Mandatum Novum: A Community of Care
March 29, 2018
Maundy Thursday
John 13:1–17, 31b-35; 15:12–17
Brookside Community Church
“It is the ability to care that creates strong communities and able democracies.”
— John McKnight
Take a deep breath. Look around you. We are safe and warm. We are surrounded by friendly faces. Our tables are set with good food. And yet, if you’re like me, you are coming away from a world filled with anxieties and fear. If we’re not careful, we can unknowingly bring all of that in here with us.
Hopefully not. We expect this place to be different, don’t we? But why?
We spent a good deal last year reading the Gospel of Matthew together. You might remember that I often used the language of “A Community of Care” to describe what I understood to be Jesus’ vision. My hope was to help us get some perspective about the alternative society Jesus was describing in the Sermon on the Mount. The language of “A Community of Care” is precisely the language I think is appropriate for tonight as we practice together our church’s most sacred of rituals: the Eucharist. So, I hope you forgive me if much of what you hear tonight sounds familiar.
We live in a world framed around an ideology of security. We focus our energy on eliminating threats and managing anxieties. We build walls to exclude weakness. We imagine fulfillment in terms of greatness. We develop goals to show the world our mission is exceptional. All the while, we sacrifice that sacred, interconnected goodness we have been created for.
Tonight is a “performance of scripture.” It is our chance to hear the gospel story and imagine ourselves as participants in it. The hope is that when this week is over, we will have a better understanding of ourselves — that Jesus calls us to live as gospel participants in our everyday lives. If we practice it faithfully, we will get better and better until we can finally look at each other and call ourselves a community of care.
The part of the story we are “performing” tonight is what you have probably come to know as the “Last Supper.” (We can take pictures later, if you want. Just don’t make me play the role of Jesus.) In the story, it often looks like the disciples were working against Jesus. Like us, they had also lived in a world framed around an ideology of security. They, too, worked to find ways to eliminate threats and manage anxieties.
Just listen to the way the rest of the story plays out. Peter, we are told, will cut off a soldier’s ear and then deny Jesus to keep himself safe. Judas will betray Jesus sell his soul to the devil for 30 pieces of silver. The rest of the men will run and hide, leaving only the women at Jesus’ side. The night is filled with betrayal and denial, and yet Jesus… looks around the room and calls them… “friends.”
What we are celebrating tonight is not a gospel that just “eliminates threats and manages our anxieties.” It doesn’t build walls and make things more secure. Indeed, the gospel story we are reading is one filled with fear and anxiety; denial and betrayal; violence, torture, and murder. And the portion of the story we are reading tonight is a celebration! But even this celebration is no different.
As our communion liturgy reminds us, tonight is that night… “On the night we Jesus was betrayed…”
On that night, as on New Testament scholar puts it, we find a “frantic, furtive, and clandestine gathering of hunted fugitives on the verge of a nervous breakdown hiding in the attic of a safe house. The scene is held together only by the determined Jesus, even though he knows his companions will abandon him when the authorities come after him, as they inevitably will.”
They were being hunted. They knew their time was near… And here they are, celebrating together. What was it they were celebrating? What is this practice we are practicing really about?
What we are celebrating is the gift of Christian friendship. With friendship, we find genuine community. And we can care and be cared for only when we are in genuine community.
An unwavering commitment to care, the kind of care that comes about within a community of Christian friendship, provides an alternative to the ideology of security. The word security, remember, derives from the Latin se cura, which literally means “without care.” That sounds good to most of us! We build our lives in hopes to be free from care, free from want, without worry. We hardly realize, however, that free from care not only means carefree, but careless. And carelessness, that state of being where we no longer pay sufficient attention to our needs and the needs of those around us, will never result in wholeness, wellbeing, or safety — the Hebrew Scriptures call it Shalom.
As New York City lawyer and writer Elliot Sperber writes in his essay “The Concept of the Wall”:
[That we] exist within absolute mystery, in which very little is known at all, obliges one to be the opposite of careless. Compelling one to move with care, it demands a critical attentiveness that, contrary to the ideology of security, does not conjure the threatening emotionally charged notion of the “alien” or “enemy” so much as it recognizes as more objective figure: the neighbor.
What tonight teaches us is that it is not security that will save the world, but care. And a key ingredient to forming a genuine community is the practice of friendships.
Tonight reminds us that the Eucharist, that sacred meal we share together, is an embodiment of a kind of friendship that is not otherwise available to us.
We live in a fragmented and impersonalized world. As the writer, Rodney Clapp, wrote in his book, A Peculiar People, our kids are too busy at soccer practice to gather with friends at the local sandlots. We live in two-earner households, with parents busy focusing their lives on career advancement and wealth accumulation. There is no time to build for friendships. No energy to sustain friendships. Our lives are too transient and unstable to remain in one place long enough to build lasting friendships. All of our lives are framed for material attainment and status seeking, but not for true friendship.
But here we are…together…as friends. And we have been invited to this table…as friends.
As friends of Christ, we have been invited so that we might find ourselves among friends.
Friendship, remember, is based on consensual relationships. They are always proposed; true friendship can never be an imposition. Friendships are consensual relationships, they can only be proposed. And like all proposals, they require the full sharing of information. We may come, hiding from the violence and anxiety of the world, but we are not here to hide from God or each other.
Jesus said to his disciples, “I have made known o you everything I have heard.” Jesus made God known, as God fully is, so that we might become who we fully are, together.
Not as servants…but as friends.
“I do not call you servants,” Jesus said as he “got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself” (John 13:4).
“I do not call you servants,” Jesus said as he poured water into a basin and began to wash their feet and wipe them with the towel.”
“I do not call you servants” he said. “I have called you friends.”
He washed their feet and then commanded them to do likewise. But he commanded them to care for each other, not as a master commands his servants, but as friends.
“Why friends rather than servants?” You might ask.
Where there are servants there are masters. That is not the case in a community of friends. Servants can become masters, but friends cannot.
“The nations of the world strive to be lords over each other,” Jesus said. “It should not be so with you” (Matthew 20:25; Mark 10:42; Luke 22:25–26).
Ok. So you might be thinking to yourself, “A Community of Care. Doesn’t that mean caring for the world? Isn’t that a kind of service? Doesn’t that make us servants of the world? It is good to serve.”
Here is the thing. Servants know the mysteries that they offer to control those they help. Friends, on the other hand, share with each other as equals. They know and seek to be known. Always proposing, never imposing. Always consensual. Never through coercion or manipulation.
Friendship is an inherent good. It is not something you do in order to get something else.
And that is why friendship is the deepest kind of love, as Jesus explained, “There is no love greater than that of a life laid down by a friend.”
Tonight, we are celebrating the gift of Christian friendship. With friendship, we find genuine community. And we can care and be cared for only when we are in genuine community.
On that night, Jesus looked at the room, and he gave his disciples the mandatum novum, a New Commandment. Love one another.
“Love one another. Just as I have loved you. Love one another!”
Can I get you to look at each other and repeat the words printed on the cards in front of you?
“Love One Another. Just as I have loved you, love one another!”
May we take it to heart and practice it faithfully. Let it be our prayer that we will get better and better at living out this new commandment until we can finally look at each other and call ourselves a community of care — filled with true friends.
— Amen.
