the blessed triduum 2024

NOTE: these are my worship notes from Maundy Thursday as my heart connected Palmer with L'Arche Ottawa.

Maundy Thursday, named after the Anglo-French word “mandatum,” means commandment. On the night before He died, Jesus told and showed His disciples one more word and one more embodied prayer that summed up all the law and all the prophets, a gift illustrating everything He’d said and done during His life on earth: Love one another do THIS to remember me. It’s the essence of the gospel in one command. Jesus called this his NEW commandment – and just so that we don’t forget what his love looked like, he put a towel around his neck, knelt on the ground, and washed the filthy feet of his friends and disciples. Do THIS to remember me – get down on your knees as a servant for one another – and love one another even in the most trying situations.

· There’s a fascinating play on words taking place here: whenever we serve one another in love, we are recalling – or remembering – the new commandment of Jesus. AND we are liter-ally and figuratively re-membering him. That is, putting his body back together again by our own acts of loving servant hood. Do THIS to re-member me.

· Maundy Thursday is ALL about this dual re-membering, ok? Trusting the command of Jesus to love one another as he loves us and making this flesh in our ordinary lives. One of the best ways to do this comes from the earliest days of our faith tradition that is older than even the service of shadow we know as Tenebrae: foot washing. In ways that are greater than words, washing the foot of another – and having your own foot symbolically and physically cleansed – is profoundly humbling and transformative. It is re-membering Jesus outwardly, inwardly, spiritually, and socially all at the same time.

The ceremony of foot washing evokes the sacrificial and sacramental love of God made flesh in Jesus nonverbally. Oh, there are tons of words we could pray and sing, and they’re beautiful. But nothing teaches us the deeper meaning of tender compassion like washing the foot of another and then having them do so to you. Nothing. Some of you know that I am a member of the spiritual life team at the L’Arche community of Ottawa, Ontario. It is an intentional community of people with and without intellectual disabilities that has been living the love of Jesus for over 50 years. It is where I learned to practice a spirituality of tenderness that trusts even the smallest act of love is holy.

· I started to visit L’Arche 7 years ago and during the first Maundy Thursday gathering I attended I was asked to help a small circle of folk wash one another’s feet. In that tiny circle of 12 were able bodied and strong women and men alongside those with gnarled limbs and profoundly limited physical dexterity. There were recently arrived refugees from Syria, students from Africa, core members with disabilities, and a few Anglo volunteers.

· After I briefly explained the HOW-TO aspects of this ceremony – the kneeling before the per-son seated next to us, taking off their shoes and socks, holding the other’s foot softly as warm water was poured over each foot, and then thoroughly drying your partner’s foot – a man from Syria said: James, don’t forget that after YOU wash the other’s foot, THEY are asked to give YOU a blessing. Isn’t that interesting? This ceremony is a sacred and reciprocal circle of tenderness. So that’s what we did…

I knelt before Cecile, a 70 year old community member who doesn’t speak in any language I could understand, but still shares sounds and expressions with vigor, and took off her shoes. Her feet were old, worn down by hard living and limited resources, cracked and dried out. Like the prophet Isaiah wrote about the Suffering Servant, Cecile was: like a root out of dry ground; she had no form or majesty that we should look at her, nothing in her appearance that we should desire her. She was despised and rejected by others; a person of suffering and well-acquainted with grief. Indeed, she was as one from whom others hide their faces: despised, neglect, and of no account.

· It wasn’t the first time I’d washed another’s foot: early in ministry I was introduced to hospice and learned to not only physically change the wounds of parishioners who had no family or resources to help them after hospitalization but wash them as they prepared to die.

· I used to say, only half kiddingly, I never learned about THIS in seminary. But God clearly wanted me to get over myself so little by little – with a lot of fear and trembling – I learned to change antiseptic surgical incisions and reverently bathe dying bodies.

But NOTHING prepared me for washing Cecile’s feet because… beyond their brokenness and absence of traditional beauty - there was gift of Cecile’s face – her crooked, silent smile – the immeasurable warmth and trust in her eyes that told me she KNEW I would gentle. And, by the grace of God I was; not by my own power, mind you, but by the love evoked by HER vulnerability and faith. She empowered me to be tender. When I was finished with the foot washing and drying, I started to get up from my knees having forgotten to receive her blessing.

· So, she put one hand on my head and the other on my shoulder – and prayed for me. Her sounds, of course, were not intellectually intelligible but they were truly a blessing. And when she finished – and I was reduced to a puddle of emotions – she smiled and touched my face.

· I must tell you, friends, Jesus was in the house in that moment for me – and for the first time in decades I knew again what the Lord meant when he told us: do THIS to remember me.

The heart of following Jesus is, for me, all about learning how to do this well. I believe we’re ALL born with God’s love in our hearts, but as we grow up, pieces of it fall away. Maybe they’re hidden or forgotten because of trauma, abuse, neglect, apathy, busyness, or even privilege. There are so many ways our hearts are damaged or wounded or broken. The late Henri Nouwen used to say that those who chose to follow Jesus do so as wounded healers – women and men aware of their brokenness – who still share a measure of loving kindness in our moments of deep vulnerability. I sense that this is how we learn to both re-call the Lord Jesus and re-member him

As we ready our hearts now to receive him in Holy Eucharist, take a moment in silence to let the words of poet Jan Richardson sink in:

As if you COULD stop this blessing from washing over you.

As if you could turn it back, could return it from your body to the bowl,

From the bowl to the pitcher, from the pitcher to the hand that set this blessing on its way. As if you could change the course by which this blessing flows. As if you could control how it

Pours over you – unbidden, unsought, unasked, yet startling in the way it matched the need you did not know you had. As if you could become undrenched. As if you could resist gathering it up in your own hands and letting your body follow the arc this blessing makes.

So, let us now, bless this bread that gives itself to us with its terrible weight of infinite grace. Let us bless this cup poured out for us with a love that makes all things new. Let us gather around these gifts simply given and deeply blessed. And then let us go bearing the bread, carrying the cup, and laying the table within a hungering world.