Except that it’s not really new at all, is it?
After all, in Leviticus 19, we are told to love both our neighbor and the stranger. What makes it new here is that Jesus shows us how to love: “Love as I have loved you.”
Hearing the story in John’s gospel of the last supper, tonight we celebrate the sacrament of the table and the gift that Jesus gives us in the Eucharist - his body and blood given for us.
Except that it’s not really just about Jesus and me, or you, is it?
Listening to Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, we are reminded that in the sacrament, we are bound together in the body of Christ, no longer living for ourselves but for Christ in us.
So, tonight we are witnesses not only to a new commandment and a new rite, but to a new understanding of the God who is revealed in Jesus in his last days in Jerusalem.
On this night, we are witnesses to the weakness of God — God who suffers in the world because of God’s love for the world.
Instead of insisting on the prestige and sovereignty that would accompany a triumphant Messiah, our suffering God settles in with the outcasts and the persecuted — the ones who aren’t allowed within the walls of the temple: the Samaritan woman, the man born blind, or, in modernity, the immigrant or the refugee.[i]
Instead of exercising absolute, authoritative or imperial power over the Roman soldiers or the Jewish authorities, our suffering God stands with Jesus when he is handed over to soldiers, humiliated and beaten. God stood with the marchers on the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday and with the Coptic Christians just four days ago on Palm Sunday in Cairo.[ii]
Later tonight we will witness the altar being stripped and laid bare, just as the soldiers who arrested Jesus on this night stripped him of everything they could.
And yet, he was not defeated, for he remained the Son of God.
Here, the altar candles will be snuffed out,
the chalice and paten will be handed over, and
the rich scarlet paraments will be removed.
The books containing God’s Word and the instructions for our communal worship will be closed and taken away.
The cross will be veiled and the light of Christ that is the Paschal candle will be extinguished.
On this night, Jesus teaches us the art of losing,
showing us that even when everything else has been taken away, God’s presence and love remains.[iii]
God’s power is revealed in God’s weakness, and we witness how “God is a God who is present in and works in human failures and helplessness….”[iv]
Because God loves, God does not manipulate us like a puppet master, nor is God a distant watch maker who sets a mechanism in motion and leaves it undisturbed to run down. Because God loves, God does not forsake us. God is with us, accompanying us in our suffering and grief, and working good out of what was intended for evil.
God was with Joseph when his brothers discarded him, and God is with the child who is left forgotten on a front porch in the cold. God was with Israel in exile and God is with the families in Syria who were attacked with chemical weapons. God was with Jesus in the garden when his disciples abandoned him, and God is with you when you feel like no one else is.
The good news of this night, is that when everything else has been taken away, God’s presence and love remains.
Let us pray…
Holy God,
Tonight as we witness the power revealed in your weakness, the love revealed in your Son,
Transform us by the saving power of Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection,
That we would be witnesses of your grace to the ends of the earth.
Amen.
[i] John D. Caputo. The Weakness of God. 45.
[ii] ibid
[iii] Richard Lischer. “Stripped Bare: Holy Week and the Art of Losing.” Christian Century.
[iv] Rowan Williams. The Wound of Knowledge. 5.
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