What if you woke up this morning knowing that today was the last “normal” day of your life?
How would you spend it?
John, in his gospel, is clear about the fact that Jesus knew that his end was near. “Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and to go to the Father.”
The last “normal” day of his life had come.
And so he spent it with his beloved disciples, all of them, even the one who would betray him.
As the day faded away into darkness, Jesus sat down at the table with his disciples and ate with them. He gave thanks for the bread and the wine, and he asked them to continue to share meals together when he was no longer with them.
“Do this in remembrance of me,” he said to them.
And on this last “normal” day of his life, Jesus did something that shocked the disciples, and especially Peter, something that seemed beneath him.
During supper Jesus took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.
Jesus says to the disciples that if he, their Lord and Teacher, has washed their feet, then they also ought to wash one another’s feet.
“For I have set you an example, that you should also 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.”
Jesus spent this last “normal” day of his life doing what he had done throughout his ministry—loving with compassion, sharing and serving, and making all loving and sharing and serving acts of blessing and thanksgiving to God, from whom he had come, and to whom he was going.
The gift that Jesus gave to us on that night was to broaden our understanding of our own humanity.
These very ordinary things that all of us do—eating together and serving one another– are not just ordinary.
These simple things like eating, drinking and taking care of one another are also loving and sacred acts when we do them as an act of blessing and thanksgiving to God.
In today’s psalm, the psalmist asks,
“How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?
And then the psalmist answers his or her own question.
“I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord. I will fulfill my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people…I Lord, I am your servant.”
Jesus did these very things on the last “normal” day of his life. He lifted up an ordinary cup, filled with ordinary wine, and it became a cup of salvation.
He served God by taking ordinary water, and pouring it into an ordinary basin, and washing the ordinary dust from the very ordinary feet of his disciples. For Jesus, this simple and humble act became an act of blessing to God. In doing these ordinary things, Jesus gave thanks for all of the good things that his Father had given to him during his lifetime. By loving and serving all of humanity, he was most deeply and completely loving and serving God.
And so our days go by, some glorious, and some full of suffering–but most days are just ordinary, seemingly unimportant, and passing away like grass that quickly withers in the sun.
The gift that Jesus gives us on this last ordinary day of his life is to remind us to let each moment of our lives be shaped by the question that the psalmist asked so long ago.
“How shall I repay the Lord for all the good things he has done for me?”
To offer up our ordinary days, to make time to eat together, to love one another as God has loved us, to serve our brothers and sisters, to wash one another’s dusty feet,
And to live our lives in remembrance of him, and with thanksgiving for all of the good things he has done for us.
Amen.