In the name of the One whose love is making all things well – Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our processional hymn opened with “three holy days enfold us now.” We are entering into the Triduum, the name for the three days of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. Properly understood, these days constitute one unfolding drama which was enacted by Jesus Christ for us and for our salvation. This is why this evening’s liturgy does not conclude with a Dismissal, as we usually have. There won’t be a Dismissal until the conclusion of the Easter Vigil on Saturday evening because this is all part of one story, one liturgy, enfolding us over three holy days.
Since Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and the Easter Vigil all constitute one liturgy, I find it helpful to also have one sermon that unfolds throughout these three days. And for that to work, there needs to be a unifying theme or throughline to carry us. This year, it’s the theme on the Holy Week banner out front – “Encounter the love that is making all things well.” That’s what enfolds us over these three holy days. Borrowing a phrase from St. Julian of Norwich, we are encountering the love that is making all things well.
The understanding of love that will guid us through the Triduum comes from that well-known passage in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian Church: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” In each of the four sermons over the next three days, we’ll encounter the love that is making all things well as it bears, believes, hopes, and endures all things.
Tonight, we encounter the love that bears all things. The word “bear” in Greek means something along the lines of enclosing, protecting, concealing, sheltering, or sealing. Perhaps it’s that last one that is most helpful in thinking about how love bears all things – it’s like a seal that covers over a crack and prevents a leak. You remember those commercials for Flex Seal? Just slap that stuff on the crack and, voila, you’re good to go – you can go canoeing on a screen door. The love of Jesus Christ for us is, at least a little bit, like Flex Seal.
The reality is that we are all cracked and broken. Maundy Thursday is the densest in the Church year, as so many things are going on. We have the commandment to love one another and the humble example of the teacher washing his disciples’ feet. Then there’s the instruction to “do this in remembrance of me” as Jesus gives us the Eucharist as a pattern to follow not just in our worship, but in all our lives. And embedded in both the foot washing and the breaking of the bread is a crack that will grow into a chasm by Good Friday as the very curtain of the Temple is torn in half.
Jesus washes the feet of all of the disciples, including Peter who will deny that he has ever been associated with Jesus, Judas who will betray Jesus to those who will arrest and murder him, and the other remaining disciples who will abandon him in his greatest hour of need. Even his “inner circle” of Peter, James, and John will fall asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus asks them to keep watch and pray with him.
I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced these sorts of betrayals and rejections. I hope not, but I expect we all have. In some ways, it’s the denial and abandonment that sting worse than the outright betrayal. We can understand someone turning against us and becoming an enemy, but when our friends ghost us, pretending as if we don’t exist – that really hurts.
Throughout Holy Week, Jesus nearly always has a Psalm on his lips. Though the Gospel accounts don’t record it, I imagine Jesus had a portion of Psalm 55 on his mind: “For had it been an adversary who taunted me, then I could have borne it; or had it been an enemy who vaunted himself against me, then I could have hidden from him. But it was you, a man after my own heart, my companion, my own familiar friend. We took sweet counsel together, and walked with the throng in the house of God.” Martin Luther King put it this way, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Maundy Thursday is an emotionally heavy day; for after the Eucharist is concluded, we encounter this silence, abandonment, and utter devastation. The first thing that will happen is that the remaining Sacrament will be processed to St. Stephen’s Chapel where it will remain overnight in what is called an “Altar of Repose” – the space is made to look like a garden, like Gethsemane, which was an olive grove just outside the city walls of Jerusalem on what is called the Mount of Olives.
Before you leave this evening, you are invited to go into the Chapel to sit and be with Jesus as his presence is there in the remaining Eucharistic bread. What happens after the Eucharist has been removed from the Sanctuary is the Stripping of the Altar, meant to evoke the desertion of the disciples. What makes this is a church, a sacred space, isn’t so much the beauty of the arches, woodwork, and stained glass. To be sure, those are all beautiful – but there are beautiful libraries and mansions. And it’s not even the prayers that have been spoken here – goodness knows, plenty of prayers are said in jails, hospitals, and mountaintops, but none of those places are considered to be a sanctuary the way a church building is. Instead, the focal point of this building, the reason for the beauty and the foundation of the prayers is the presence of Jesus in this place, which is most fully real in the Eucharist. As we heard, Jesus tells us to do this in remembrance of him, “for this is his body, this is his blood.”
But once that presence of Jesus is removed, this is just another building. As the Sacrament is taken to the Altar of Repose, the lights will be dimmed, symbolizing the betrayal of Jesus by his disciples. The hymn that will be sung during this liturgical action is "Go to dark Gethsemane.” And if we hadn’t chosen that hymn, it would have been the one that begins with “Alone thou goest forth, O Lord.” Jesus goes forth alone for us and for our salvation.
And so, in this darkened space, we slowly and solemnly strip the space of all adornments, symbolic of how all of the disciples, ourselves included, abandon and reject Jesus, choosing our safety and comfort over following him. As this happens, the choir will chant Psalm 22, the psalm that Jesus himself will utter from the cross with his dying breath, saying “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The result being a barren church just as Jesus is left barren, except a few faithful women, to face his Passion.
The weightiness of this silence and abandonment is what Love Incarnate, what Jesus Christ, bears for us. We abandon God in things done and left undone. We forsake the mission of love entrusted to us. We reject the dignity of those we disagree with. We so often choose silence and play it safe instead of getting into “good trouble.” The logical outcome of our fleeting and fickle behavior should be a like-kind rejection. We have come to expect that the world operates on the logic of “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Perhaps that’s what leads St. Paul to elsewhere write, “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Yes, the advice we receive from the world might be to “not suffer fools.” But Love, indeed, suffers our foolishness, for Love bears all things. Jesus takes our rejection, our timidity, our uncertainties, our sins, our doubts, our cowardice, our selfishness and bears all of these things, bearing them up on the Cross and sealing them with his love.
The cracks that that we all bear and the brokenness that we cause – they will not lead to an opening of the floodgates against us. The love of Jesus is not given in proportion to our reciprocity. We might only love Jesus a little, but he will always love us into infinity and eternity. This is how John introduces this entire section: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” Jesus loves us beyond our ability to love him back; he loves us beyond our ability to understand; he loves us beyond our ability to earn.
Tonight, we see unfolding before us the love which enfolds us and is making all things well. For us and for our salvation, the love of Jesus bears all things, forever sealing you in God’s love.
