Holy Week is a sleep deprivation phenomenon for clergy. When the guard of being rested is down, it’s interesting how the Holy Spirit can sneak through with something surprising. For me this year, that’s the hook from a song from the 1970’s. To be sure, the song isn’t one which makes a whole lot of sense and does have references to illegal drug use which generally isn’t something one would associate with a Good Friday homily. But taking the bulk of the lyrics aside and just focusing on the hook, with a slight tweak to one pronoun, and … well, it was exactly what Good Friday was all about.

Did he make you cry, make you break down, and shatter your illusions of love? Is it over now, do you know how, to pick up the pieces and go home?

Yes, the hook from Stevie Nick’s song Gold Dust Woman which was on the Fleetwood Mac Rumours album and, for those of you old enough to remember, the pronoun was originally “she.” But no matter … just focus on the word of the paraphrased hook for a moment: Did he make you cry, make you break down, and shatter your illusions of love? Isn’t that what is happening here? Isn’t Jesus doing exactly that?

Last night we observed the first day of the Sacred Triduum – Maundy Thursday – in which Jesus takes the role of a slave and washes the disciple’s feet. He then wraps it into a teaching of the “New Commandment”: Love one another as I have loved you. According to this commandment, love is a verb and love is to set aside our egos and serve generously without regard to reciprocity or judgement. Today, Jesus takes this love all the way to the cross – to death.

When we hear the word “love,” I suspect we do not think of the battered body of Jesus hanging on a cross as our first image, do we? It’s because we all carry around illusions of what we think love is. We often find our experience of human love to be fickle and with strings attached. We experience love as conditional – something we get as a kind of reward if we are good little boys and girls but which is withheld when we misbehave. At times, the very people who say they love us really do so in order to manipulate or even abuse us. Oh, we human beings love, but even at our at best we do it imperfectly.

We also give our love and our hearts to people, ideas, and things which really are more attachments or addictions than anything else. We love our possessions, our families and friends, ideologies, and even our egocentric concept of who we think we are. We have difficulty loving beyond the familiar and the safe. So this is why, on this day, every single notion, every illusion of love we carry is shattered at the cross.

Did he make you cry, make you break down, and shatter your illusions of love? Is it over now, do you know how, to pick up the pieces and go home?

This man, Jesus of Nazareth, an innocent man convicted by the corrupt powers of his day and time who saw his teachings a threat to their love of power and control, shattered all of our illusions as his life poured out in love for the whole world. Not poured out for a few of his friend, or only for believers … but for the whole cosmos. The pieces and remains of his earthly ministry scattered: now residing in the minds and bodies of frightened disciples who have fled and women who stand watch and grieve. How do you pick up the pieces and go home? And it begs the question of whether or not we even should pick up the pieces, doesn’t it?

When our illusions of love are blown apart at the cross, perhaps it isn’t up to us to pick up the pieces. It may very well be that some of those pieces need to be left behind at the cross. Perhaps it is an invitation to leave behind those very things which are standing between you and the outpouring of Christ’s love for you: an opportunity to leave behind resentments, old wounds, suffering, addictions, attachments, and pain to make space for Christ’s real love, his love poured out this day, to enter your heart. If anything, perhaps we need to pick up the pieces and offer them to God alone for redemption and healing – an offering to let ourselves be remade, redeemed, renewed, resurrected.
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Did he make you cry, make you break down, and shatter your illusions of love? Is it over now, do you know how, to pick up the pieces and go home?

​In 1956, German social psychologist and humanist philosopher Erich Fromm wrote a book entitled The Art of Loving. He makes the case for love being a verb rather than a noun. He writes: “Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a ‘standing in,’ not a ‘falling for.’ In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.” It is primarily giving, not receiving.
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Tonight begins the Triduum – the Great Three Days wherein the Church recalls and recounts the final earthly days of our Lord Jesus Christ which culminates in his execution and resurrection. It is the incarnation of the art of loving. On this night, we hear from the Gospel of John: “I give you a new commandment: Love one another. As I have loved you, so are you to love one another.”

The word that Jesus uses for love is not the eros of romantic love or the philio of familial love: it is agape – the self-sacrificial love which manifests itself in selfless giving towards others. Not just selfless giving toward one object of your affection, but rather a self-giving for the sake of all. Loving in this way becomes a state of being, an embodied cosmic force.

On this night, Jesus disquieted the souls of his disciples by disrobing as a slave would, taking a basin and water and washing the disciples feet. It is a practice we will offer the option of doing this night in remembrance of Jesus’ act and I know this brings disquietude to us even today, but perhaps for different reasons. I sense our discomfort with this is primarily centered on the vulnerability of having another person touch our bare feet (it’s ok to admit this feels really weird). It’s one thing to have our spouse or partner give us a foot massage, but it’s quite another to have someone from church do this, right? While discomfort is discomfort, from my study of the Bible and its context, I sense there was a different motivation in why the disciples were uncomfortable with what Jesus did.

First century Rome, like other ancient cultures and even some in our world today, was a very classist society. Not only were there rigid social classes and structures, but there was no mobility between them. One could not really aspire to move into upper-echelons of society in that place and time. If you were a laborer, you would always be a laborer; if you were a king, you would always be a king and so would your descendants in perpetuity. Your place was determined by accident of birth, so to speak. Who you were was predetermined and one just accepted this as normative.

Into that rigid social structure we find Jesus of Nazareth – an itinerant, working-class. Pharisaic teacher. He gathers about him a group of men who are largely fishermen and other common laborers. In the innermost circle of disciples, there is an understood social order: Jesus is their teacher/leader, and the disciples are beneath him as those who learn (the meaning of the word disciple comes from the Latin discipulus which means “pupil” – one who is learning). So keeping in mind the rigid social structures, when Jesus willingly flips the social order by stripping and donning a towel like a slave to wash their feet, it did not feel right at all. In fact, it was all wrong!

Jesus upset the social order. He flipped the script. It isn’t supposed to work like this! Peter’s protestations are best understood in light of that. He likely was caught off guard by this: after all, he knew his proper place was beneath Jesus – he should be washing Jesus’ feet. This is why Jesus tells him, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” When Jesus warns him that if he doesn’t allow Jesus to wash his feet then Peter has no part in him, Peter then goes “all in” and wants his head and hands washed too.

After he is done, Jesus then gives the teaching about the example he has set of love in action. He reminds them the social constructs of class and who is better than who are not the ways of the Kingdom of God. He is promoting a very subversive vision of mutuality and service to each other and to the world. He says, “If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

As Christians, we know these things, but the question is, “Are we willing to actually do them?” Stanford Business School professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton have coined the phrase the “Knowing-Doing Gap” – that gap between knowing what to do and actually acting on the knowledge by doing it. It is a human problem and spans all of our existence, not just in the realm of business. To do what Jesus has told us to do requires us to subvert the social and power structures of our own day. It means … oh here comes that word again … knowing the dynamics of social privilege at work in our own culture and subverting those dynamics in acts of love and humble service to others. It is still risky business and it is the heart of what it means to love.

This is the core of what it means to be a faithful Christian because our faith calls us to risk for the sake of love. Fromm said it this way,

​Jesus judged love as his ultimate concern. He will risk everything to the point of death to love us. We know these things. How will we do them?