Maundy Thursday                                The Rev'd James Ross Smith

Exodus 12:1-14a;                                 April 5, 2007

Psalm 78:14-20, 23-25                          Mandatun & Solemn Mass 

Corinthians 11:23-26(27-32);                  of the Lord's Supper

John 13:1-15 

 

On Ash Wednesday, after the morning Masses, I was standing at the crossing at the parish where I work, the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, Times Square. # 1 Though the workday had already begun, people were still lining up to receive their ashes. At one point, three women came into the church. One of them, I soon found out, had turned eighty-four that very day. They were very friendly. They received their ashes, went to the Lady Shrine, lit a candle, said a quick prayer; and then, seeing that I was free, they came back to chat for a moment. They were going to a matinee to celebrate the birthday. They had lots of questions, especially about the building. They told me that they were Roman Catholic. I was surprised when they also told me that they knew that Saint Mary's was an Episcopal church; so we talked church history for a bit and then the older woman looked me in the eye and said, “Oh, none of that really matters to me – after all, God is one, yes?”

 

Now, that startled me. She didn't say, “After all, we worship the same God, don't we?” Hers was such a simple statement. It reminded me of the Shema: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one”; it also reminded me of the first of the Islamic “twin testimonies”: “I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except God, the one...”

 

I thought, this is something basic, something essential. Begin Lent here, with God , not in the usual place, with myself, my trying to get it right, my failing, inevitably, to get it right.

 

Her words stayed with me. A couple of weeks later – it was a Saturday afternoon, late in the day – the days were already getting longer. Finally, there was a hint of spring in the air. I'd been cooped up in our apartment in Brooklyn all day long, all by myself, trying to get caught up, a bit self-obsessed to tell the truth. Around 5:00 o'clock I forced myself to go out to take a walk. The day was beautiful – windy, a bit wild even. As I walked east on Atlantic Avenue # 2, I saw that the sky was faintly pink, reflecting the beginnings of a sunset over the river right behind me. I was walking on a rather down-at-the-heel sort of block when I passed a small grocery store, nothing fancy. As I walked by, I saw that the grocer was standing in the middle of the store. He was barefoot and was standing on a small prayer rug, hands upraised. He was saying his afternoon prayers. Oddly enough, it was a bit like one of those Edward Hopper paintings: an urban moment observed, at a distance, through a storefront window — though I don't think Hopper would have found the image particularly interesting. The man wasn't at all sad or alienated. He was praying, talking to God, maybe hoping for God, right there in the middle of the everyday. “Heaven in ordinary,” is the way George Herbert puts it in a poem called “Prayer.” The man in the grocery store wasn't alone. It felt like God was there, right there in the middle of the city; and as I walked east on Atlantic Avenue, where you can buy antiques from gay men — some with a good eye — and, some... not so good; where you can get excellent jerk chicken from the Jamaican woman who used to be a model; where you can purchase copies of the Koran and incense and halal meat from immigrants from Yemen and Sudan; and I thought how beautiful it all was, but also how messy: so many differences, so many questions, arguments, uncertainties, feelings; so much struggle and striving, and, yes, hope and laughter and playfulness and joy. Don't get me wrong: this was no epiphany. I can't say that I loved all my neighbors. (I mean, is it really necessary to spit on the sidewalk?) But I did see that for us, for the members of the Body of Christ, it is impossible to say “God is one,” without also somehow talking about Atlantic Avenue and Elm Street and Old Campus and The Hill, without talking about the messiness and the joy, about death and life, cross and resurrection.

 

The Christian understanding of God, Christian language about God, is a beautiful thing, but it isn't simple, that's for sure. For us, God is one, but we also confess that “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God...through whom all things were made”; and so, for us, there is one God and He is Love, but the one who is Love is never, has never – and here language fails us….the one who is Love has never been “alone,” gazing within, in an act of pure self-contemplation – for how then could He be Love?; and so we say that from all eternity the Father has loved the Son and the Son the Father, and some would say that their love is a person, who is the Holy Spirit. Meister Eckhart, a spiritual teacher who lived during the Middle Ages, once said, “St. Paul...called [Christ] the fruitfulness of the Father and the image in the Father, working with the Father to bring forth His person....To speak in parable, the Father laughs into the Son and the Son laughs back to the Father; and this laughter breeds liking, and liking breeds joy, and joy begets love, and love begets person, and person begets the Holy Spirit….” # 3 Eckhart's parable reminds us that God did not create the world, or us, because He had to. Creation was an act of love, a love that pours forth from the very heart of God, from the very heart of the Trinity; and you would think that a love as powerful as that could prevent every evil; but, of course, that is not true. We know the story: sin and death enter the world, most terribly the sins of falsehood and suspicion; the sins of rivalry and envy; and, inevitably, the sins of hatred and murder; and yet, God does not give up and He does not stop loving. He does not treat creation as if it were some kind of terrible mistake. Again and again He acts: we thank Him for all those “mighty acts” at every Eucharist; and tonight, we gather to begin a liturgy that will not end until Easter Eve, at the Vigil. And during these three days we assemble to thank God and to praise Him for the mightiest of all His mighty acts: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” [John 3:16]; and to understand what that might mean, we listen again and again to God's holy word. Tonight we begin with Exodus: the God who created us in freedom so that we could freely love Him and each other refuses to allow His people to live as slaves (though long centuries would go by before most anyone understood the full and universal significance of that refusal). God leads His people through the Red Sea to freedom; but tonight the first reading does not tell us about the passage through the Red Sea . We begin earlier in the story: the people are still in Egypt, in darkness, in “a night of watching,” a night of urgency and fear; the fear of death itself; and the Lord passes over the land, sparing the children of Israel; and God asks for a sacrifice – the sacrifice of the Lord's passover – which is to say the passage from death to life, from slavery to freedom, from fear to joy; and He tells the people to mark their doors with the blood of an unblemished lamb. The sacrifice speaks, to be sure, of freedom's cost — and Israel is not allowed to forget it. The people must show hospitality to the stranger, for they had themselves been sojourners and strangers in a foreign land; and the people are also reminded that, though they are meant to celebrate their freedom, they are not supposed to rejoice at the death of the Egyptians; and when the early Christian teachers, the Fathers, read this story, they couldn't help but see Christ at the heart of it – they were sure that the bloody marks on the doorposts had been made in the sign of the cross; and that the paschal lamb was surely an image of Christ himself: the innocent victim, the Son who obeys the Father and becomes human; the Son who obeys and suffers and dies so His brothers and sisters can live; and in all this – the passing over and the passing through, the blood, the lamb, the sea, the marks on the door – in all of this the Fathers see grace, they see sacrament; they see the oil and water of baptism and the sacrifice of the Eucharist. They see the passage from death to life; and they see the Lord living, and present, even as they continue to wait for His return. They also see a people, a new people, a body – yet another sacrament: God present in us, not just as individuals, but as sacrament – Christ alive, present in our bodies, in the flesh, as His Body, a community, the church. # 4

