This sermon was preached for Maundy Thursday, April 6, 2023 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. The readings for this sermon were: Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, John 13:1-17, 31b-35, and Psalm 116:1, 10-17.
In the last few months, there’s been a great leap forward in a technology called artificial intelligence, also known as AI. One of the ways AI can be used is to generate images that look just like real photographs at first glance. They aren’t actually photographs of anything in reality, though. They’re just patterns of pixels put together by computers who have learned from a vast amount of real photographs what certain objects or scenarios are supposed to look like.
It’s actually quite easy to be fooled into thinking AI images are real so people have coming up with tell-tale signs for whether an image is real or AI. One way to judge whether a photo might be computer-generated is to look for any hands. At this stage of AI development, computers are quite bad at generating images of human hands. Look closely and you’ll see the wrong number of fingers, joints in wonky places, missing knuckles.
There's a reason for this. Computers learn from two dimensional, flat images, so they’re really good at surfaces - at the superficial. But artificial intelligence image models are not trained on the underlying structure of things, like the bones and the ligaments of a human body. They have no concept of how hands move, what they feel like, what they are for. Only how hands seem. So they get them really quite comically wrong.
You do not need to be an expert on human anatomy to know that something is off about a hand with twenty fingers and three knuckles. All you need to know is what it’s like to have a palm, a pinky, a wrist. All you need is to know the deep experience of being human. Computers have gotten really quite good at certain things. But this sort of knowing, your innate, embodied intelligence will beat out artificial intelligence every time. This is the kind of knowledge and intelligence that holy week is about.
We worship an incarnate God, a living God who chose to know the intricacies of the human experience in the deepest way, through the life and death of a particular human named Jesus. Jesus knew hands, and what hands were for. He reached out his hands to comfort and heal, to draw in fishing nets and flip over tables and pull people up on their feet. Tonight we remember how he used those hands to wash his friends’ feet and break their bread. Tomorrow we remember how they drove nails through his palms.
These next days at church are all about that human way of knowing and being known. Holy week invites us to go beyond the superficial, beyond images, beyond words. Holy week beckons us to embody the story of Jesus' journey to the cross. You do not need to be an expert in biblical studies to understand the heart of this story. You just need to let yourself know what it is to be human.
These next few days, we come to know Jesus through our hands, our feet, our hearts, even our tongues. We walk, we kneel, we eat, we drink, we sing. We feel, wholeheartedly. We let the symbols of our faith’s ancient tradition speak to us where images and words fall short. Water, bread, silence, darkness, oil, flame.
In a moment, I’m going to ask you to do something strange. Something weird and uncomfortable. I’m going to ask you to allow another person to wash your feet and then wash someone else’s feet. That squeamishness you might be feeling when you think about doing that? That squeamishness is part of the point. Lean into it. It’s what the disciples were feeling. It was awkward and confusing to have their teacher serve them in such a bodily way. Their discomfort is just as much a part of the story for us to experience as their confusion at Judas’ betrayal in the garden or their sorrow at the foot of the cross.
Now if washing someone’s feet, or having your feet washed, is a step too far for you, if your toes are already curling up in your feet in embarrassment and protest, if you’ve never done this before and you don’t know if you are ready, we have a hand washing station, too. If your choice is between feet or staying in your seat, I invite you to come forward to wash someone’s hands, and to have someone else wash yours. We offer this option tonight as well because this practice is not just about doing something out of our comfort zone - it's also about service. It's about caring for each other's bodies with our bodies.
At Jesus’ last supper before his death, he commanded his friends to love one another. And he showed them what that love meant with his hands, in the most human way he could - by caring for their bodies. He washed their dirty, sore feet. He fed them. We are to do the same. Tonight, and every day. We are to see the needs of the people around us - people we know and people we don’t - and we are to care for them with all that we have. We, too, know what feels like to be tired and dirty, we know what it is to be hungry.
You have to be paying attention at an odd part of the mass to see it but part of the priestly preparation at the altar is a little hand-washing ritual. The altar server ceremoniously washes the priest’s hands with a cruet and silver basin, while the priest prays quietly. That’s the tradition at least. A dear mentor priest taught me her own twist. She turns around and washes the hands of each other at the altar - the server, the deacon, any assistants. So now I do it, too, so that every Sunday as an echo of this night. I do it as a reminder of Jesus’ commandment to allow ourselves to be served and then turn and serve one another every chance we get.
I hope you’ll take this chance tonight. I hope the physical act of washing and being washed whether hands or feet reminds you that God's love for us goes beyond the superficial, the intellectual, beyond images and words. It is a love carried out through hands and bodies. Jesus' and ours.
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