Learning the Great Commandment

John 12:1-8, 13:1-7


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan Newcomer

March 20, 2008

We all know those simple letters: W.W.J.D.? With the question mark: what would Jesus do? Simple anagram. Kind of simplistic. I mean, our situation, our context, our social location, is so different from Jesus’: when I, well I’m new to this area, when I first tried to ride on the Metro, get a ticket for the red line from that wall of machines, LED lights, toggle switches, charts with fees and categories of travel times, I was never going to get on the train asking myself or the person behind me in line, well, what would Jesus do? Although he might have helped me interpret the right behaviors to go with those “kiss and ride” signs, I didn’t see why I had to kiss everybody around me before I was allowed to ride! Would Jesus want me to, to love my neighbor as myself that way?

Although, wouldn’t it be kind of wonderful if we rode the Metro the way we practice in church: the kiss of peace, the passing of the peace, that rare moment—in some churches—of a little happy riot of friendliness and human greeting? What if the train stopped between Rockville and Shady Grove and the conductor said we will now have the passing of the peace!

Wouldn’t that be a wild WWJD moment, everyone getting up, shaking hands, embracing gently, passing the peace of Christ around and around? That would remind me of that grace-filled scene in the movie “The Fisher King” where the crowd in Grand Central Station suddenly begins to dance in pairs to a Strauss waltz. Lovely. Jesus would approve I’m sure!

But there are not a lot of everyday things we do because we know the answer to the question WWJD? What would Jesus do?

There’s a whole lot about cognitive and moral development, learning theory, brain functioning, chemical balance that goes into what we do.

And during these few moments of reflection on this powerful night of Christian worship, I want to guide us through the religious, Christian truth that can come to us from asking another question, a question prior to the one what would Jesus do? That question is: how did Jesus know what to do? How did Jesus know what to do?

It is clear from the Great Commandment that Jesus gives his remaining disciples—love each other as I have loved you—that Jesus is revealing his last great teaching: love each as I have loved you. And we then see how far he takes his love—with his freedom and his integrity he takes his love to and through death.

Well just in terms of learning theory, how did Jesus know what to do, how to do it, and what to say all along the way and especially in the passionate moment of this last supper night?

I admit it sounds, almost, like an improper question, maybe taboo. A mixing of different levels of reality: how do you ask God a secular question about God’s very God-ness? We would dismiss the question, how did Jesus know what to do?, by quickly saying: well because He was God, or at one with God. Or had a direct pipeline, unlike the rest of us. The closest we might dare to get to Jesus’ humanity would be to say: well, he prayed a lot. That’s how he knew what to do, he prayed and God told him.

But there’s a heresy there and the incarnation, the fully human, fully God doctrine, the Emmanuel, God-with-us as a Christmas-born baby and an Easter-raised savior would be lost. And without a fully human Jesus, God’s love for us and our hope for resurrection life would be beyond our own humanity. And the gospel is that God’s love and eternal life come into our humanity.

So unless Jesus is a wind-up God-doll or a God-strung puppet, how Jesus became Jesus is a knowing that can help us Christians become Christ-like. The keystone to Maundy Thursday, “Maundy” being from the Latin word for “great,” the great Thursday of the Great Commandment: love like me. So how he was like was maybe crucial, could be helpful, to how we can be like him.

And this is one thing I see. One part of an answer. The learning theory, the idea of how we learn to be, is simple, and a fairly respectable one, although there are others. (This one is Aristotle’s, not Plato’s if you’re taking notes). We learn by observation and then by imitation. We learn through our senses, our eyes being powerful, but touch and smell powerful as well, especially in the story we heard tonight of the woman who breaks the jar of rich perfumed oil over Jesus, filling the house with its sweet scent and drying his feet with her hair.

Jesus would have observed a lot here. What our senses receive we take in. Paying attention is an act of love—attention assumes attraction—we are open—eyes, skin, nose, and we take in, we receive. Paying attention, observation, is also an act of vulnerability—we are willing to let something of the world into us.

To learn something, to learn anything, we must receive something. An unstimulated baby fails to thrive. The world must touch us if we are to know anything.

And I believe Jesus was deeply touched, spirit-touched, emotion-touched, body-senses touched, heart and soul-touched by this humbling, generous, intimate act of adoration, respect, and love even, as a preparation for death: anointing oils.

And as always in this seemingly male dominated book—the Bible, even the New Testament gospels—it is the figure of a woman that so often enlightens the story. This is why truly the scholar-less fantasy of The DaVinci Code still grips our imagination: we need a woman in the story.

There is something almost inappropriate about the roles taken by the woman and the Messiah-Rabbi-Christ-man. The story is sensual when it’s supposed to be spiritual. There is an inversion of fiduciary responsibility here. This is an expensive waste, to Judas; you wouldn’t want this woman investing your stocks or running the Federal Reserve Bank!

But what Jesus learned, what he received, the simple giving serving love, simple giving serving love at great cost, at great cost, is what he does in a quickly following evening with his disciples. Jesus has learned, learned to experience, surely only re-experiencing this extravagant love and its role-changing enactment. And then Jesus learns by doing. He learns by imitation. He repeats what he received in his doing, his action, his gesture of extravagant serving love: washing his disciples’ feet as the door-servant, the man-servant or the maid-servant should have done, could have done.

This is how we learn, receive then do, receive a pattern of behaviors as stimulating sensations and observations, and then do what we’ve learned so that, as John Dewey said, we truly really learn by doing.

We learn to be Christ-like when we do Christ-like things; we learn what are Christ-like things by observing Jesus Christ, being stimulated by Jesus Christ, feeling in our hearts what our eyes, skin, ears, nose, have all tasted of Jesus Christ.

May we repeat this lesson tonight. Would you allow me and would you allow Sandra to play the role of Christ? Would you observe and feel our gestures of washing your hands as you learn first the role of receiving disciple so that you can ever more fully go out into the world as an imitating doing disciple loving others as Christ has loved you, with costly servant real love?