Sermon for March 20, 2008
Maundy Thursday

"Believing the Lie"

The men filed into the upper room in sober consciousness of a heavy spirit that lay on their Lord and Master. What was this heaviness they felt? They had heard the rumors, the venom that filled the mouths of their opponents, priests of the Temple, Sadducees and Pharisees, Zealots and Herodians, every party that filled the ranks of the most influential Jews. Whispers and more were circulating around their leader, conspiracies to arrest Him, to accuse Him of blasphemy, to convict Him of breaking the Mosaic Law, to make Him a traitor of Rome, to ambush and assassinate Him. It was in the air. They had tried to get the people to do it, bringing up topics that would inflame the populace, but His answers were too shrewd. They had attempted to entrap Him, but He trapped them instead. They were learning at every encounter. He was going to fall into some kind of trap or other eventually. It was the Passover. His Spirit was at a low ebb. Every word He spoke to them was filled with shadows of imminent danger. He had so often spooked them with predictions of death at Jerusalem, this trip, during this holy season.

      Jesus seriously blessed bread and instituted the Eucharist, His Sacrament, instructing them to repeat this action again and again to bring Him back to them, to hold him inside of them, to incorporate Himself within their very lives. Each portion of the Passover meal, the bitter herbs, the sweet apple compote, the sacred lamb they ate in a quiet foreboding. Ultimately Jesus held aloft the large goblet of wine that signified this feast and brought them all together in a holy fellowship, all drinking of the same sweet fruit, the same fate. His words added the ominous meaning that they were all of the same blood, His Blood, into which they all now drank.

      But after the meal, Jesus confounded them with a humble act usually left to the lowliest servant in a household. He took off His outer clothing, and bringing out a basin of water, He told them He must wash their feet. Peter objected, voicing what they all must have felt, the very inappropriateness of Jesus' offer. It was His feet they should be washing. He gave them stern warning that if they weren't willing to have Him wash their feet, they were not part of Him from now on. The humility of having Jesus wash your feet was to admit your feet needed to be washed. The dust of the road was on your toes, arch and ankles. The dust of life.

      Life is dusty. Ever since our first parents fell in Eden, God pronounced a judgment on them, man and woman. He cursed the serpent, but toward the man and his wife God did not curse, only He cursed the ground, and He did it for their sakes. This earth, the dust from with Adam and Eve had been made, had been fertile and self-fruitful, a garden world from which they only had to walk along and pluck their dinner. Having decided the pluck from the one tree He had forbidden them, the couple heard God curse the ground. But He did it for their sakes. That's what it says. It will not so readily bear fruit to them. It will produce weeds and thistles. They will sweat over it, work hard to make the dust bear crops, and live in hardship until they die, and the dust receive them back to become once more the elements from which they had sprung.

      We are born in this human flesh. We are born in sin, as our Church Fathers concluded, the original sin still embedded in us. Guilty before God and fallen. That's how we start. Finding redemption in Jesus' blood, we confess Him as our Lord and submit to baptism. Our sins are washed. We are cleansed inside, where no shower or bath could ever reach.

      But Jesus knows we will walk through this earth. From time to time it is inevitable that we will pick up some of that cursed earth on our feet, so to speak. Our old nature makes it impossible that we remain perfected, and He made provision on that blessed night that we come clean, again and again. He said it over the wine: This is my Blood which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins-drink ye all of it, in remembrance of me.

      But to drive that point home, Jesus then took out that basin and began to wash the disciples' feet. He washed Peter's, James', John's. He washed Bartholomew's, Philip's, Andrew's. And He washed Judas' feet. He washed His own betrayer's feet and immediately sent him on his way, to do what he must do, swiftly. It is the greatest irony in all Scripture that Jesus washed the feet of him who was to do Him in.

      Now, what was Judas guilty of? As with all the apostles, Judas had heard the rumors. Slander and intrigue followed Jesus wherever He went. Any prominent man has his detractors, and the most important figure in human history would have the most vehement objections raised to everything He did-it's expected. But the slander was strong.

      It takes two to make a rumor. It takes two to gossip. It takes two to create a scandal of words around an innocent man like Jesus. One party is the initiator of the lie. Caiaphas, Annas, the leaders of the Pharisees: there were plenty of people to twist His words and invent false claims to speak against Jesus Christ of Nazareth. They spoke their slander. It breathed out of them like a plague, like clouds of locusts, like darkness. They lied.

      The other part of slander, the one who completes the circuit, allows the lie to plant and grow and bear evil fruit is not the liar, the slanderer, the inventor of the mischief. The other part only listens. Listens and believes. Listens and wants to believe. Listening is part of the lie. Judas listened to the rumors and lies and threats and conspiracies. He received them and because he envied Jesus, because he had grown to resent His self-sacrificing nature, His holiness, His rejection of every other way to go but the road to a certain doom, Judas received these rumors and lies and believed them. He wanted to believe them. He was swayed because he was ready to be swayed. He betrayed Jesus to the priests because he had first betrayed Jesus in his heart.

      Before Judas went out into that night, and before he received the 30 silver coins, before he kissed Messiah on the hillside of olives, and before he watched them take the Lord of life away in chains, Judas betrayed His Lord in his heart. Our consecration prayer gets very serious and holy with the ringing of a bell as the priest bends low over the altar saying, "For on the night in which He was betrayed, He took bread..." We all know the night in question, and we know by whom. But the betrayal was before the foot washing, before the meal, before the room was prepared. Judas was a devil, as Christ described him, many days before. And because his heart harbored evil against our Lord, when the rumors and conspirators' offers reached Judas' ears, he was ground cursed and ready to receive it, weeds, thistles, hardness, evil intent. Judas didn't speak the lies. He heard them, he listened, and he believed. For that he is the greatest traitor of all time. The second half of slander.

      And we have all done it. We have gladly received bad words about people we already dislike, distrust, dismiss as unworthy of us. We are ready to believe them, and even repeat them, as though proven by our own judgment of character. We know they are what we believe about them, and so the slander becomes true.

      I'm not talking about murder or adultery here. Not theft or even covetousness or idolatry. The night Jesus was betrayed, His chief betrayer was completely innocent of any legal impropriety. He was pure as the driven snow, according to the Commandments, at any rate. He didn't start the lie. He only completed it. As we all have done. So the dust of this world gets on our feet, rather easily, doesn't it? And so Jesus made it clear that when He left us, He wanted us to wash one another's feet. And why? What is it that He did to us?

      Can you wash the feet of someone you feel inferior to you? Can you take in hand the soiled foot of one you despise? Can you submit to be washed by that unclean and evil person? See how He tested us in this? And yet, every priest is a traitor, inferior, despicable. And every priest has the right, and the obligation, to hear your confession and pronounced God's absolution over you, to your soul's health. St. John says if we confess our sins, God will forgive them. St. James admonishes us to confess them to one another. And Jesus Himself, three nights later, would blow over these same men and give them the Holy Ghost, that whosoever sins they remit shall be remitted, and whosoever sins they retain, shall be retained. He gave us the obligation to restore each other to cleanliness, to wash each other's feet.

      We will hear about each other from time to time, and helpful people will want to be the first to share something important about our flaws of character and misadventures, our lapses of judgment, and blind spots regarding you-know-who. The lies and slanderers are out there, but without a place to land and grow, they are but dust to the wind. If you love God and love whom He loves, you may not ever listen or give ground to such evil speaking. Wash each other's feet instead. It's the Lord's way.

PFH+