“Love as I have loved you.”
On the 5th and 6th Sundays of Easter – this week and the next, we will be back in John’s gospel, in the long instruction and prayer that Jesus gives to his disciples on the eve of his arrest and crucifixion. This is because we hear these teachings differently in light of what comes after the crucifixion – the amazing truth of resurrection. We can follow this new commandment that we love as Jesus loved because we know that it is the path of life and we know that we are inhabited, inspired, indwelt by the Holy Spirit which empowers us.
Ok – so this morning, we are back at the Last Supper, and after Jesus tells his disciples, “everyone will know you are my disciples if you have love for one another,” he demonstrates what he means by getting on his knees with a basin of water and a towel and tenderly washing each of those rascally disciples’ feet – even the one he knows is going to betray him in just a couple of hours, and the one he knows is going to deny that he ever knew him. Judas – and Peter – and most all the rest who will scatter to hell and gone with the soldiers show up.
Love one another as I have loved you. So that looks like Jesus tenderly washing those feet. It looks like mundane, every day acts of service. Basin and towel kinds of service – watching your grandchildren and actively listening to them without the phone in your hand. It looks like taking in the garbage cans for your neighbor – giving your place in the checkout line to the mother behind you that is trying to keep her kids corralled – making food to share at coffee hour, and setting up the coffee for the rest of us. It looks like sharing tomato starts and going out of your way to make conversation with the crotchety neighbor. It looks like volunteering in the community – at a school, a homeless shelter, the food bank, the public radio station, the library’s literacy projects. It looks like waking up night after night with your baby, or curtailing your social life as you care for an ailing spouse.
Basin and towel kind of love can easily be overlooked and yet it is the kind of love that makes the world work. It is the glue that grounds a community and that makes it more difficult to divide people over political differences. It looks like no big deal – but in fact, it is. Consistently loving in this basin and towel kind of way makes for families and communities that provide shelter and hope and life. It is Jesus’ kind of love, demonstrated at the last meal he would share with his friends before his arrest.
We sing about this foot washing kind of love on Maundy Thursday:
(Refrain) Jesu, Jesu, fill us with your love,
show us how to serve the neighbors we have from you.
Kneels at the feet of his friends,
silently washes their feet,
Master who acts as a slave to them.
(Refrain)
Neighbors are wealthy and poor,
varied in color and race,
neighbors are near us and far away.
(Refrain)
These are the ones we should serve,
these are the ones we should love,
all these are neighbors to us and you.
(Refrain)
Loving puts us on our knees,
silently washing their feet,
this is the way we should live with you.
(Refrain)
Then there are the grand huge and concrete acts of love that are more costly. Sacrificial love. The kind which bears witness to the cross of Christ. The kind that Jesus gave on the cross – his blood shed, his body broken for the healing of all creation. Sacrificial love. And it plays out in private settings but more often in public ones.
We have a storehouse of saints who teach us what this love looks like. This past week, May 13th, for example, was the Feast Day of Frances Perkins. A lifelong Episcopalian, she was a staunch and outspoken advocate for industrial safety, and a persistent voice for the reform of what she believed were unjust labor laws. She became the first woman to hold a cabinet position in the White House and as Secretary of Labor, she had a major role in shaping the “New Deal” legislation signed into law by President Roosevelt and which had great impact upon the nation as it emerged from the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Because the Augustinian order is in the news now what with the new Pope being a member, I want to note that Frances frequently recited the Augustinian prayer: ‘My God, I love thee above all others, and I love my neighbors as myself.’ She was frequently and publicly attacked: Not suitable for a cabinet position because she was a woman; a communist because she supported labor rights, she was called Jewish in order to damage her reputation and undermine her political influence; she was lax and dangerous to the nation because she assisted refugees, including Jewish folks fleeing Nazi Germany.
Most of us are not called to the kind of love that would earn us a place in the Calendar of Saints – the kind of love symbolized by the cross – but every single one of us is called to the kind of love symbolized by the basin and towel. Whatever opportunities come your way, large or small, to love the way Jesus loved – take them. There are hundreds of them every day one you begin looking. Guaranteed, the Spirit comes alongside and magnifies every single act of service to do more good than you will most likely ever know.
