does for sinners on the cross, they ascribe to God their own invented notion of love.  But this love doesn’t do anything at all to save us.   It just looks the other way at sin.  We need a love that deals with sin – that addresses sin squarely.  We can’t fend off a bad conscience and the threats of the law simply by asserting that God is too loving to punish us so harshly.  No.  We point to where God’s love required the harsh punishment of His beloved Son in our place. 

There is a poem that my grandpa taught me that was written by the famous Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen that speaks to this subject very well:

Of what this paltering world calls love
I will not know I cannot speak.
I know but His who reigns above;
And His is neither mild nor weak. 
Hard even unto death is this,
And smiting with its awful kiss,
What was the answer of God’s love
Of old when in the olive grove,
In anguish sweat His own Son lay
And prayed “Oh, take this cup away.”
Did God take then from Him the cup?
No son His Child must drink it up.

God teaches us what love is.  He teaches us what love requires.  He teaches us in the obedience of Christ.  Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13).   This isn’t just a dry lesson on some lofty self-giving virtue that man aims to attain.  No this is the divine plan to save sinners from hell. 

Behold in Faith God’s only Son
Come nigh and see what Love has done
To save thee from damnation. 
The Father lays on Him thy guilt,
For thee His precious blood is spilt
To bless thee with salvation. 

This is what we need Love to do because of what we have failed to do.  We are sinners who cave into the world’s redefinition of love all the time—we define love by what we want—we love ourselves instead of others—and so we need God to teach us again and again what true love is.  We don’t need to learn how to perfect our own.  This won’t save us.  We need to know where God perfected His love toward us in that hour of darkness that He required His beloved Son to endure.   

And this hour had finally come, as John records in our Gospel this evening.  But the hour had not yet passed.  Life was still coursing through His veins.  His body was still warm.  He still ate.  He still served.  He served in love.  He loved them to the end.  But it was not yet the end.  Jesus, the true Passover Lamb, had already taken upon Himself the sins of the world.  But there was still one more thing that He had to do before He paid for them on the cross. 

And on this night when Jesus was betrayed, in love what did our Savior do?  The Father had already given all things into His hands.   And what did Jesus then distribute with those very hands?   John doesn’t record the events of the Last Supper as it was handed down to Paul in our Epistle Lesson.  Instead, He records the events immediately following. 

Jesus washed His disciples’ feet.  By doing so, Jesus taught His disciples and He teaches us where the source of love must always begin.  It must begin with God serving us.  When Jesus stoops down to serve those whose sins He bears, He is teaching the relationship between God and sinners.   And we find this relationship nowhere more clearly than where Jesus gives to us His body and blood to eat and to drink for the forgiveness of all our sins.  It is here that He stoops down in utter humility to make us clean.  It is here that He delivers to us what He once delivered to His Father on the cross.  That which once satisfied the Father’s wrath against sinners, now satisfies our need for peace with God.  

Peter thought it was strange for Jesus to wash his feet.  More than that, He thought it was inappropriate.  But then Jesus said, “If I do not wash you, you have no share with me.”  And so Peter allowed it.  How strange it sounds to us to say that Jesus gives His body and blood for us to eat and to drink.  Indeed, how inappropriate.  But Jesus says, “Take eat. Take drink.”  And so we do. 

Once Peter learned that he needed Jesus to serve him, he did what a lot of people do.  He started to tell Jesus how to go about it: “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!”  But all Peter needed from Jesus was for his feet to be washed and he was clean.  Jesus serves us on His own terms. 

We also know that we need Jesus to serve us.  But what exactly do we need Him to do?  Of course, we don’t need Jesus to wash our feet.  This was a symbolic gesture that Jesus did so that we might follow His example of love and service toward one another.  We are to wash each other’s feet.  That is, we are to serve and love each other and bear one another’s burdens.  But what do we need in order to do this?  What do we need in order to resist the temptations of our loveless flesh – as we pray in that petition, “And lead us not into temptation”?  What do we need in order to be delivered from evil – as Jesus has taught us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer?  We need Jesus to forgive us our sins.  That’s what we need.    We don’t tell Jesus how to fill our need.  No, but we humbly receive from Him what He gives us; and in His service to us we find our every prayer answered. 

There is nothing more important than the forgiveness of our sins.  There is no union with God, there is no fellowship with man, there is no safety from danger, there is no resurrection from the dead apart from the forgiveness that Jesus gives us – and He gives it to us because He earned it for us in His hour that had come. 

St. John makes no distinction in our Gospel this evening between the hour when Jesus would give His body to be broken and His blood to be shed on the cross and the hour when Jesus gave His body and blood for sinners to eat and to drink.  It is the same hour.  That is why we examine ourselves before we come to this altar.   We examine our need.  We examine where we have not served our brothers and sisters, but have gossiped instead.  We examine where we have not loved our spouse, where we have not covered faults and blemishes; we examine where we have given with a stingy heart.  We examine our failure to love as we have been loved and to serve as we have been served.  And as we examine ourselves, we also examine what we receive right here. 

And so we see our deepest need met.  See it, dear Christian.  Taste it.  Receive what your Teacher and Lord, what your God and Brother gives to you tonight.  Receive it often.  And so receive what Love has done for you.  For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim what the death of Christ has earned for you.  He who is washed need only his feet to be washed and he is clean.  And he who eats and drinks need only believe what he here receives.  Believe it dear Christian, and forgiveness of sins is yours.  And where there is the forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation. 

In Jesus’ name, Amen.