 

That is why on this night we also read the story of the footwashing and why we obey our Lord's command to wash each other's feet. Jesus is not content just to say “love.” He knows that that is not enough; and so He gets down on His hands and knees and shows us the Son who comes to live among us as a servant, the Son, “who though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped…” [Philippians 2:6].

 

Earlier this year, I went to the recent, remarkable exhibition of Spanish art at the Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan . My favorite thing there was Francisco de Zurbarán's Agnus Dei (you know the image well; you used it a year or two ago to illustrate your Holy Week flyer). It's a not a big picture, but I was not the only one who felt its power. One reviewer said, “The most powerful moment of surreal disruption [in the show] occurs at the very outset of the exhibit, near the bottom of the ramp, where the curators have hung Zurbarán's Agnus Dei . The painting depicts a lamb, legs trussed, patiently awaiting the knife. A great work of religious art, this Lamb of God, placed among browsers under the Guggenheim sky, looks as naked, exposed, and vulnerable as anything I've ever seen. It stopped me dead.” # 5  I think that the reviewer must surely have had “eyes to see.” The painting is truly an incredible thing, and it's power comes, in part, from the layers of meaning encoded in that small rectangle, in that picture of a small lamb, that picture that seems to say, “Behold this Lamb of God – naked, exposed, vulnerable — and praise Him. For He is the innocent victim who obeys; who chooses to go to His death; to die for us, so that we might live, so that we might put an end to the endless cycle of violence and retribution; the Paschal Lamb who goes to the cross so He can show us who our Father really is, so that we, His brothers and sisters, can spread the good news that God is not a God of vengeance and never has been; that our God does not just speak about love, He does love; to show us that God invites us to join Him in that work: serving, forgiving, washing feet, reconciling, sharing our gifts, sharing ourselves, refusing to hold on to our pride, our possessions, our lives, refusing to hold on: as if those things were ever meant to be hidden, hoarded – grasped. # 6

1 At 145 West 46 th Street , New York , NY . See http://www.stmvnyc.org .

 

2 Atlantic Avenue is a main thoroughfare in New York City 's Borough of Brooklyn. It runs east-west, ending at the Hudson River .

 

3 Slightly adapted from a citation of Eckhart, Sermon 18, in Radcliffe, Timothy, O.P., Seven Last Words, new edition, (London: Burns & Oates, 2004): p. 27. Radcliffe was the Master General of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans), 1992–2001.

 

4 See Daniélou, Jean, S.J., The Bible and the Liturgy ( University of Notre Dame Liturgical Studies III) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press), 162-76.

 

5 Stevens, Mark, “New York Magazine,” December 4, 2006 (http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/24742/; accessed on April 18, 2007).

 

6 In addition to the works cited above, I also found the following useful as I prepared to preach the Triduum: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter (Ressourcement / Retrieval & Renewal in Catholic Thought), translated and with an introduction by Aidan Nichols, O.P. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990); James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998); Sandra M. Schneiders, Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel , revised and expanded edition, with a Study Guide by John C. Wronski, S.J. (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003). (Schneiders' book is really quite brilliant. Her approach is, first of all, “historical-critical,” but she manages to summarize, assimilate, digest, and evaluate several decades' worth of critical work on John, not just for its own sake, but in order to make the historical work available for her reflection on the theology and spirituality of the Fourth Gospel. The book is written in an approachable and manageable style, and, especially in its latest edition, would be a wonderful study guide for both groups and individuals. See also, David F. Ford, The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House Co., 1997) and Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The latter is rather technical, since Ford engages with currents in modern philosophy; Shape of Living would be a more comfortable read for the reader who is not an expert. Ford is an Anglican and is, at present, Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge . He received a Master's degree in Sacred Theology (S.T.M.) from Yale's Divinity School . See also Samuel Wells, Power and Passion: Six Characters in Search of Resurrection ( Grand Rapids , MI : Zondervan, 2007). Wells is an Anglican and was ordained priest in the Church of England. After serving as a parish priest for fourteen years, he came to the United States . He is the Dean of the Chapel at Duke University and Research Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School . Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, chose Power and Passion as his official “Lent Book, 2007.”