(John 13: 1-17, 31b-35)
Christ’s love has gathered us into one. Let us fear, and let us love the living God.
In the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
This night is different from all others.
On Maundy Thursday, Jesus does not offer us an inspiring idea. He offers himself—his body, his hands, his breath, his touch. He kneels before his friends, stoops down in the posture of a servant, and begins to wash. He takes bread in his hands, gives thanks, breaks it, and passes it around the table. He lifts the cup, gives it away.
This is love, not spoken but done. Love that is bodily, sensual, intimate. It is love you can feel on your skin, taste on your tongue, smell in the bread and wine, see in the water running down your feet.
These liturgies tonight are not intellectual exercises. They are sensual acts. Contrary to the common belief that bodily experiences are inferior to spiritual ones, our bodies are actually sites of grace—through eating, drinking, breaking, touching, washing, and wiping. Jesus reveals the fullness of love through his own body and physical intimacy.
Jesus does not give us a theology of salvation either. He gives us dinner. He does not send a messenger or a servant. He kneels and pours water over dirty feet. He gives his friends something to do, not just something to believe. He says, ‘Do this’. Do this, not to prove your worth. Not to earn anything. Do this to live in my love and to remember.
This love—Jesus’s love—is not just a feeling. It is a passion. A drive. A deep movement of God’s being toward ours. This is not love that waits for our response before offering itself. It is love that moves first, that initiates, that lowers itself to the floor and says: Let me serve you.
And this passion arouses passion. It awakens intimacy. It invites us not only to be comforted by love, but to be changed by it. To let it disarm us. To let it take us by the hand and show us what it means to belong to one another in action.
That is what makes this night both beautiful and unsettling. Because this love asks us not just to remember Jesus—it asks us to re-member him—to literally put him back together, piece by piece, in us. In our bodies. In our relationships. In our church.
And this is why Jesus gives us the Eucharist. Because our memory is too fragile on its own, we forget what love looks like. We forget how to receive it. We forget how to give it. So Jesus puts it back into our mouths, into our hands, into our bodies. ‘This is my body, given for you.’ He does not just say he loves us—he feeds us with that love.
He breaks bread so that our brokenness might not be the end of the story. He shares the cup so that our thirst might be met with the living water. And then he asks us to do the same so that our capacity to love might be broken open and expanded, just as his body was broken for us. We might become those who love in the image of God.
Breaking and sharing the bread and wine have become the core of Christian worship across different traditions. Yet the foot-washing—equally significant in Jesus’ demonstration of love—remains less practised. Why? Jesus himself declared, ‘Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.’ Perhaps, simply because it requires to be too close, too intimate, too embarrassing. We certainly can understand why Peter suddenly flinched back in horror. But that is precisely the point, when, for Peter, love should remain at a safe, polite and respectful distance.
Jesus’s invitation to foot-washing breaks down that boundary and touches the vulnerability of his disciples, friends, and all of us. Jesus desires to serve us and get close enough to love us. (Jesus also wants us to share that desire by doing this for one another.) Jesus shows us that it is passion alone—embodied, tangible love—that draws us into true communion. He loves and teaches us to love with our whole bodies and through all our sensual experiences.
Here tonight, we should examine ourselves: Does Jesus’s passion arouse our passion? We know that this is the love we were made for. But have we truly encountered and sensually experienced it? This is the love of Jesus. Passionate. Intimate. Sensual. It draws us out of the loneliness of self-protection and into the mystery of being known, being fed, being washed, being loved.
This is a love that doesn’t count the cost. A love that is fully given. A love that offers not just comfort, but intimate communion.
‘Do this,’ Jesus says. ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ Not just in your minds. But in your bodies. In your community. In your desire. In your love.
After this Last Supper, we are also invited to stay with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Will we do this in response to his passion?