The sermon for the evening service of Maundy Thursday on April 6th 2023. Ordinand Rachael Brind-Surch preached a sermon encouraging us to follow Jesus' commandment to love even when it is difficult.

The reading she is reflecting on is:

John 13: 1-17 to 31-35

I don’t like colouring.
I don’t like colouring because I’m a Creative, and when you are colouring, you are usually done with the creative bit.

The decisions are made, the content decided.
Some people find that soothing and life giving. 
I find it frustrating, maddening!

For me, the fun is in the figuring out,

There is a certain control, a taking the lead 
In the problem solving and the composing. 

Even if you aren’t a creative, I’m sure you may be able to relate to that first excitement of taking action, of making decisions. 

Of drawing the lines.

To me colouring is labour, it’s what we in the trade call blocking in.
The necessary yet interminable grind before completion.
Your composition is set and the lines are drawn.
And now comes the painful, slow task of blocking in.

It’s Thursday 
Jesus is in a room with his friends at Passover. 
The room he knew he would send his betrayer, Judas out from.
In a crowd of men as quick to desert him as the crowd are to turn on him.

The composition is set and the lines are drawn.

All that is left to come is the painful, slow blocking in. 

The story isn’t over, the piece isn’t finished, but as the Son of God, he knows the painful arduous labour that has to take place before completion.

It amazes me that someone, on the cusp of their most profoundly dehumanising, dignity robbing demise would choose the time they had left to wash feet.

Instead of self-preoccupation, anger at those who have betrayed him or ticking off a bucket list, he chooses to serves his friends, and in doing so teaches them to serve. He chooses to love his friends. He kneels before each of them, with the posture of a servant, bending low over each foot and blessing them with his attention. Teaching what it means to love humbly, in a way that marks those who follow his example, as his. 

Later Jesus will weep in Gethsemane. He is afraid 
And those of us who wish to will sit and wait with him, 
as the clock hands block in the time until midnight
He doesn’t want this cup of suffering. 
He will be beaten, scourged, abandoned, denied, mocked and misunderstood.
He will be desolate, lonely and he will cry to God from that pain and desolation. 

But he knows that his path is set and the lines are drawn. 

He feels all these things and yet he chooses to love. 
He chooses to wash feet.

My Grandmother was the first person who taught me to draw. 
She would draw and then pass me the pen. 
She taught me to take what I could imagine and mark it into existence.

As a girl Brenda had drawn her own lines. She moved to Leicester from the Yorkshire Dales at 16 to train, falling in love with nursing, my Grandad and God. And the greatest of those three was God. 

A year ago during Holy week I visited her, she has dementia. 

At that time her speech was just starting to leave her, and arthritis and loss of motor control made drawing impossible. Though her mind was very much switched on still, her body with which she used to love people as a nurse, her words used, to speak love to grieving families and her hands with which she would draw and craft exquisite embroidery were betraying her. 

She can’t wait to rise in glory where the indignities of ageing, illness and dementia don’t exist.

To her the design needs nothing more. 

But the story isn’t over, the piece isn’t finished 
As a nurse she knows, the painful arduous blocking in that has to take place before completion.

Her path is set and the lines are drawn.

It amazes me that someone on the cusp of the most profoundly dehumanising, dignity robbing edge of their own demise would choose the time they had left to wash feet.

When I visited her last year, she was washing feet in one of the only ways left to her.
Instead of self-preoccupation or ticking off a bucket list, she had a colouring book. 
To love her friends and family, she coloured each pattern, she found it hard to stay in the lines. She showed me the wobbly edges and pulled a wry smile, it was humbling. A labour of love, bending low over the page to colour and pray and bless each one with her attention.

Each finished colouring was scanned and on the back of each were typed the words she can’t speak. 

‘I am thinking and praying for you 
Love Brenda’.

It was, I thought then, as I quietly received her humble gift, a fine example of what it means to love in the way that her God loved. A love that meant humble service, in spite of the circumstances we find ourselves in. 

So now on Maundy Thursday I am thinking about colouring and about my Grandma and about Jesus and washing feet.

Maundy Thursday is kind of a strange name.

