In the story we tell tonight and through these Easter days, there’s a lot of movement up and down, especially by Jesus. He goes up to Jerusalem for the Passover; he goes down to wash the disciples’ feet; he then goes back up to the table for the meal; after the meal, he goes down to the Kedron Valley and the Garden of Gethsemane; he will then go up to the house of Caiaphas the high priest and the headquarters of Pilate; tradition has it that, once condemned, he falls down three times on the way to Calvary; then he goes up on the Cross; once dead, he’s taken down from the Cross and laid in the tomb before descending into hell; then he rises from the dead; and finally he ascends to the Father. It’s constant movement up and down and up.
The same movement is found in the famous hymn in St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (2:6-11). There Jesus starts very high: “he was in the form of God”. But then he begins a downward descent, “not counting equality with God a thing to be grasped”. He, the Son of God, assumes “the form of a servant”, being born in the likeness of sinful human beings, though sinless himself. He goes down still further, accepting death which is the consequence of sin. He didn’t just accept death, but the most humiliating death of all, death by crucifixion. You can’t go any lower than that. By the time he becomes the corpse of a crucified man, Jesus has hit bedrock, the lowest of the low.
Yet it’s precisely there that the Father is waiting for him; and so begins the great ascent from the depths of human degradation and destitution. God “highly exalts him”, giving him “the name that is above every name”, so that at the name of Jesus all should bow and bend the knee, going down as he goes up, and all should acclaim the crucified as Lord “to the glory of God the Father”. You can’t go any higher than that. He who went right down has been raised right up. This is the journey of Easter.
But it isn’t just the journey of Jesus, his exodus, his Passover. It’s the journey of each of us and all of us, our exodus, our Passover. We go down with Jesus so that we can go up with him. That’s what the washing of feet signals. With him we go down into the brokenness of the world – the fear, the violence, the hatred, the duplicity, the poverty, the exploitation, the polarisation and all the other symptoms of a broken world we bring here tonight. With him we go down into our own brokenness – our sin, our self-absorption, our refusal to forgive, our unwillingness to listen, the lies we live and tell, the people we wound and so much more that we bring with us this evening.
To go down into the brokenness of the world and into our own brokenness demands a sacrifice – the sacrifice of Jesus and our own. We will be wounded as he was; we will be broken as he was; we will shed blood as he did. But the sacrifice – his and ours – will be for the healing of the cosmic wound, for the life of the world.
The priest John Donne concludes his poem “Hymn to God My God in My Sickness” like this:
As to others’ soul I preached Thy word,
Be this my text, my sermon to mine own:
Therefore, that he may raise the Lord throws down.
Yes, the Lord does throw down. He threw Jesus down; he throws us down. But the Lord throws down only so that he can raise up. He sent Jesus to the Cross only in order to raise him and the whole creation from death to life, to lead the cosmos through darkness to light. He throws us into the brokenness of the world and into our own brokenness – throws us on to our knees to wash feet. But only in order to raise up both us and the world. It’s in the brokenness, on the Cross and in the darkness, that God meets us and raises us on high. So down we go with Jesus; and there at bedrock we wait for the power of the One who was there before us, waiting for us. He it is who will raise us on high; we cannot raise ourselves.
But once God does raise us up, then we can become the Body broken and the Blood poured out for the life of the world. He who goes down into the bread and wine of the altar rises up, astonishingly, in the feeding Church which becomes what it eats, his Body and Blood throughout the world and into all creation “to the glory of God the Father”. Amen.