Sermon for Maundy Thursday HTW 2010 by Revd Janet Williams

 The door to the Upper Room is open: perhaps what strikes you most forcefully when you look through is the shocking scene of Jesus taking off his outer clothes. His torso is bare now, his back exposed. We might find it difficult to look at – as if we were trespassing on his privacy.  We don’t often see Jesus like this, and in John only once, later on in the Passion story when the soldiers divide his clothes between them.  This naked flesh tells us at once how vulnerable he is; this is the flesh which will so soon bear such terrible wounds.  For John, it is important that we see these later events as results of Jesus’ action: he is the one who strips, the one who bares himself to the wounds of sin and hatred.  This is a train of events he deliberately sets in motion.
Perhaps what lingers in your mind is his kneeling down to tend his disciples’ feet.  We kneel in front of people to acknowledge that we are in their power, that we are dependent on them.  We kneel to plead, to pay homage, to swear loyalty, to ask for mercy.  Slaves kneel, and powerless people.  But Jesus’ kneeling is a continuation of a movement that begins in the opening of John’s Gospel, “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us”; God himself descending from heaven, casting aside majesty, power and glory to live among us. As Paul puts it in Philippians, “though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant”.  The self-emptying of Jesus continues – not just laying aside his divine glory to become a man, but humbling himself by taking on the lowest role among men.  No man in that society would kneel to wash the feet of another, unless he was a slave or a man so poor that he had no servant.  Before he is reduced to a powerless prisoner, given over to judgment and execution, Jesus himself chooses to take the part of the weakest and lowest in society – a slave.
And then he picks up a jug and pours water into a basin.  This is the man who earlier met a woman at a well and talked about a spring of living water which wells up to eternal life. This is the man who told others at a wedding to pour from massive water jars, water which had turned to wine, wine for feasting and celebrating, wine in such abundance that all who drank were intoxicated. The man who told us that he came that we may have life ‘overflowingly’.  Now he pours out his life as he pours out water.
Three actions:  Jesus stripping off his clothes, Jesus kneeling at his disciples’ feet, Jesus pouring out water.  All of them are symbols for his pouring out of his love, his life, his blessing, his Spirit.  This is Jesus’ heart, how he manifests God – always by self-giving, self-emptying.  All of them are shocking actions:  they are the antithesis of all human wisdom. We clothe our rulers in gold and jewels; he strips off.  We make thrones for them and kneel by them; he kneels down.  We make secure treasure-houses for all that is precious; he pours out his treasured life. 
This costly profligacy is demanded of us too: it is his parting gift to his disciples, and they – we - are commanded to copy it. The other Gospels tell us that at the last supper Jesus shared the bread and wine, and commanded that his disciples continue to share the bread and wine in his memory. But John instead has Jesus give us this gift and this commandment, to wash one another’s feet.  I wonder why we have taken the Eucharist so much to heart and yet neglect the footwashing?