Tonight I had the opportunity to attend a beautiful Tenebrae service at a local church where a dear friend serves on the worship team.  It was a service full of good music, poignant testimonies, and full readings from the Gospel of Mark.  One of the last songs sung was one I hadn’t heard or sung in a very long time: “Lead Me to Calvary,” also called “Lest I Forget Gethsemane.”  It was a fitting way to mark the evening.   Tomorrow I’ll walk up the street for a Good Friday service and then Sunday I’ll celebrate Easter at my own church.

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I did really appreciate the set of readings from the Gospel of Mark.  It was good hearing the narrative from the Last Supper to the burial of Jesus.  As I sat there and listened, I couldn’t help but think it would also be a great thing to do something similar with the Holy Thursday narrative in John.  Many Maundy Thursday services do that, often picking up John’s inclusion of the washing of the disciples’ feet as an act of great significance.  Quick research reminds us that Maundy comes from the same root as our word for “mandate,” which has to do here with Jesus’ clear command to his disciples:

¹² When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, “Do you understand what I have done to you? ¹³ You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. ¹⁴ If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. ¹⁵ For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. ¹⁶ Truly, truly, I say to you, a servantis not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. ¹⁷ If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.

A little later in John 13 he gets to the “new commandment”:

³¹ When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. ³² If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once. ³³ Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me, and just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ ³⁴ A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. ³⁵ By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Jesus comes back around to it in John 15, after foretelling Peter’s denial and promising the Spirit and talking about vines and vinedressers and branches:

¹² “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. ¹³ Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵ No longer do I call you servants,for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. ¹⁶ You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. ¹⁷ These things I command you, so that you will love one another.

Where the synoptic gospels are rich in the various moments of Jesus’ final evening before his death, John’s Gospel takes time to dig in, to embrace the obvious moment while also pointing ahead to what is next and to what is beyond.  Thursday evening in John is a long chunk, of course: 5 full chapters, 7 if you go all the way to the crucifixion.  But there are some great twists and turns in John’s account of Jesus’ final discourse and his closing prayer.

Anyway, it’s just a thought.  Lots of churches do things differently in the days leading up to Easter, and John obviously gets good attention in some (probably many) in various and sundry ways.  Definitely something worth thinking about for the future, though.