A New Command: The Mark of the Authentic Christian - My Maundy Thursday Memo to Spanish River Church and Friends

Today’s Reading: John 13

Let's start at the end.

Near the close of John 13, after the meal has grown tense and strange, after one man has slipped out into the darkness, Jesus says something that stops time: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

A new commandment. That word — commandment — is the key to understanding why we call tonight what we call it. Maundy Thursday. Most people assume "maundy" is just an old-fashioned way of saying "mournful" or "maudlin," as if the church simply needed a suitably gloomy word for a suitably gloomy evening. But it isn't that at all. Maundy comes from the Latin mandatum — command. We gather on Maundy Thursday because Jesus gave us a mandate. Not a suggestion. Not a spiritual aspiration for the especially devoted. A command.

Love one another as I have loved you.

But before he said it, he showed it. And the showing is everything.

John sets the scene with extraordinary tenderness. "Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper." He knew who he was. He knew where he had come from and where he was going. He was under no illusions about his identity or his authority. And because he knew all of that — he got up, took off his outer garment, wrapped a towel around his waist, and got down on his knees to wash the road dirt from twelve pairs of feet.

This is what love looks like with skin on.

Paul, writing to the Philippians, reaches for the same moment in the history of the universe when he urges the church toward humility. "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant." The Greek word is doulos — a slave. The God who made every galaxy and every grain of sand took the form of a slave, and on the night before he died, he dressed like one and acted like one. The Philippians hymn ends at the cross — humiliation completed, obedience perfected — and John 13 is the living preview of Calvary. Every movement downward Jesus made that evening was a rehearsal for the final movement downward on Good Friday.

This is what theologians call the humiliation of Christ. It is also, if you have eyes to see it, the most extravagant love letter ever written.

The look of love, it turns out, is not always what the world expects. It doesn't always arrive with ceremony. Sometimes it arrives on its knees, with a basin and a towel, cleansing the parts of our lives we’d rather keep hidden, and exposing our self-importance - our waiting around for someone to serve us rather than grabbing the towel and basin with our own hands.

Now, I want to be honest with you about something, because John 13 won't let us be otherwise: the Church has always been a mess.

That same upper room held Judas Iscariot, who had already negotiated his price with the chief priests. Jesus knew it. "I am not speaking of all of you; I know whom I have chosen." He washed Judas' feet anyway. Imagine that. The hands that would be nailed to the cross twenty-four hours later cupped water over the feet of the man who was already counting his thirty pieces of silver.

And then there is Peter. Dear, blustering, impossible Peter. When Jesus comes to wash his feet, Peter recoils — "You shall never wash my feet!" — which sounds almost noble until you realize it is simply pride dressed up as reverence. Jesus cuts through it plainly: "If I do not wash you, you have no share with me." And Peter, being Peter, immediately overcorrects: "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Later in the same chapter, Jesus tells the disciples plainly that one of them will betray him, and they are bewildered. Then he tells them that Peter — their leader, their rock — will deny him three times before the rooster crows. Peter is certain this is impossible. Peter is wrong.

Betrayal and denial. In the inner circle. On this holy night? This Passover? This last supper that will become the Lord’s Supper and lead to another cup - a bitter one - received by Jesus from the Father’s hand, just down the road and up the Mt of Olives in the Garden of Gethsemane?

The Church has never been a gathering of the already-perfected. It has always been, and will always be on this side of eternity, a hospital for sinners, a ragged collection of people who sometimes betray and sometimes deny, who struggle with pride and cowardice and all manner of ordinary human failure. If you have spent any time in a church — including this one — you already know this. It is not news.

But here is what is news. Here is what cuts against the darkness of that room like a lamp in a window.

Jesus, knowing all of it — the betrayal already in motion, the denial already forming in Peter's chest, the scattering that was only hours away — Jesus gave them the mandate anyway. Love one another as I have loved you.

The late Francis Schaeffer, one of the great Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, wrote that this commandment in John 13 is what he called the mark of the Christian — the one identifying feature that Jesus himself designated as the proof that his followers are genuine. Not our theology, though theology matters. Not our moral record, though holiness matters. Not our programs or our buildings or our numbers. This — the love of Christ's people for one another, humble and serving and forgiving, poured out in ten thousand ordinary moments — this is how the watching world is supposed to know we belong to him.

It is, frankly, a terrifying standard. And a glorious one.

We enter Maundy Thursday tracking in the dust that the dirty feet of disciples always carry. We head in that same upper room, on that same charged and tender evening. If we’re self-aware at all, we come as people who have felt the impulses of Judas-like betrayal and Peter-like cowardly overconfidence lurking in our hearts. We come as people who need our feet washed, who need to be told again that there is a love that knew everything about us and came for us anyway, that stripped off its glory and got down in the dust to serve.

We come to receive the mandate: Love one another. As I have loved you.

That is Maundy Thursday. That is the command. That is the mark.

May Jesus - and the world - find it in my heart.

May it be said of us all who call Spanish River Church our church.