A Sacred Friendship
Today is perhaps the Church’s greatest festival of charity. Not charity in the modern sense that we so often hear, “Have you given to the charity yet?” Rather, in the much older sense of charity being a specific expression of love for others, usually evinced in acts of care and self-sacrifice. This association of charity comes, of course, from the scene revealed in the gospel passage. Jesus, gathered with his closest friends, foreshadows the sacrifice that is to come in his words about the bread and wine being his body and blood. In the same evening, he demonstrates profound charity by upturning his role as a teacher and master to wash the feet of his friends. Finally, we hear Jesus explain that this way of living, embodying deep charity, is not a suggestion but a new commandment.
This association with charity has led to the development of several traditions connected to today. There is this liturgy, which includes the washing of feet and remembers our Lord’s institution of the Eucharist. There is the Royal Mandatum, where Christian monarchs give alms to the poor from their personal funds. And there is the tradition of having the diocesan Chrism Mass on this day, where the bishop blesses and consecrates holy oils for the church’s ministries of care to the sick and suffering. Chrism masses are also traditionally where clergy renew their ordination vows, giving them a freshened sense of the servanthood to which they are called.
Much is made in Christian conversation about the servant nature of Christian life. To seek and serve Christ in others is one of our baptismal promises. We seek perfect freedom by submitting ourselves entirely to service to God, as the Book of Common Prayer reminds us. Today’s gospel passage reminds us that while we are, indeed, servants, we are not the sort of servants than many imagine upon hearing that word.
Servants are those who are, today, employed by another to provide service. In Jesus’ day that may have been true but was more often a reference to slaves of various kinds. People who owed service to another due to some kind of ownership arrangement. Servants who serve because they have no other choice have a very different relationship to their master than do friends who serve one another out of love. And this is at the core of what Jesus shares with his closest friends on this evening.
The depth of what Jesus’ is doing will not be clear for some days longer, but in offering himself to his friends, body and blood, in the meal they share, Jesus is drawing these people into a relationship much closer, much more intimate, than master and servant or even teacher and disciple. Jesus is drawing this circle into loving friendship, an extended family whose values will be known in the world by the love, the charity, they show to one another.
Over these next three days we will be confronted with reminders of the work of God in our midst. This work happens on a scale and at a depth that is impossible for us to truly understand. How can we understand what it means for God to take on human flesh, only to be betrayed by one of his closest friends, murdered by fearful earthly powers, and still bring about salvation for every one of us, our ancestors, and our descendants until the last day?
What does it mean for today’s joyful reprieve from Holy Week’s focus on the Crucifixion to also be tinged with the backdrop of Judas’ betrayal? What do we make of the weight of our own sin in relation to what must happen tomorrow? What is it for Jesus to proclaim love and charity, to wash the feet of even Judas, knowing what is to come the next day?
The answers to these questions are beyond us. They are worth our time as objects of contemplation and prayer, to help us understand better the nature of a God so loving that these events have come to pass. But the distance between us and true understanding of these mysteries is as great a distance as the east is from the west. And yet, it is into this mystery that Jesus invites us.
Far beyond servants of a master, Jesus calls us to friendship, to charity. It is into the very centre of all this that Jesus calls us to be. Where he sits with us, gives of himself in a sacred banquet, washes our feet, and commands us to do the same. It is in the centre of these great mysteries that we, with all of our joy and all of our betrayal, belong. And out of this place, we are called to bear love and charity that others may know who it was who called us there.
