"In the summer of 1966 a Boy Scout troop stopped at Sequoia National Park in northern California. One of the guides said: "You will never find a Sequoia tree in isolation. Sequoias only survive by being close to each other. Despite the very large size to which they grow, they have very shallow roots. They survive because the root system of each tree is interwoven and connected to those of its neighbor. This is where their strength derives. When fierce winds come, the trees literally depend upon one another to stand. There is no rugged individualism here. Community is the answer."

Maundy Thursday comes from the Latin "mandatum" meaning "new commandment. That command was:

"…I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." John 13:35

This service, the first of the Great Triduum, may be the most complicated one of the year. We gather, we wash feet, we share the Holy Eucharist, we reserve the Sacrament in the Garden of Gethsemane, we strip the altar and we watch with it through the night. From first to last it is about that new commandment; it is about love.
First, we hear of the love Jesus showed to the disciples and, by extension, to us by washing their feet as a servant. Then, in response to his command to them we wash one another's feet, demonstrating our oneness and love for one another. Hence, love is all about relationship, about intimacy, about vulnerability and risk.
There are some stories that can demonstrate that love.

"On August 16, 1987, Northwest Airlines flight 225 crashed just after taking off from the Detroit airport, killing 155 people. One survived: a 4-year-old from Tempe, Arizona, named Cecilia. News accounts say that when the rescuers found Cecelia they did not believe she had been on the plane. They first assumed she had been a passenger in one of the cars on the highway onto which the airliner crashed. But when the passenger register for the flight was checked, there was Cecelia's name. She survived because, even as the plane was falling, her mother, Paul Chican, unbuckled her own seat belt, got down on her knees in front of her daughter, wrapped her arms and body around the child, and then would not let her go. Nothing could separate that child from her parent's love – neither tragedy nor disaster, neither the fall nor the flames that followed, neither height nor depth, neither life nor death."

(Keith Smith, "How to win the Christian race," Bible Center Web Site, Biblecenter.com.) October 3, 2003.

We can understand this kind of self-sacrificial love when we think of the love we have for our families, a love Jesus talked about when he referred to God as parent. However, it is not limited to this.

"The Grand Rabbin of Lyons was a Jewish chaplain to the French forces in the 1914-1918 war. One day a wounded man staggered into a trench and told the Rabbi that a Roman Catholic was on the point of death in no-man's land, and was begging that his padre should come to him with a crucifix. The padre could not be quickly found. The Jew rapidly improvised a cross, ran out with it into no-man's land, and was seen to hold it before the dying man's eyes. He was almost immediately shot by a sniper; the bodies of the Catholic and the Jew were found together."

(Victor Gollancz, ed., A Year of Grace (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1950) p. 205.

In this case, total, self-sacrificing love was shown for a stranger. The love Jesus showed that night in washing the disciple's feet, both was personal and individual between teacher and followers, but also global in its implication. Their charge was to then, leave that place, and to follow Christ's example. This is not a soft, easy charge…it will mean risking, possibly sacrificing power, prestige and long-term defenses. It will mean going into the no-man's land of God's people who are crying for help as well as to the intimacy of our family and friends who have such power to hurt us.
The Holy Eucharist, given to the disciples and to us that night, points to the same reality. In the sharing of the consecrated bread and wine we are both bound to Christ and to one another. It doesn't end there, however, for we are then charged to go out and to continue to celebrate this Holy Mystery with the world. It is important to note that, in the early church, it was never celebrated alone. During the Middle Ages that admonition was dropped and priests celebrated alone once a day…it was, apparently, all about them. Today we are forbidden to celebrate without at least one other present. We receive in community and are sent from that table to be Christ's people in the world. We are blessed beyond belief by this God who loves us with abandon. What we do here tonight does not end here, but finds its meaning when we move out to embrace God's other children around us. May we renew our pledge to self-sacrificing love, to a new awareness of the needs of those around us…both those close to us and those who are strangers. We, who know how the story ends, are charged this night with a gift and a burden…to love one another as Christ has loved us. AMEN