Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday has always felt like a pause to me.

But not just a breath.

A threshold.

The last ordinary evening before the world changes —

and the disciples don't know that yet.

It’s Passover.

They can smell the Passover lamb roasting.

The unleavened bread is being prepared.

There is comfort in the fellowship,

comfort in the ancient ritual,

comfort in being together.

We know how this story ends.

Which means tonight we have to work a little —

to set down what we know,

and put ourselves back in that upper room,

where comfort and dread

are sitting at the same table.

This is a thin place.

The Celtic Christian tradition speaks of thin places —

moments and locations where the veil

between what is and what will be

becomes almost transparent.

Where God is not distant.

Where God is dangerously close.

Maundy Thursday is the thinnest night in our liturgical year.

And before Jesus speaks a single word,

he moves.

He gets up from the table.

He takes off his outer robe.

He ties a towel around himself.

He pours water into a basin.

And he kneels.

The body teaches before the words do.

In the world Jesus inhabited,

everything was structured around who kneels before whom.

That boundary — between teacher and student,

master and servant,

the honored and the lowly —

was not incidental.

It was load-bearing.

The whole social order rested on it.

Peter's shock isn't squeamishness.

He knows something structural is being violated.

You will never wash my feet.

But Jesus doesn't argue with the structure.

He doesn't give a speech about equality.

He simply moves through it —

basin, water, towel, floor.

And here is what I want us to sit with tonight:

He washed all of them.

All twelve.

He washed the feet of James and John,

who had been arguing about who would sit closest to him in glory.

He washed the feet of Peter,

who would deny him before morning.

And he washed the feet of Judas.

Knowing.

John tells us explicitly —

Jesus knew who would betray him.

He knew, and he knelt,

and he took those feet in his hands,

and he washed them.

The commandment does not come with an exemption list.

I want to bring some feet into this room tonight.

I won't name them.

But I think you'll know them.

There are feet in our community

that have walked enormous distances —

through desert, through danger,

across borders that were never meant to hold them.

Feet that are calloused and weary

and still moving,

still trying to find solid ground.

Jesus kneels before those feet.

And then —

and this is the hard part —

there are other feet.

Feet that patrol those same borders.

Feet that stand at doors in the early morning.

Feet that walk in the name of a law

that is separating children from their families.

Jesus kneels before those feet too.

This is not sentiment.

This is the most demanding thing

I know how to say from this pulpit.

Can we hold both sets of feet

in the same basin?

That question might be worth sitting with all the way through Good Friday.

After he has washed their feet,

Jesus speaks.

"I give you a new commandment — that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."

Notice where this commandment comes from.

Not from the head of the table.

Not from a position of authority.

It comes from the floor.

With water still on his hands.

From the posture of kneeling.

The word Maundy comes from an old French word meaning command —

think of mandate.

But this mandate is unlike any other.

It is issued from below.

It is demonstrated before it is spoken.

And it asks us to do something

that the world, right now, in this city,

is working very hard to make impossible.

Saying love one another as I have loved you in 2026

is not a comfortable thing.

It is a truth-claim.

It is an act of witness.

It is, in its quiet way,

an act of resistance.

We are those disciples.

We are gathered in our own upper room tonight,

in a moment we may not fully understand yet,

at a hinge in history

whose weight we are only beginning to feel.

And we are called to this:

Not to certainty.

Not to easy solidarity.

But to the posture of kneeling.

To the long, stubborn, tender act

of taking someone's feet in our hands —

old feet, calloused feet, arthritic feet,

the feet of our beloved,

the feet of those we struggle to love —

and washing them.

That is the quiet fierceness of this community.

Not a chant.

Not a march.

Though those have their moment.

Something that looks like kneeling.

Something that says, softly,

sí se puede.

We can.

We will.

The basin is still full.

The towel is there.

We know how to kneel.

Amen.