The Latin root of Maundy (as in Maundy Thursday) is mandatum, as in mandate or command. We call today Maundy Thursday because we remember the new command that Jesus gave his disciples before he was betrayed. You are to love each other as I have loved you. As the rest of the liturgy of the Triduum unfolds, we see just what the implications of Christ's love for us entails.
Betrayal.
Humiliation.
Desertion and abandonment.
Torture.
Death.
Christ's love for us entails his suffering through all that and more. In short, Christ's love for us is sacrificial.
You are to love each other as I have loved you.
Christ is calling us to love each other with the same sacrificial love that he loved us first with. Therein lies the crux of it all. But what does it mean to sacrificially love someone in the 21st century here in the powerful and privileged United States of America?
I don't think it necessarily is a call to martyrdom (but that's not to discount the witness of those who have been and will continue to be martyred for their faith). For starters, Christians in America aren't being systemically persecuted for their beliefs as Christians around the world are (in fact, it saddens me to say that too often we are the ones who are doing the persecuting).
But if the cross we (individually and collectively) are called to bear doesn't involve our own gruesome deaths, then how is it that we can sacrificially love each other as Christ has loved us? In order to understand that, we first have to know what exactly it means to sacrifice.
We talk a lot about sacrifice during Lent. The tradition is that we deny ourselves of something we hold dear for a period of forty days. This often manifests itself in phrases like "I'm giving up ______ for Lent this year". But as I'm about to point out, this misses the mark. But first, a disclaimer.
I wish I could take credit for the following theological reflection and say that it came to me in some divine revelation. That is not the case. As I mentioned, my mom was in town this past weekend, so I wasn't able to be at youth group this week. I was in the church office two days ago, and the youth pastor was there, so I asked him how youth group went. He said it went really, really well.
He said they were talking about the topic of sacrifice and what it means. He presented it in the same way I just did (in relation to "giving up"). He then asked the youth group what they thought sacrifice meant, and one of the young women (the same one from my women's day post last month) said that she thought the concept of sacrifice has an element of hope to it, whereas giving up is inherently hopeless (giving up = defeat). You sacrifice something because you care about someone else.
I know. When he told me that 13 year old girl's insight, my brain exploded too.
I had never before heard sacrifice defined in that manner, but it makes perfect sense. Why did God come down incarnate in this world to live the life of a human being and endure all the pains that life entails? Because God so loved the world that God was willing to sacrifice God's very nature to show us that death does not have the final say. God does not give up. God wins. Life wins. Love wins.
Unfortunately, in order for there to be a resurrection, there has to first be a death. And that's what we now find ourselves in the midst of, not just in these next three days of the liturgical calendar, but in the very world itself. It's often said that we Christians are an Easter people living in a Good Friday world.
But by answering Jesus' call to follow his new commandment; by sacrificially loving others as he sacrificially loved us; by pouring ourselves out to heal the world and all its inhabitants in the way that he did, we can destroy the kingdom of oppression that we currently live in and replace it with the kingdom of justice.
We can destroy the kingdom of hate and fear, replacing it with a kingdom of hope and love.
We can destroy the kingdom of sin and death and replace it with the kingdom of God.
We are surrounded by death, but through our love for one another and by the grace of God, we are bold to envision, proclaim, and bring forth something so much better.
We live in a Good Friday world, but Subday's coming.
Today, I saw God in Christ's sacrificial love for us.
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