as I have loved you
In the late afternoon on Maundy Thursday, I crash, feeling my own slow crumble as I curl into a corner of the couch and tentatively flex, cataloguing the cramps in my feet. Sometimes, as I consider the years stretching on and no end in sight to the needs in front of me, I feel a flash of fear, because I am a woman who holds precious things, and more and more, my arms get tired.
I confess this vulnerability, cradling a journal in my lap, holding close again at close of day the understanding that, before going to the cross, Christ conveyed a new command, a mandate.
As I have loved you, love one another.
Maundy originates from the Latin mandatum. I didn’t know this at first, had to look it up, that odd word with its melancholy sweetness, but it fits, I think, because it turns out to be critical to my contemplation, mandatory, really, that before turning to stand carefully within the crowd of witnesses at the foot of the cross, I should remember what the Lord commanded just before going there for me.
Critical also, it seems, to consider why I needed His cross in the first place.
On one of my favorite apps, I learned today that for over 400 years, in the Sistine chapel’s Tenebrae services over the three days preceding Easter, choirs have sung Miserere Mei, Deus, Gregario Allegri’s haunting composition that takes as its lyrics the 51st psalm, and that with each confessional refrain, an officiant snuffs the candles in the sanctuary one by one, gradually plunging the room and the worshippers into complete darkness.
Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.
The light blinks out slowly in the room, like an ebbing life, like a body breaking.
This is the kind of love we are talking about, Eugene Peterson paraphrased the apostle John, not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.
It was the phrase as I have loved you that made Christ’s mandate new, and this afternoon, I cannot escape the implications.
What is it to be crowned with steadfast love and compassion, if not, in imitation of the Savior, to wear a crown of thorns?
On Maundy Thursday, as they gathered in an upper room, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, King of Heaven and Earth kneeling vulnerable, wearing a servant’s towel, gently baptizing their walking around lives, agitating the cleansing waters with His own hands.
He emptied himself, Paul later wrote of Christ, by taking on the nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. Funny, but it is not usually this I think about, not this for which I give deep thanks, when I bend to life’s inevitable cleaning.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin!
In the Tenebrae, the room dims still more, another flame extinguished with the jolting suddenness of mallet to spike. Dusk curls now at the edges of our living room windows.
I think of how Jesus showed us a love that sheds dignity in favor of givenness.
I have given you an example, He explained to them that night, that you should do as I have done for you.
The Supper followed, Jesus lifting the cup, ripping the bread in front of them. This is me, broken for you.
I think of how Jesus showed us a love expressed in brokenness, in crumbling, in being torn for love.
As I have loved you, love one another.
Really every Thursday evening, I feel broken by the week, but had not, until the maundy entered my Thursday, considered that I could greet the feeling as a kind of sharing with Christ, that maybe I could let it move me to adore Him, shakily, with a prayer in my own small voice. Thank you, for being broken for me.
I had mentioned this to a friend, how I feel by the end of the week, and she, wanting to spare me, had asked what I’ve been doing to be so worn. I felt a little incredulous. What, indeed? Nothing extraordinary, only the mama things, I said, the friend things, the daughter and the sister things; only trying, however awkwardly, to love.
Walk in love, the apostle urged, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.
But it’s a good question, my friend’s, and a faithful one.
What have you been doing?
Like the very best questions, like God’s curious questions, like the questions Jesus posed to those who came questioning Him, it searches and dives below the surface of things for the truth. I can be broken by sin just as easily as I can be broken for love. I’ve been stretched in a thousand seasons, and not always because God was stretching me.
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
Nightfall, and here in my own natural Tenebrae, God seems intent on searching my heart before bringing me to the cross.
Remembering my friend’s good counsel and acknowledging that my thinking can be more broken than my body, I also acknowledge now the fact that God has given me some heavyweight blessings, and that there’s a cross I’m to carry as Christ did, for joy. And I don’t know, but under those circumstances, I’m starting to wonder why I never expect love to be a sacrifice I actually feel in my body.
I read that the growing darkness in the cathedral during the Tenebrae means to transport worshippers to the garden in the pitch of night on the eve of the cross, where Jesus, anticipating His death, told Peter and Andrew and John, my soul is overwhelmed, and taught them to pray.
Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.
As night floods in, pouring through our windows, I hear Him encouraging me too, warning me, as He warned them. I can almost hear the twigs breaking under their heavy feet, as He says it, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
It’s true. I feel it. The flesh is weak, and His urgency seems as real to me in the dark of my own Maundy Thursday as it must have felt in theirs.
So, pray.
Pray, because evil slithers in the darkness and everything here is backwards and upside down, and I never think, in the moment of my brokenness, that this groaning in my body could in fact be a natural part of walking His Way, a symptom of loving and serving in union with Him.
But what if being broken and given is only exactly what it means to love as He loved me?
I close my eyes.
As you have loved me, let me love. Help me love as you have loved me. And teach me, Lord, to pray.
I hear Riley’s feet on the stairs before I see her, hear her walking across the living room, where she reaches and leans and clicks the lamp in the corner on. Light, like a warm touch, like His fingers grazing my cheeks, swallows the darkness whole, and Riley says, just bright, “There you are, Mom.”
I open my eyes and smile at her. “Yes, here I am.”
