This LCA provides this sermon, edited for lay-reading, with thanks to the original author.
John 13:1-17, 34, especially vv.1,14-15, 34 Jesus loves us completely, and asks us to do the same.
It is the last night of Jesus’ earthly life. He is eating the Passover meal with his closest friends and followers. As he takes and breaks the bread, and gives thanks to God, he says: “Take and eat; this is my body given for you.” Then, as he hands around the cup of wine, he says: “Take and drink. This is my blood of the new covenant, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.”
So powerful and so significant was Jesus’ action that, as we well know, the Christian Church has made it a central part of its worship ever since. We call it Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record it in their Gospels, and as we heard in our second reading, Paul also recounts what Jesus did that night. And John? Not a mention of it, even though he records that Jesus and his disciples were eating the evening meal.
Had he forgotten about it? I doubt it. Didn’t he think it was important? No, he was too solid a theologian to think it unimportant. I believe John deliberately omits it, because it was already in the other Gospels, and instead provides a theological and practical commentary on the significance of Jesus’ death for us. In the end, when Jesus speaks of the “new commandment”, it is only new because it is God’s desired outcome of the “new covenant” sealed by his death.
So let’s return to John’s record of that evening. It is a tense and threatening time, for the Chief Priests and Pharisees were already actively seeking to arrest and kill Jesus. John invests the events with even greater significance. “Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father.” “Jesus knew that the Father had given him complete power; he knew that he had come from God and was going to God.” In other words, what was happening had to be viewed in the light of the whole plan of salvation. This was the time when God’s plan of salvation was coming to completion; this was the climax to the ministry of Jesus in the world.
Then Jesus strips off his clothes, and probably wearing only a loin-cloth, gets down on his hands and knees to wash the feet of his disciples, acting the part of a household slave or lowly servant. Against the background that John has painted, what a surprising, strange thing for Jesus to do. The disciples, I’m sure, would have been staring at Jesus and asking, possibly out loud: What’s going on? Why is Jesus doing this? Simon Peter, as usual, can’t restrain himself and blurts out: You’re not going to wash my feet, are you, Lord?
Jesus replies to Peter: “You don’t understand now what I am doing, but you will understand later.” And when is that “later”? Is it a few minutes later, when he had completed washing their feet and put his clothes back on, when he tells them: “I have set an example for you, so that you will do just what I have done for you.”? Did Jesus expect them to go around washing other people’s feet? I don’t think so. Was he asking them to do acts of humble service for others? Yes, but more than that even. They would fully understand what Jesus was doing when he went to the cross for them. Only then would they understand how completely Jesus loved them and served them. That, in John’s typical double-meaning, is how Jesus loved his own to the very end of his life, and how he loved them completely, perfectly.
There too is the full weight of the “new commandment” that Jesus gives, and which we celebrate this evening. “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
It’s oh so easy to water down what Jesus said and did that evening, and to hear only a nice generalized message about copying Jesus’ example, and being kind and loving, and serving others. No, let’s hear again the radical call of Jesus, who gave himself completely for us. That is the pattern of life to which we are called.
And that is also the trumpet call of the meal of the new covenant that Jesus gave us. Too often we hear only half (yes, it is the most important half !) of what takes place in this gospel meal. We hear and believe that Jesus gave his body and shed his blood in a loving sacrifice for us, so that we might have forgiveness and salvation. Treasure that – but hear also each time you receive the Lord’s Supper the summons to give yourselves in love for others, or as Paul puts it in Rom. 12, to offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, or as the Gospel song says, to be bread shared out to the world and to pour out the wine of our love for others.
So, come and receive, and then, go and give. And, remember, no act of service is too humble for those who follow Jesus, the master who came, not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life for others. Amen and amen !
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