Maundy Thursday 2008
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter

It was the best of times and the worst of times.  This is truly the night of the great reversal.  Is there anything more poignant than the great fellowship of the Seder meal and the hope expressed in it, the warmth of the community gathered with Jesus around the table, and then the fall into betrayal and terror?

Jesus is the only one who knows what is going on.  The others, like all of us mere humans trying to live our lives one day at a time, are blind sided.  It is only in retrospect that we understand some of the more difficult things of our lives, if then.

The disciples may have pondered what Jesus was doing when he washed their feet, and what he meant when he took some bread from the Passover meal and said, This is my body, and passed a cup of the wine around and said, This is my blood. 

And in the middle of such a great gathering how much attention could they pay to the words, one of you will betray me.  Oh, surely, none of the beloved would do that.  And none would deny him, and none would run away, and yet, they all did.

We enjoyed our time of fellowship a short while ago over the wonderful agape meal, and at least some of us enjoyed the footwashing or submitted to it.  Those of us who were privileged to help certainly considered it a privilege.  We would like to think that we could just keep these wonderful feelings of community and intimacy, of tenderness, of caring and being cared for, all the time.  But that is not how life seems to work.

Enter the wormwood and the gall, the range of the downside of life from petty annoyances to terrible tragedies and losses that seem beyond redeeming.  How amazed  we are that through the events of this night, this last night of his life, Jesus could hold it all together in love. 

He gave everything he could to those who were with him.  John says, “Having loved his own while he was in the world, he loved them to the end.”  He washed their feet to show that their leadership of the new community was not to be as the lords of this world.  He gave them an even greater meaning to their sacred meal than the Passover.  It would be this meal that would enable them to be one with him and one another even when they could not physically be together.  He knew of their upcoming betrayal and denial and abandonment and did not judge them for it.  He knew that they would return when he returned, except for Judas, who could not bear what he had done and did not stay around for the forgiveness that surely would have been forthcoming.

And I guess that is what I would like to emphasize tonight:  Jesus ability to forgive—to forgive those who betrayed, denied and abandoned him, and those who crucified him.  Father, forgive them. 

In his unwillingness to judge us as unworthy of forgiveness, he gives us a model for life together.  Certainly there is no greater way to love than to forgive.  In a family, there are many stings and greater hurts, and yet there is no end to the forgiveness that we can give each other if we love each other.  In a Church Community the same is true.  We will step on each other’s toes and feelings, all out of the best of motives, and yet, forgiving love can restore us all. 

In the larger arena of Global Church and World, we struggle to make this forgiving love a reality also.  It is hard when we do not think we are all working toward the same goal.  Yet, again, Jesus still remains our model.  We refuse to do harm to others even when they intend to harm us.

Richard Rohr challenges us to agree to bear the mystery of God:  God’s suffering for the world and God’s ecstasy in the world.  To bear in ourselves the sorrows of those who sorrow and to likewise share the joys that are possible in this brief, earthly life.  It is not to take on one without the other; it is to hold the tension of the two together, like the two directions of the cross.

This is a large task.  None of us can do this without the grace of God.  Yet, it is precisely the grace of God we are offered as we offer ourselves to live forgiven, loving lives, rippling out in ever larger concentric circles.

Tonight we focus on our need for forgiveness and our need to give forgiveness, as we betray, deny, abandon, and as we are betrayed, denied and abandoned.  And to do it all with the great sense of God’s great love and Jesus’ great example.

Amen.