SERMON: Maundy Thursday Chapel Service

 

12 pm, Maundy Thrs, Apr 6, 2023 - JGWhite / Christ Ch Ang

(Psalm 113; John 13:31-38)

Welcome to ‘Maundy Thursday.’ Perhaps many of you are like me, and will be worshipping again later, at a holy communion service, here or somewhere else. Then, we will mark the Passover meal of Jesus and the disciples. 

Here and now, you have a Baptist Christian, in an Anglican building, calling the shots for 25 minutes for a mixed bag of believers. So great to be together! And you have been very cooperative: so obedient. J You have followed my every command.

This is a day for pondering how we follow commands. At least, one command. Following up on yesterday’s noontime reading, we’ve now finished John chapter thirteen. Here, Jesus says, ‘I give you a new commandment.’ A new mandate, I like to call it, on this Maundy Thursday. Our name for this day comes from the Latin mandatum novum: new commandment. ‘A new mandate I give unto you,’ we might translate it.

Commandments seem so strict and definitive. How do you command love? Yet that is just what Jesus did. ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.’

Christ makes commandments, mandates, and obedience, into a new, organic reality. Think about it. There may be many things you say you love that are strict and clear-cut.

I love hiking, I’d say, because I truly appreciate and enjoy and care for the outdoors. I love walking on beaches and exploring the shoreline. So, around the branches of the Minas Basin and Bay of Fundy I pay attention to the tide schedule. ‘Time and tide waits for’ no one, we rightly say.

Years ago, when camping on Moose Island in the Five Islands, this struck me, while reading the Psalms. To love the laws and ordinances of the Lord includes loving the tide times. It is a set schedule (not by us!), it is unstoppable, it must be obeyed. Those ebbing and flowing tides control your walk to Moose Island, and around it, and your walk back to the mainland.

So I love the tide schedule. Because so much is possible for me when I know it and obey it. I can see the tidal bore in Maccan if I know the bore times that people have figured out. I can dig clams somewhere when the water is out. I can boat around when it is in.

So, in other ways, we figure out the laws of love, among us. Thanks to Jesus, our Teacher, we get to be apprentices of compassion and care and enjoyment and respect for others. So it is a new command, this mandate to love one another. We have learned so much about care for others and wanting the best for them. And I dare say there is yet more for us to learn, in the practice of love.

Worshipping together, let us see the love of Christ.

Looking to Him this week, let us know the love of God.

Going out and going about our days, let us share this love.