Maundy Thursday 2009
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator
New York City

This is not an occasion to speak of beginnings, but that is what I plan to do.

No, this is not a time about beginnings; it feels much more like endings. Paul the Apostle, in the Corinthian correspondence tells us what happened the night he was betrayed, that night in which the forces of evil that eventually ended his ministry, the forces of death and suffering set in to do their worst. John, our patron saint, in the gospel, speaks of Jesus having loved us to the end. He was going to God. It was all over.

And tomorrow, Good Friday, it will feel as if we are at the nadir, at the very darkest, coldest ending of all. And yet, this story has to do with our beginnings. Follow my thoughts here:

John the Evangelist, as is his wont, has some fairly odd things to say today. One of the oddest is that little dialogue with Peter toward the middle of the story. ‘You are going to wash my feet? That cannot be! I have to do it; you will understand later, replied Jesus. Why just my feet, he asked? You have already bathed, said, Jesus, but you have been out all day, and it is just your feet that are dirty now.

You have already bathed. Remember that John was writing this story almost two generations after the events it purports to describe. And he was talking to a lot of people, who, as the gospel puts it, had already bathed. He was talking to the baptized—about their baptism.

What John had in mind, I think, was to use this passage as a reminder that all of who have bathed, who have taken the great water bath of baptism, are incorporated into a ritual life that involves the occasional washing again. The washing of confession and absolution. The washing of repentance before communion. The washing of restoration before you greet another Christian with the Peace. The little washings that follow the big one at our baptism.

Here at this the darkest, last moments of Jesus earthly ministry, the Lord invites his followers to turn the pages back to the beginning. He did this for Peter and his friends, and he does it to all of us tonight. And so we go back to the beginning.

The writer of Exodus tells us that God told his people that the time of the Passover would be the beginning of months, it would be the first month of the year. The calendar stops, and starts over. History stops, and starts over. Creation stops and starts over again. I suspect that the detailed urgings about having a lamb from the first spring birth is likewise an urging to go back to the beginning, stop the season and start again.

The escape, so detailed and cautious, with its protective caution about doorposts and smears of blood, is a way of talking about starting over again.

And, Paul the apostle, in the Corinthian correspondence talks about the tradition he hands on to the faithful in Corinth, how on the night he was betrayed, when things had sunk to their lowest, Jesus told his friends how they would always come to know him. By being in his body, by having his blood in our body. Washing, eating, tending to the blood, washing the feet, in all these ways, here at this moment at the end, Jesus tells us to go back to the beginning.

And that is precisely what we need. When our lives are riddled with sin and failure, we wish we could start over. We can. When our careers are sunk in pointless boredom, they can have meaning restored. When we are finding despair and hopelessness at every turn, there is one who has been there before us who offers us a new start, a new first month, a new year, the refreshing wash of a cool bath. What we need, when we are at our most honest, when the devices and desires of our own hearts are put away, what we need is a new beginning. And that is exactly what Jesus offers us.

And, at the end of life, at the very end, when this world has nothing more it can offer us, Jesus takes us to his table and strengthens our own body with his, and pumps the life giving blood of is life into our failing bodies. Even at the omega, there is the echo of the alpha. And the alpha is Jesus the Christ, whose traditions Paul remembered and told us about so that we might repeat them tonight.