Maundy Thursday Sermon - Fr Charlie Annis CR
Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.
In the name of the Father…
“Unless I wash you, you have no share with me”. There are really just two things that I want to say to you this Holy Week and to spend the time that we have together trying to unpack them a little in the light of the events we are here to bear witness to. So what are they?
The first thing is that, if we imagine that the drama of Holy Week, which from this vantage point is supremely the drama of the Cross, is solely the drama of “what happens to Jesus” then we are in very real danger of failing to grasp the full measure of its significance. That is to say, unless we see that the drama of Holy Week is just as truly the drama of our own life in Christ, then we are in danger of imagining that what we are engaged in this week is nothing more than the reverent commemoration of history. That is the first thing.
And the second thing is that, because this is true, because what we see in the Cross of Jesus is not just the Cross of Jesus but the Cross we ourselves are invited to take up, because what we see in the Cross of Jesus is a foreshadowing of our own encounter with the Cross, the Cross is a reality which calls forth from us a response of the deepest ambivalence. Like the disciples in the gospel, we find ourselves hopelessly torn between the instinct to embrace the Cross as the one great and mysterious means of our salvation, and the equally strong instinct to flee from it with all our might.
These then are the two fundamental truths I want us to reflect upon as we journey through the coming days together.
Before we go any further, then, let me say a bit more about each of them and how they relate to what we are here to do this evening. First of all, what does it mean to say that the drama of the Cross is not simply the drama of what happens to Jesus, but the drama of our own life in Christ?
When we are baptised into the death of Jesus and signed with the sign of his Cross, the whole narrative arc of our life is taken up and united with the life of Jesus, above all with his passion, death and resurrection; so that thereafter we can truly say that the two stories — the story of our life and the story of Jesus — are no longer two stories but one. Another way of putting this is to say that in baptism the life of a Christian believer takes on a particular shape and, because it is into Christ that we are baptised, that shape is cruciform, it is cross-shaped. The life of the baptised person is a life that cannot come to its ultimate fulfilment except through an encounter with the Cross. And that is why the events of Holy Week can never be of purely historical interest for us. What we discover, as baptised believers, in the events of Holy Week, is that the narrative of our life has, in a sense, already been played out, it is finished, it has been played out in the very events we are about to bear witness to. That is what it means to baptised into the death of Jesus.
And yet at the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that all of this is just one side of the story, that there is another, very different side to this story, in which we recognise our life to be a narrative that has not yet been played out, whose course has not yet been determined, because here we all are in the middle of our lives making decisions every day that affect their course, choosing to take this path rather than that one. And this freedom we experience to determine the course of our lives is not a mirage or a fantasy, it is real.
It is, then, only when we hold these two truths together — that the destiny of our lives as baptised believers is inextricably bound up with the events of Holy Week, and yet that we really do retain the power to choose how to live our lives from day to day — that we can begin to understand the position we find ourselves in in relation to the events of this week.
In a nutshell, what we are confronted with in each of the saving events of Holy Week is not only an extraordinarily privileged encounter with our own destiny, but in each and every case with an invitation, an invitation to enter ever more deeply and willingly into that destiny. If it is true that, as baptised believers, we are not free to determine how our lives will come to their ultimate fulfilment, that is to say, we are not free to circumvent the Cross, then we are not for that reason merely passive. Above all, we can choose to resist. We can choose to go against the grain of our destiny. We can hold back. We can stall for time. And it is in this daily decision, whether to embrace the reality of the Cross or to flee from it, that the entire drama of our life in Christ consists.
So what then does any of this have to do with the story we have just heard in the gospel, and with what we are here to do this evening?
Well, one thing we have to understand about the disciples in the gospels, about Peter and Judas and the others, is that what the disciples represent, in holy week above all, is the human heart and mind struggling, and often failing, to come to terms with the Cross, not just as the destiny of Jesus, but as our own destiny as disciples of Jesus. In that sense, the disciples are, as always, our representatives in the great drama of Holy Week. And what we find again and again is that what this confrontation with the Cross produces in the disciples is the very same profound ambivalence I mentioned before. On the one hand the disciples are determined to embrace the Cross: “Let us go then that we may die with him” says Thomas. “Even if I have to die with you” says Peter “I will never disown you”. And yet, when faced with the reality of the Cross, again and again they flee from it. “God forbid it, Lord!” says Peter when Jesus speaks of his suffering and death, “This must never happen to you”.
And that is where all of this connects with the story we have just heard and with what we are about to do together this evening. Because, in the entire drama of this holy week, we could hardly hope for a clearer expression of this ambivalence than Peter’s reaction to the Lord’s offer to wash his feet.
Like all the events of Holy Week, we cannot grasp the meaning of the foot-washing until we recognise that what Jesus is offering Peter and the other disciples, even in this apparently mundane act of service, is the Cross. And it is only when we see this that we can begin to understand the strength of Peter’s reaction to the Lord’s offer — “You will never wash my feet” — that what Peter is refusing is not only, or even primarily, the washing of his feet but something far more important than this. Peter’s refusal of the Lord’s offer to wash his feet is a foretaste of that same rebuke he will offer to Jesus when the Lord speaks about his coming suffering and death: “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” What Peter is refusing, in other words, in his refusal of the Lord’s offer to wash his feet is, above all, the Cross. That is why the stakes of this apparently simple gesture of kindness are as high as “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me”. Likewise, we cannot understand the strength of Peter’s refusal until we see that it is not only the Cross of Jesus he is rejecting, but his own Cross. When Peter says to Jesus “you will never wash my feet”, he is not only saying of the Cross “this must never happen to you Lord”, he is also quite definitely saying “this must never happen to me”. And, by the same token, why is it his head, and hands and feet Peter offers to Jesus when he so suddenly changes his mind in tonight’s gospel? They are the head and hands and feet he is offering to be pierced and nailed to the Cross and to be beaten and crowned with thorns.
What we see in the story of the foot-washing, then, is only the first and clearest example of the deep ambivalence the Cross produces in the disciples of Jesus, the great and mighty tussle within us all between fleeing from the Cross and embracing it, between “you will never wash my feet” and “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head”. It is an ambivalence we will encounter again and again the closer we come to the Cross, both in this Holy Week and in our own life in Christ. And so it is fitting that it is that very same ambivalence that is at the heart of the unique ceremony we are also going to participate in tonight: the ceremony of the the Judas Cup. And although it is the Judas cup that the chapter will drink from, it is those deeply ambivalent words of St Peter that we will all be saying together: “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you”.
And so as we come to have our feet washed this evening and to acknowledge our share in this cup of betrayal, let us recognise the journey we ourselves are beginning, and have already begun, let us acknowledge with St Peter our desire to be faithful to Christ, to take up the Cross and follow Jesus, but let us also recognise with Peter, and with Judas, our equally strong instinct to flee, and let us then, with the Lord, turn our eyes resolutely to the Cross.
Amen.