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Christ Church Morningside
at the Holy Thursday Eucharist, 5 April 2007 .
In time the day arrived – the house was clean and sparkling, flowers were strategically placed to hide stains on the coffee table and potted plants carefully positioned to hide the artistic contribution the children had added to the walls in indelible crayons. All went well at first. The pleasantries of polite company got them through the round of pre-dinner drinks and even 6 year old Sarah who had struck a deal with mum that she would go to bed once everyone was seated in the dining room seduced everyone with her charm.
To ease the blow of having to leave the party to go to bed, the young businessman asked his daughter to say grace before meals. Suddenly, the precocious child was overcome with shyness and protested that she didn’t know what to say. Hoping to make a good impression and more importantly to save the food from going cold, dad tried to coax her into it and told her just to say what she had heard mummy saying. The little girl looked at her mother rather quizzically and then with head reverently bowed and eyes firmly shut exclaimed to everyone’s astonishment: “Good God, why on earth did we invite these awful people to supper!”
Well here we are – a bunch of pretty awful people – Episcopalians and even Presbyterians – invited to supper by a man who took eating and drinking seriously and who gave some of his most important teachings over a meal shared with the awful folk of his own day. His eating habits and especially his guest list of tax collectors, prostitutes and other undesirables had incensed the Scribes and Pharisees. And who could blame them? Like good religious people they were simply doing what their mums and dads had told them: that they should avoid occasions of sin, be careful of the company they kept and above all keep themselves ritually clean and pure in obedience to the commandments laid down in the Law. And in so doing, like all good conservatives, they claimed to have God on their side. Nothing could be clearer: ‘If you keep the rules, the rules will keep you’ but since Jesus so blatantly didn’t, and wantonly demonstrated such disregard for acceptable table etiquette, he would have to be ruled out and firmly dealt with.
Its against this familiar background of old religious certainties that Jesus, the wandering preacher man, stands out like a sore thumb with his subversive slant on things and his going on about new commandments – when folk are overstretched keeping the ones they have already; challenging folk to love one another, even the awful folk who seem beyond the pale and urging religious people to start getting used to the company of those they have been told to avoid since those very people have already received their season tickets for the Kingdom of Heaven.
Sometimes we talk about the ‘Passion of Jesus’ as if it were confined to those 12 hours that began with his arrest, his trial, his torture and ultimately his crucifixion. And yet those crucial hours which are characterised by suffering are in some ways his second passion. The first passion of Jesus, if passion is understood as what consumed his interest, enthused him and really got him going for 30 plus 3 years was the Kingdom of God … that vision of a world in which everyone would participate in God’s blessing, in God’s promise and would have a fair share of the fruits of the earth. And it was precisely Jesus’s passion to bring about a new kind of world and to overthrow the status quo in which the few lorded it over the many and the rich gorged themselves while the poor went hungry that led inevitably to his second passion at the hands of that most unholy alliance between Imperial power and religious authority personified by Pilate and the High Priests. In other words it was what Jesus was passionate about that led to his murder and to talk of his passion, as if it could be confined to those last 12 hours leading up to 3 o’clock on Good Friday is to completely miss the vital and indeed fatal connection between his life and his death.
Failure to accept that connection leads Christians to view Holy Communion and indeed Holy Week in terms of the interior rather than exterior life, something that is all about heaven rather than about earth, a mystery that offers future guarantees rather than one which challenges present realities. And above all else divorcing Jesus’ death from his life leads to an anodyne and neutered religion, safely and securely quarantined from political and social life.
But that is not what we find tonight in the gospel offered for this commemoration of the Last Supper. On this night when Jesus instituted the Eucharist we might have expected the familiar and much loved words: ‘Take and eat this is my body. Take and drink this is my blood.’ But what we are offered are not so much familiari words as a shocking action that speaks more loudly: the host of the supper, assuming the slave’s place, kneeling on the floor to wash dusty and dirty feet. With the clock ticking and the time for words over, this is the final table teaching of a man whose closest companions still haven’t understood what his life was all about. And so laying aside his garments, just as he would lay aside his life a few hours later, Jesus pours water into a basin and begins to wash his disciples’ feet.
Whether they got the point we don’t know – it seems Peter didn’t - but what we do know is that the New Testament has preserved two ways of remembering Jesus. In remembrance of Jesus, Matthew, Mark and Luke invite us to break bread, while John alone invites us to keep his memory alive by washing feet.
Worship and Service – breaking bread and washing feet – belonged together in the life of Jesus then and in the life of his people, the church today. In his own life time Jesus was passionate to get across the message that we cannot have communion with God unless we are willing to have communion with those around us. I was hungry and you gave me to eat, thirsty and you gave me to drink … or as the letter of James puts it some years later, ‘How can you claim to love the God you cannot see when you fail to love your neighbour whom you can see?’
How each Christian and each church brings the breaking of bread and the washing of feet together is a very hard question to answer. There is a church in Glasgow which had a tradition of keeping the building open for personal devotion all day and being in the city centre many people came to the services or to sit quietly in prayer. When a new parish priest arrived, he was appalled by the numbers of homeless people who were sleeping in and around the church yard whom all these people had to pass on their way in and out of church. With the parish council’s agreement a decision was taken that the church would remain open IF for every hour of devotion the parishioners pledged as a parish to do one hour of service to the local community. Sadly within a week the church doors were firmly locked. People wanted God to themselves without getting their hands dirty.
Finding a way to bring the breaking of bread together with the washing of feet needs careful discernment according to personal and community circumstance but it is clear that any Christian or any church that can get through Holy Week without being challenged to close the gap between private devotion and public service is following an idol of their own making and not the one who washed feet before breaking bread.
And so tonight, as a first step towards closing that gap, those who will serve you communion - Mary, Gill and I - will first join Karen, Linda and John, the ministers of our local churches in washing your hands. A symbolic yet poignant reminder that those who seek God need to raise their eyes beyond the bread in their hands to recognize him also in the faces of those around them. A reminder too that God will not and cannot be privatised, bought or won by prayers and pious practices but only truly known in those people who take up towels and water and whose lives, like that of Jesus himself, admit no division between the things of earth and the things of heaven.
Let us pray that the passions of Christ will seriously infect each of us this Holy Week and compel us when our worship is over to let our service begin. Amen.
Rev Michael Paterson Curate Christ Church
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