The Night Love Stooped

Photo by Rey Proenza on Unsplash

“But enough about me,” the character played by Bette Midler says after going on and on. “Let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?” It’s an old line, but it still lands.

Perhaps we laugh because it feels a little too recognizable, too much like us in our less-than-best moments. We are tempted to worship what someone once called the Almighty I. Even our lofty words can bend in a selfward direction. “I love you” can become “I love what you do for me,” or “I love how you make me feel.”

We are not practiced in a love that costs us. The aftertaste of materialism, self-pampering, and habitual me-ism is a life that turns inward. The soul, meant to unfold outward, begins instead to contract.

Today, though, on Maundy Thursday, for those who keep the church calendar, we glimpse another way to live, a deeper way to be in the world, another way to love. We find our eyes pointed to hope and meaning beyond our little selves. Here is a way that seems so small and ordinary, we might overlook its subtle significance. 

But at table, in what we call the Last Supper, there plays out a drama that shows an alternative to the temptation, as someone put it, to diddle around with itsy-bitsy concerns, with itsy-bitsy meals and journeys and friends for itsy-bitsy years on end.

Instead, in the Maundy Thursday service some of us will observe, we see an almost crazy act, at least in the wider culture’s eyes. We see love doing the unthinkable: love walking without flinching into self-sacrifice. Love lofted above the self that always clamors for more, for me, for mine.

John’s Gospel tells us that “Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father.” And then Jesus and his disciples sit down to eat supper in a rented room upstairs in a private home.

Simple enough.

But then there’s this: “during supper Jesus, knowing … that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself.  Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.” 

The disciples had seen Jesus heal the blind, embrace the marginalized, bring a dead man back to life. They had walked into Jerusalem to the cheers and waving palm branches of an excited crowd – a mass of people jumping and shouting like fans at a rock concert.

The disciples can almost taste the victory: the victory of the coming kingdom of Jesus over the corrupt kingdom of Herod.

Luke writes that as they ate the disciples planned the new government, arguing over which of them would fill the top cabinet posts.

But watch Jesus. How he responds: For while they obsessed about their status and perks and what they had coming, Jesus got up. He took off his outer garment and tied a towel around his waist. He picked up a basin and a pitcher of water. And he stooped. I see a world of meaning in that little word: stooped.

Kneeling down, he crouched at his disciples’ feet. His followers were stunned.

Now, to wash a guest’s feet was a customary courtesy in the first century. There were no cement sidewalks in Palestine. All the pathways were tamped-down dirt. When the weather was dry they were dusty. When it rained, they were muddy. Since people wore sandals, feet became grimy.

You’d take care of the feet when coming as a guest to someone’s house. If a man was poor, he rinsed his own feet. If a man was rich and a person of prestige, only his servants would wash his feet and those of his guests. So it was common enough.

But not like this. For think of this: The Lord of the universe, the incarnate Son of God, lays aside his heavenly glory. He kneels.

He cradles his followers’ calloused, bunioned feet in his hands. As a servant would, he eases away the grit and sweat.

And there’s this: He does it not only to the loyal disciples. He washes the feet of the one who will betray him, the feet of his opposer, his betrayer, one wanting to do him harm. The one who would soon set into motion the final events leading to a tortuous death.

One morning years ago I asked the guys at our morning workout, during a brief devotional we had afterward, what does it mean to live this out, what might this mean for the challenging relationships we might face in the coming day, the coming week?

One guy said, “This story reminds me to be willing to take the first step when there’s a situation needing reconciliation.” I like that.

It’s different than what I saw captured in a book title: How to Argue and Win Every Time.  But we are called not to guard ourselves or win at all costs. When I counsel people about relationships I talk about active listening, not self-centered or passive listening. Active listening cares more about what the other is trying to say than what I want to blurt in reply. Sometimes it takes great energy to listen that way. To care that way. Sometimes it costs us.

We see the harder edge of it in this story, read in so many churches today and tonight. What Jesus does works like an antidote to our instinct to promote ourselves, to outargue an opponent, to chase status even when it costs someone else.

It’s a blessed alternative to how in our souls’ smallness we hunker down and think only of self-protection and self-defense.

But we should be honest. There is something in what Jesus does that runs so roughshod against our habits of mind that it can feel beyond us. This is more than the fruit only of sheer willpower or good intentions.

So thank God for what this evening’s account offers us. It gives not only an example, but also a gift: a mercy without measure, and yet made near, lived out and tangible, in a story so concrete that it steadies us. It’s so moving it draws us into the costly, enlarging love on display here. There we find warming help for the things love will ask also of us.

Where You Can Find Me

Near Nashville:

Book signing / Meet the Author The Fellowship Coffee House 2944 US-31W, #105 / White House, TN, Saturday, April 4, 9-11 am.

Book signing / Meet the Author The Rabbit Room (North Wind Manor) Wednesday, April 15, 2-4pm https://www.rabbitroom.com 3321 Stephens Hill Ln, Antioch, TN 37013

In Nashville:

Preaching at 7:30, 8:45, 11 am services, with book signing at 10:05 am, Sunday, May 3, St. George’s Episcopal Church, 4715 Harding Road 37205.

Preaching at the 9:30 am service, with book signing to follow: Sunday, May 31 at 10:45, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, 4800 Belmont Park Terrace, Nashville, 37215.