Love One Another: A Holy Week Meditation For Maundy Thursday

So He got up from the supper, laid aside His outer garments, and wrapped a towel around His waist. After that, He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and dry them with the towel that was around Him. He came to Simon Peter, who asked Him, “Lord, are You going to wash my feet?” Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” “Never shall You wash my feet!” Peter told Him. Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with Me.” “Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not only my feet, but my hands and my head as well!”Jesus told him, “Whoever has already bathed needs only to wash his feet, and he will be completely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For He knew who would betray Him. That is why He said, “Not all of you are clean.” When Jesus had washed their feet and put on His outer garments, He reclined with them again and asked, “Do you know what I have done for you? You call Me Teacher and Lord, and rightly so, because I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example so that you should do as I have done for you. Truly, truly, I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them….A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so also you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another.

Today is Maundy Thursday, named after the Anglo-French word “mandatum,” which means commandment. On the night before He died, Jesus had one more thing to say to His disciples, one more word that summed up all the law and all the prophets, one gift illustrating everything He’d said and done during His life on earth: Love one another. The Gospel message in one command. So simple to hear, so difficult to do.

Love was Jesus’ first and last priority because His love will never fail. Yet love—love of self, love for God, for our neighbors, for strangers, for our former spiritual community, and yes, even for our evangelical enemies—is the greatest and most difficult commandment

The heart of Christianity is learning how to love well. We’re born with all this love in our hearts, but as we grow up, little pieces of it begin to fall away. A childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, apathy, privilege, or any number of damaging wounds penetrate our hearts and darken our souls. So we retreat, becoming hardened or indifferent to the world around us. And in so doing, we become callous to the suffering of others.

Yet we are commanded on this most holy of days to love one another. But how? In Christian tradition, active love looks like compassion, or the sometimes agonizing ability to experience what it’s like to live in somebody else’s skin, to walk in their shoes, feel their pain, understand their lived experience. But in Buddhism this opening up of the heart in suffering kindness toward the other is called bodhichitta. Similar concepts with different perspectives.

A Sanskrit word meaning “noble or awakened heart,” bodhichitta means to be awake, enlightened, and completely open. This state of being is often called the soft spot, or a place as tender and vulnerable as an open wound. In the process of discovering bodhichitta we move toward suffering and pain, not away from it. As author Pema Chodron writes in her book When Things Fall Apart, “Whenever we let go of holding on to ourselves and look at the world around us, whenever we connect with sorrow…in these moments bodhichitta is here.” It means holding intimate space with those who are hurting, abandoned, neglected, and betrayed.

It’s no small coincidence that recently we celebrated International Transgender Day of Visibility, a solemn occasion to give love, dignity, and full humanity to non-binary people who consistently suffer relentless attacks, abuse, and discrimination. Did you know that 80% of trans students feel unsafe at school because of their gender? Were you aware that 49% of trans people report physical abuse or that 41% of trans people have attempted suicide? Why as a culture—and, most damningly, as the Church—have we purposely chosen not to love trans people well? Maundy Thursday reminds us that we may have all the right doctrine, all the right beliefs, even faithful spiritual practices, but if we do not love we are but a clanging symbol.

Today we pause to remember that true love means suffering for and with others. God’s response to our human suffering was to take on flesh and suffer with us. That is what love looks like. “Suffering is overcome by suffering, and wounds are healed by wounds,” writes theologian Jurgen Moltmann in his book The Crucified God. So my question to you is simple: who are you suffering for? If you are protected from the vicious onslaught of conservative evangelical culture and their GOP goons, how might you insert yourself in-between oppressor and the oppressed to take on suffering on their behalf?

Ultimately, as the resurrection proves, love is even stronger than death. Suffering love is bodhichitta in action. It’s the painful privilege of receiving the insults, the jokes, the labels, the ‘othering', and the shame in order to deflect that evil if only for a little while. It is living into the Master’s call to love without ceasing. And that kind of love will one day turn the world upside down.

Amen.

Gary Alan Taylor