So I give you a new command: Love each other deeply and fully. Remember the ways that I have loved you, and demonstrate your love for others in those same ways.
John 13:34 (The Voice Bible)
Holy Thursday is one of my favorite remembrances of the Christian year. There’s something about food, story, and urgency that compels us to remember and to rehearse.
I often think that Jesus could have said so many things, could have called us at that moment to so many things, yet his command was a simple return to what God’s work had been about from the beginning, love.
Love modeled in service to one another.
Love that beginning with eating, drinking, and conversation.
Love through dirty feet and achy knees.
Love misunderstood, vulnerable, and abundant.
Love becoming primary identity as God’s people for the world.
Love without disclaimers or pre-requisites.
Each time we gather, each time we eat and drink together, each time that we remember that we are baptized, each time that we claim to be Christian, we are re-committing ourselves to the way of love that Jesus modeled for us.
On this Holy Thursday, we have an opportunity to go beyond intellectual recollection of what Jesus did on that fateful night. We have an opportunity to get beyond the sadness of an event that took place long ago. We have an opportunity to get on our knees, tie a towel around our waist and show the world what it means to be a follower of the way.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
in our eating and our drinking.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
in our engagements and in our conversations.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
in the way that we come alongside the forgotten, the last, and the lost.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
in the ways that we forgive and reconcile.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
in the ways that we treat all people as God’s own children no matter what.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
by washing in waters of cross-shaped love.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
by walking in silence, re-membering love with every step.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
by confessing our loveless attitudes, actions, and encounters.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
in our beginning again, through sacrifice, posture, and courage.
May we make love known,
Christ known,
by being what God in the flesh, Love in the flesh, is.