It comes from the middle English version of the Latin word Mandatum. Which is where we get the word mandate from. It literally means commandment. 

Commandment Thursday. 

And that is the rub.
That’s why the question of how we wash feet is so important. 
Because it’s not just a past time, a suggestion or a nice idea. 
It’s a commandment.
The last commandment given by Jesus to his followers before he died. 

So how do we wash feet? 
How do we follow this commandment.
And who’s feet are we washing?

Because that is the other part of this set scene.
To wash feet there has to be someone’s feet to wash.

For some of us the challenge won’t be in the washing of the feet. 

For some of us, the hard part, the humbling part, isn’t in the giving  or the serving
It’s in the receiving, in having our feet washed.
Some of us are more Peter then Jesus.

I have a lot of empathy for Peter. 
He is called the Rock, a material not known for its flexibility, or vulnerability.
I get the impression Peter likes to draw his own lines, he listens just long enough to get the gist of where the lines ought to go before, grabbing the pen for himself and starting to free style – with mixed results.

For a man like Peter the thought of baring his feet, with his master bent low is so much like colouring over the lines he has drawn for himself, that he can’t quite believe what he sees. 

As Jesus advances on him with bowl and wash cloth he backs away:
You’re going to wash my feet? He says?
You will never wash my feet.’ 

Feet were seen as impure in ways far beyond the dust and the dirt of a city street. In the temple in Jesus’s time and in many places of worship to this day, the holy spaces of worship demanded the removal of outdoor shoes. 
To have a God willing to step in to skin and step into the dust of the earth,
To not just touch the world but walk in it, sleep in it, draw in it is so beyond the imagery of ancient God of the Psalms, the God whose very footstool is creation. That even his closest followers struggle to take that leap of understanding.

It’s an impossible composition. And yet here is Jesus.

And whilst perhaps Peter had yet to realise just how divine his teacher was, he knew Jesus was a big deal and he knew the statement of servitude being made. That only the humblest of house hold staff would don a hand towel, hold out the bowl and grasp the heel of each guest in order to cleanse the dust of the road from each sole. 

As hard as it can be to kneel in front of another and bow low, over their feet.
The act of exposing the vulnerable, impure parts of ourself is hard.
It is a big ask to take the things of our being which we feel are unsightly, undignified, undesirable and place it into the hands of those willing to care for us.

But that too is the commandment of Maundy Thursday
The commandment that we are called to be known by.
That we love one another, and are loved by one another in the way that Jesus last loved,
With a bowed head and nurturing hands and tender hearts.

These are the interlocking lines laid out before us in the community known as church.

So how do we each do it?

How do we become someone - who is so filled with love, that when the final hope, is so obscured by dehumanising, confusing, dignity robbing pain.

We find a way to wash feet?

And how do we do it?

How do we become someone who - in spite of their skin being hardened or self-sufficiency long established, can offer up all of ourselves, those parts for which we feel most shame to be cleansed.

To serve others we have to be shown how to serve.

To love others, we have to be well loved.

We serve because he showed us how.

And we love because he first loved us.

Because in this last safe space of fellowship, out of the centre of his heart break at betrayal
in one of the only ways he had to hand- he chose to wash feet.

This is the commandment he has given us
It is the commandment Brenda followed, when even as she was hemmed in by her limitations, she laboured over small acts of service creating small gifts of love.

This is an interrelational commandment:

A vulnerable offering 
A humble reception
A labour of love.

A tender, thoughtful blocking in.

We may find it maddening, 
And yes, it is absolutely hard to stay in the lines. 
Each of us will have times when we are hemmed in by limitations,

When that commandment feels impossible in the face of the hand dealt to us. 
There will be times when it feels beneath us, when there feels more important decisions to be made or action to be taken.

But we will each come to places in life where we can’t tweak the design any more or plan another way around it. 

Where the only decision left to us, is how we go through it.

To decide if we follow the example of those who love well until the end. 

If we love in a way which marks us as his disciples.

Sometimes we have to let go of the pen,
And do our very best, with the lines we have set before us 

Sometimes, even though we may not like it very much, 
We can choose to love
We can choose to start colouring.