Maundy Thursday

I attended a Maundy Thursday liturgy this evening, which left me feeling homesick for the Advocate, the community we worshiped with when we lived in North Carolina. For Maundy Thursday, the Advocate met in a lodge at a church camp outside town for a Mediterranean-style dinner and "table Eucharist" (meaning the priest blessed bread and wine there at our tables to use for communion). As part of the service, we washed one another's feet. Then, at the end, the crucifix was wrapped in black, the tables were stripped, everything was cleared away in silence; then we gathered on the porch in the dark to sing "Stay with me" (a song taken from Jesus' words to his sleepy disciples in Gethsemane), to read Psalm 22, and then to disperse.

The service I attended tonight was a simple in-the-church kind of liturgy, which couldn't begin to provide the same kind of conviviality and drama. I was disappointed, though, that they didn't wash feet. On the other hand, there was a moving, and surprising, rite afterward: after folks had helped to strip the altars for Good Friday, they gathered outside the church, where there's a garden where people's ashes are interred. There they scattered crushed communion wafers over the ground and poured out the remaining communion wine. I thought: It's a libation for the ancestors. And then I realized: They're offering communion to the ancestors; they're sharing their communion service with the ancestors.

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The Maundy Thursday service centers on the reading from the Gospel of John where Jesus washes the disciples' feet as an example of how they should serve one another as he has served them. This morning I was looking for an equivalent passage in the D&C--"thus you should serve one another," "whoever would be greatest must be servant of all," etc.--to post to this blog in observance of the day. I thought I would find it at the end of D&C 88, where the rite of washing of feet is described. I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the D&C says nothing about service in its discussion of the washing of feet.

We do get this in D&C 50:26--

He that is ordained of God and sent forth,
the same is appointed to be the greatest,
notwithstanding he is the least
and the servant of all.

Joseph Smith has the point of Jesus' teaching completely backwards. For Joseph, the emphasis is on being the greatest--on being "possessor of all things," having "all things . . . subject unto [you], both in heaven and on the earth" (v. 27). It's dismaying, but it makes sense: for Joseph, the gospel is about empowerment, authority, exaltation, deification. Whatever truth there is in that vision--and I believe there's truth in it; those themes are part of what I prize about Mormon tradition--that vision is liable to losing sight of the crucial gospel themes of servanthood, of emulating a God who steps down from high station, who empties himself on behalf of others.