Desperate: A Maundy Thursday Reflection

By Wes Ellis

Today is Maundy Thursday, the day of Holy Week when our Lenten journey is interrupted by a family meal.

During Lent, we follow Jesus into the wilderness, into Jerusalem, and eventually to the cross... The traditional practice of this season is to "give up" something. Not everyone in the church does this. Some choose to "take up" some kind of practice instead. Some try to reflect without any specifically Lenten discipline. But whatever practice we take up or put down, we do it in order to nurture the honest confession that the monster haunting the human soul that gives life to the most horrific tragedies of our experience is not alien to any one of us. We confess our need for God’s grace and forgiveness.

In his memoir, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, Mark Vonnegut, MD., writes of his struggle with mental illness. He describes his loss of confidence "that going crazy was something that happened to other people" (xi). His description of the self-alienating experience is haunting. "All of a sudden," he writes, "I can't eat or sleep.... I'm hearing voices.... I'm not sure who I am or where I am.... Maybe I caused an earthquake... Maybe my father killed himself... Life is over" (36). In reading his description, I was gripped by the anxiety that the stuff in Vonnegut is the stuff in me, human as we are... this experience is not so far from where I am that I should consider myself immune. In fact, I cannot help but see why something similar shouldn't happen to me. As I said, his words are haunting. But what comes as something of a surprise is the grace that Vonnegut experiences in the midst of his struggle. "Then it turns out that I'm in a psychiatric hospital, which is not good but is better than what I thought was happening. When I was asked if I was hearing voices...it was a relief to finally be talking to someone who knew what was going on" (36).

Vonnegut writes, "The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I've saved myself trying to be normal" (9).

What does any of this have to do with Lent? What, especially might it have to do with Maundy Thursday?

Lent is a season of confession. That is to say, in Lent, we are free to unmask, to take off the shackles of our self-preservative impulses which seek to suppress our dysfunction. We are free to save ourselves the time we spend "trying to be normal" or healthy or righteous, and finally talk to someone who knows what is going on. The biggest gift of being unambiguously frail is the time we save ourselves trying to be powerful. And the interruption comes every Sunday and in full force on Maundy Thursday—the interruption of grace.

As Paul Tillich has written, "Man does not have to deceive himself about himself, because he is accepted as he is, in the total perversion of his existence."

In the midst of this season of confession—in the midst of finally giving up on preserving our “normality”—in giving up on trying to save ourselves and just admitting that we are desperate, Jesus comes to us on his knees and serves us… he washes our feet and he feeds us. Jesus breaks the bread and says, "take, eat." He takes the cup and says, "take, drink... this is for the forgiveness of sins." He says all this to us... to US…

If we don't embrace this as an interruption, even a scandalous one, then I'm afraid we'll miss the point. The acceptance and the forgiveness we receive in this meal is not something we had coming. We are loved precisely where we do not deserve love. What could be more disarming? All the radical hospitality that has been played out in Jesus' ministry—to lepers and tax collectors and prostitutes—is localized here in this meal...

even in Judas...
Yes, Judas...

Judas—the one who is in the middle of betraying Jesus and sending him to his execution—is accepted and forgiven at Jesus’ table too... in his utter faithlessness... "in the total perversion of his existence."

When we look at the table and see Judas, we should see ourselves—served God's grace even in the midst of our frailty and fraudulence.

Ironically, in the radical hospitality and unfathomable grace of Jesus, a command is manifest. The word "Maundy" comes from the Latin, Mandatum—a mandate or a command.

Jesus tells his disciples to love. That's the command.

And it's not just any kind of love… it’s the love that is put on display in Jesus' act of washing the feet of his disciples. This was not his job. This was a job for invisible people, powerless people, people like the ones we recognize ourselves to be in Lent. But Jesus takes the basin and the towel and does the job. In doing so, he dismantles the virtue of power and elevates the honest. He flips upside-down our notions of greatness. He lowers himself. And the logic continues all the way to crucifixion. As the Church eventually would articulate it, "he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:7-8).

This is the command, the mandate, we receive.

In our frailty, we are accepted. And in being accepted, we are called to accept others. We are liberated to liberate. We do not have to deceive ourselves about ourselves. And as Tillich says, "...being accepted by God means also being transformed by God." But for now… while transformation may seem far away… let us simply notice that we are accepted by God and save ourselves the trouble of trying to be righteous.