I was thinking about…

The Night Love’s Depths Got Redefined

By Andy Lee

For those following along with Christianity’s most sacred week, today represents one pivotal hinge where Holy Week transitions from someplace spiritually weighty into hallowed territory. I’m referring to Maundy Thursday – that storied evening before Christ’s unimaginable suffering commenced.

Now admittedly as a kid, I didn’t fully grasp the magnitude behind the final acts and teachings Jesus imparted before his execution. Mostly I just fidgeted through marathon processionals while my mind impatiently awaited hunting Easter eggs a couple days later. Maundy Thursday felt like one prolonged opening act before The Passion’s dramatic climax.

Thankfully, embracing its profundity with maturity reveals how today preserves some of the most intimate, upending moments unlocking ultimate love’s cosmic mysteries. Because on this night commemorating the Last Supper, the Savior doesn’t just impart final instructions – he absolutely decimates every conventional human understanding about greatness, servanthood and the full extent of sacrificial love.

See, the Gospels depict Jesus beginning by adopting history’s most humbling posture imaginable. Rather than leveraging his final hours dispensing royal decrees bolstering divine authority over His subjects, the Lord of the Universe literally kneels at his disciples’ feet washing dirt and grime from between calloused toes like the lowliest domestic servant.

And Jesus didn’t just lecture about this iconoclastic understanding. No, while disciples squirmed in shock and revulsion at their Rabbi assuming the repulsive duties typically reserved for household slaves, the Living Word got down on his knees skin-to-sin to model heaven’s upside-down hierarchy. The Teacher became the teachable.

Yet the Nazarene doubled down repeatedly elevating servanthood as salvation’s supreme embodiment. Throughout the fateful dinner continuing Christ employs startling metaphors like consuming his body and blood – graphic images no middleman now required to facilitate the Divine/human interface. He was it – the longed-for mediator and new covenant fusing heaven and earth’s dimensions forever.

Small wonder authorities shook with rage over these affronts! Every pious power structure prioritizing rules over relationship threatened. Because grace means nothing unless sin catalyzes its availability. What use empty forgiveness if imperfections don’t already exist?

So on this night before sin’s wages peaked in his execution, the Lamb of God leaned into every contaminated crevice, redefined greatness from the bottom up while initiating a covenant of downward mobility shocking the universe. Maundy Thursday kicks off Christianity’s defining 72 hours not with triumphant supremacy but via the most profoundly disruptive act of intimate proximity imaginable.

That tonight depicts intimacy’s closing act only underscores the gospel’s inverted ethic. For it’s in losing by world’s estimation that we ultimately find victory’s terms getting rewritten from below. The Son of Man became human so divinity’s reach extends into every last forsaken quarter.

Stay humble, keep serving! 🕊