Maundy Thursday 2025, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church

Here we are, siblings in Christ, embarking together on the journey of Christ’s passion, through the suffering and love which is Holy Week. And it unfolds for us tonight in the midst of a love feast. 

In the narrative of Jesus’ passion as unfolded in the Gospel according to John, the story begins to unfold six days before the passover. Jesus and his disciples returned from a time hiding in the wilderness out of the fear and uprising that followed Jesus’ raising of his friend Lazurus from death back to life. After some time apart, Jesus came back to Bethany to be with his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus.  The return was dangerous for Jesus and it was dangerous for them, too…but they are all together again in this story, because of love. 

In the midst of a dinner party thrown for her teacher and friend, Mary left and returned with a jar of perfume…not a little vial…imagine a full pound of pure, essential oil. Breaking open this lavish offering, she anointed Jesus’ feet and wiped them with her own hair, the prophetic and bitter-sweet aromatic of spikenard sinking into his flesh and being absorbed by her own hair as she washed and anointed his feet. And, as recounted for generations to come in a sensory memory that has never left us: the scent of the perfume filled the whole room. 

That night was lavish…scandalous according to Judas…and heartbreaking if we consider the foreshadowing. In my view, the holy nature of Mary’s discernment of serving at the feet of Jesus with that abundant outpouring of love was a gift even sweeter than the scent of the perfume.

Mary’s love for Jesus included her willingness to see that moment for what it was, even when that vulnerability opened her to harsh critique, judgement, loss, and grief. Mary of Bethany knew what she was doing: she had sat at Jesus’ feet, learned Jesus’ teaching, loved Jesus enough to give him an earful a short time earlier when he arrived at their home too late, after Lazurus had died. Mary saw Jesus’ vulnerability and grief over Lazarus, she witnessed his divine gift of returning her brother’s life and she understood the cost of that outpouring of Jesus’ own love. That love changed her, empowered her, emboldened her.  She gave up her safety and all regard for conventional propriety once again to invite and care for Jesus in her home. And I believe she discerned all along, with every preparation for that meal, what she needed to do.  

Just as Jesus knew all along what he needed to do, for the love of the whole world.

Love changes us.  Love empowers us.  Love emboldens us.

I am going to make my own potentially scandalous suggestion that it was Mary’s outpouring of love at that meal that changed, empowered and emboldened Jesus, too.

And that, my friends, is where I invite us to enter this Gospel lesson tonight.  

We encounter Jesus now in Jerusalem, and we know he didn’t sneak in quietly. Palms and branches were waved, cheers and shouts and noises ensued even beyond what we recreated here in the basement of Sunday. The people of Jerusalem were preparing to celebrate Passover, the Jewish festival recounting the historical liberation of God’s chosen people from their Egyptian captors. The people of Jerusalem, which was also occupied under Roman rule at that time, wanted liberation.  They wanted a savior, a messiah, a grand figure who would right the wrongs, let the oppressed go free and usher in a new day for the people chosen of God. Jerusalem was a giant street festival at that time; even gentiles…like the Greeks…had come into Jerusalem for the festivities and were seeking out and asking for Jesus, hoping he might just be the person to set their liberation into motion.  Hosanna in the highest.  

That was Sunday.  

And now, it is Thursday.  The days were streaming by and Jesus, human and divine, knew that his days were numbered. 

But in those passing days in Jerusalem, Jesus could not have forgotten Mary’s anointing. Mary’s anointing almost certain broke his heart open with a vulnerability that only love can give us. It is that heartbreak that helps us understand the passion…the interconnection of love and suffering.  Jesus, wholly human and wholly divine, understood the magnitude and meaning of Mary’s anointing.  He might even still have smelled the perfume on his own feet as he entered the room and sat at the table with his friends for what we have come to know as the Last Supper. Jesus, who had preached throughout his ministry that the last would be first, that the one who is truly the greatest is the one who serves, now stood at what he knew was the precipice of love, of passion and compassion, the great gift of love and suffering that he would take on not only for a few of his beloved friends, but for all.  

And having loved his own while he was in this world, he loved them to the end.

Holding all of these things in his own loving heart, in the midst of supper Jesus got up, wrapped a towel around his waste and picked up a bowl and pitcher.  Then…imagine this…going person by person among his disciples who were seated around him at that festival table, he knelt down on the floor and began to wash their feet. Every one of them, even Peter who at first pulled back from the ridiculous vulnerability of the idea. Then in true character when encountering the loving push-back of his teacher when his reaction kept him from seeing the deeper lesson…Peter offered his whole, full self.  Jesus keeps going…this is taking a long time, I have no doubt…and reaches even the feet of Judas who would soon betray him.  Jesus, their teacher and friend and savior, washed his feet.  He washed everyone’s feet: their dirty, smelly, road-worn feet.

If you feel the discomfort of that, you’re exactly where you need to be.  Don’t shy away from it.

Our Gospel lesson and our Epistle lesson converge at this point, as Jesus returns to the table with his friends and we hear the words spoken at this love feast that forms our sacramental lives in each celebration of the Holy Eucharist.  Jesus who is the host and the guest; Jesus who is the teacher and the servant; Jesus who is God incarnate and fleshy, mortal human, heart full and breaking open to reveal in that space the overflowing and abundant love that like the aroma of Mary’s perfume filling the house would outpour from him to fill the whole world.  

Love changes us.  Love empowers us.  Love emboldens us.

Friends, we are invited to this table and to this feast with Jesus.  We are invited with our doubts, with our incredulity, with our profound discomfort, with our desire to step away or to say, “no Jesus, let me wash your feet instead of you washing me.” Throughout this night and in the solemnity of Good Friday and the emptiness of Holy Saturday, we will keep feeling caught in the middle of this dialogue between the profound suffering and profound love of holy week.  We will fight the urge to move away.  And yet we are invited to remain on this journey with Jesus.  And we, too, will be changed. Because love changes us.

Where will we, hearts broken open by love, find ourselves kneeling at the feet of another, serving with a love that has permeated us?

Where will we, empowered to become vessels of Christ’s love in the world, find ourselves breaking open to serve the least, the lost, the grieving, the lonely?

Where will we, emboldened by the radical nature of Christ’s love, bravely speak the Good News of Jesus Christ that centers love, that breaks down the barriers of oppression and ushers forth the realm of Christ on earth, as it is in heaven?

Love changes us.  Love empowers us.  Love emboldens us.

Tonight, Jesus turns over the tables of our lives just like he overturned the money-changers in the temple.  Except this time, the catalyst and agent of change is the profound love of God for the world, a love so profound that God pours forth God’s incarnate self to be betrayed, handed over to suffering and death, to become the love-offering for the whole world.  

It’s lavish.  It’s scandalous.  It’s life-altering.

And it’s a gift freely given to us, not out of our own deserving or even our ability to ask.  Simply out of a love we cannot humanly imagine or understand.

But our host, Jesus, does.  

And having been broken open by love, he extends a new commandment to his friends: love one another. 

Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

So here we are friends, sibling disciples and followers of Christ. In a world where love and empathy are being sidelined, we have the counter-cultural ability and command to center it.

It is Jesus who invites us to share together in tonight’s love feast.  It is Jesus who outpours love that breaks us open.  It is Jesus who gives us a new commandment to love one another.

So come, exactly as you are.  Come, even in your discomfort.  Come and join the love feast of Christ’s passion not as spectator or a guest, but as a disciple.

Love will change us.  Love will empower us.  Love will embolden us.

And the Love of Christ through us can…and will…change the world.