April 1, 2010 | Maundy Thursday

The Power of Example

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 116
John 13:1–17, 31–35

The wisest of people all seem to say that the way we die, or the way we think about death, affects the way we live. Now I haven’t undertaken a study of what all wise persons would say when it comes to matters about life and death, but over the ages there have been people who have gathered up such insights from the wise. In the fourth century before Christ’s birth, student of the great Greek philosopher Plato and formidable philosopher himself Aristotle did just this. To write his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle asked the wisest people he knew how they would define true happiness, or the good life, and what he discovered is that they thought happiness depended not only on health, enough wealth, some amount of greatness, pleasure, honor, and excellence but also a long, complete life. No one, no matter how great a life he lived, could be said to have lived a good life if he died a wretched death. A good life, according to the wisest people, must come to a good end.

Not an ancient moral philosopher, but rather a living distinguished surgeon, Sherwin Nuland also gathered the insights of the wisest people he knew. In order to understand what our lives and our deaths are about, Nuland sought the wisdom of his wisest friends, family members, colleagues, and patients. Already in his seventies when his book How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter was published, Nuland writes, “There is no way to foretell whether this is to be my last decade or whether there will be more—good health is a guarantee of nothing. The only certainty I have about my own death is another of those wishes we all have in common: I want it to be without suffering” (p. 263). Like most people, Nuland desires to die with dignity. And yet, having seen so many deaths in his lifetime as a surgeon, he recognizes that there is rarely a death that is dignified. Dignity, he concludes, must be sought not in death, but in the life leading up to death. “The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. . . . The art of dying is the art of living” (p. 268). In other words, our desire to die a good death should make us more attentive to living a good life.

The church, in all its wisdom, has also captured the lesson that how we think of death matters for how we choose to live. For the church, Jesus Christ is the exemplar of how to die and how to live. While during his lifetime none of Jesus’ disciples would have been able to accept Jesus’ crucifixion on a cross, for no death could have been so ill-fitting a life, after his crucifixion, Jesus’ disciples had to begin the hard work of coming to terms with his death. A lot was at stake in this work, for a wretched death, a death without dignity, has a way of throwing into question the meaning of the life that was lived. I imagine the crucifixion of Christ, as shocking as it was, caused the disciples to question the things about which at one time they were most certain. Was Jesus really the Messiah? Did he really have the power to save us? Did he live in vain? Was all this for nothing? Until they could make sense of his death, Jesus’ disciples would not be able to make sense of his life.

Out of the struggle to make sense of the death and life of Jesus Christ, the Gospels were produced. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John reveal the authors’ understandings of who Jesus was and the significance of his life and death. Unlike the first disciples, the author of the Gospel of John knew how Jesus’ life would end, and by the time he wrote his Gospel, he had made sense of that death. In John, even Jesus clearly knows how his life will end. Knowing that he will be put to death, Jesus nevertheless turns toward Jerusalem and steadily follows his course to the cross.

In the passage you heard today, Jesus knows his hour has come. Quite dramatically, over the course of many chapters John draws out the way Jesus spends his last hours. He spends those hours preparing the disciples for his death and departure—saying his good-byes in a farewell speech, sharing a simple meal with his disciples, teaching his disciples a new commandment, and here by washing their feet, giving them an example by which to live.

Of course, the disciples don’t know that in all these things Jesus is preparing them for life without him. Not understanding the meaning of Jesus’ actions, especially Jesus’ act of washing their feet, they need him to spell things out. So Jesus explains to them, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” Because the disciples may not yet understand, he says to them, “What I am doing you do not know now, but afterward you will understand.”

Jesus knows that in time, after they experience and come to make sense of his crucifixion and death, his disciples will be able to see more clearly the meaning of how he lived—what he taught and what he did. How Jesus died is no different from how he lived. The crucifixion will be the distillation of his utter love and devotion for them, and through it, they will be able to understand the example of love that Jesus set for them when one time he washed their feet.

We are, on this Maundy Thursday of Holy Week, at the threshold between Jesus’ life and Jesus’ death. While we are at this threshold, we might consider not only the difference Jesus’ death makes for our understanding of his life, but also what power his death has over our lives. Knowing his death is imminent, to the end Jesus spends his time preparing his followers for life without him. It is the kind of preparation that a parent makes for his children to be able to live a good life in his absence.

In a small book called The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch writes to and for his young children the lessons he wants them to learn when he is gone. Knowing he will die from cancer before they are grown, he writes, “There are so many things I want to tell my children, and right now, they’re too young to understand. . . . I want the kids to know who I am, what I’ve always believed in, and all the ways in which I’ve come to love them. . . . It pains me to think that when they’re older, they won’t have a father” (p. 191).

Like a parent, Jesus says to his disciples, “Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”

Not only giving them the commandment to love one another as he loves them, Jesus also shows them by washing their feet what such love looks like. These are the things by which Jesus equips his first followers and the church ever since to carry on after his death. As we stand at the threshold of Jesus’ death and departure, John wants so much to comfort us with Jesus’ confidence that we have what we need to live a good life. From Jesus we have received a new commandment by which to live and an example to follow.