The church I last served had an actual “upper room.” It was a simple, open space on the topmost floor of the building just beneath the chime tower and the cross, where youth of a different era had once roller skated. With a simple linoleum floor, portal windows and a sloped, painted wood ceiling it exuded the feel of an attic, far away from the sidewalks and trafficked streets five floors below. It was the perfect location for Maundy Thursday services through years.
In the Christian calendar, “Maundy Thursday” is the Thursday of Holy Week – the last week of Jesus’ life. Thursday, the evening of the “last supper,” after which Jesus was arrested by his friend’s betrayal, the effluence of which was Good Friday and its crucifixion. “Maundy,” from the Latin for “mandate” or, more commonly, “commandment.”
Neither Matthew nor John among the New Testament writers ascribes elevation to the setting for Jesus’ last evening with his disciples, simply referencing a borrowed “room” in which they gathered. But Christian imagination through the years has been sparked by the notation in both Mark and Luke of “a large room upstairs.” Since we, in our situation, had the architectural assets to take those writers literally, we eschewed the sanctuary on those annual occasions in favor of that humble space at the top of our building.
As the appointed hour approached, the smallish crowd would travel up the elevator, find our seats among the folding chairs arranged in a square, facing inward around a simply set table set with a filled chalice and a stark loaf of bread, flanked elsewhere in the open clearing by a couple of stools and basins of water. The format of those experiences varied, but always the tone – established as much by the room as by the liturgy – was intimate, almost hushed. There would be simple songs – unaccompanied, or supported by a guitar or accordion; there would be spoken words, responses and prayers. Eventually the bread would be broken and the cup would be shared. And then bare feet, stripped of their shoes and socks and all pretensions of sophistication, would be entrusted into hands that would tenderly bathe and dry them in awkward quietness, until the silence was broken with the familiar words of Jesus:
“I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you…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.”
I loved those services, and I’ll confess, miss them. I loved that room and the Spirit it could invite. Sure, more glorious music could easily be found, and more poetic liturgies could be shared. But there was, for me, something profoundly inspiring about those simple and austere gatherings on the 5th floor.
Something both provocative and evocative.
Something grounding; centering.
Something awe-filling.
Something…holy.
There was something about the unadorned, artless, stripped-down elementariness of the moments that enabled us – enabled me – to plainly hear and receive afresh the routinely choked-out but elemental definition of discipleship; that to which the motions and the words, the loaf and cup, the basin and towel all point: love. “Love one another.” This, according to Jesus, is how people will know who you are – not by your creeds or your piety or your confessions or your sacraments; not by your buildings or your pronouncements; not by your liturgies, your blandishments of scripture, nor your songs.
By your love. By the way that you love like Jesus loved.
Bare feet, received by unoffended hands, and tended as if they were one’s own.
Because in every way that ought to matter, they are.
The service would end, and that upper room would empty. But something had changed among us. There never was much chatter in the elevators on the trip back down to ground level. We were “cleaner”, I suppose, in more ways than one; “clearer”, at least, about who we were and what lay ahead of us, and chitchat didn’t seem to fit. We had, as it were, work to do.
The work of discipleship.
The work of stripping down and leaning over.
The work of this “new commandment.”
The plain, ordinary, unglamorous, foot-washing sort of work, in a word, of love.
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