We know, but will we do? - Maundy Thursday 2017

​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,

To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner. To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern – and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values

​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?