Maundy Thursday in Holy Week – Kindness

On Sunday we began this sermon series on the Fruits of the Spirit with the theme of love. But now that we come to the fifth fruit, kindness, we must return to love, because to speak of kindness is to speak of a form of love. And that is fitting because at the heart of Jesus’s words on Maundy Thursday is the mandatum novum, the new commandment: 

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. 

Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. 

The opposite of love is, of course, hate. Perhaps we can say that the opposite of kindness is anger. And I think that’s why kindness is increasingly invoked these days. Hashtag ‘be kind’. ‘Practice kindness’. ‘Be kind to our staff’. All these are responses to an age of anger. 

It feels that, in our times, anger is out of control. It is stoked by tech companies who have learnt that our rage returns profits higher than our kindness, and they have constructed their algorithms accordingly. Anger is manipulated by populist politicians who exploit and magnify our resentment towards minorities and outsiders. Even progressives argue that anger is good, that it is a motivator against injustice. A popular slogan, emblazoned on t-shirts, has become, “If you’re not angry then you’re not paying attention.” 

Certainly, there is much to provoke anger in today’s world. But I’m not so convinced it is helpful to us. Perhaps how we feel about anger depends on whether or not we see anger in God. Many people do, even understanding the death and resurrection of Jesus as a sacrifice to placate God’s wrath at humanity since the disobedience of the Fall. 

The Fourteenth Century mystic Blessed Julian of Norwich takes a different view. In her Revelations of Divine Love she concludes that God cannot be angry; for if God were to be angry even for a moment, we could not live, so grounded is our very being in God’s love. 

The Cambridge theologian Janet Soskice has noted how, in Middle English, the words ‘kind’ and ‘kin’ are the same. To say that Christ is ‘our kinde Lord’ is not merely to say that Jesus is tender and gentle towards us (though this is implied), but that he is our kin, our kind. In the writings of Blessed Julian, this kinship with Jesus is not merely nice words, it is the basis of our salvation. To be redeemed is to know Jesus as a familial relation. Here she is drawing on the metaphor of adoption used by St Paul, particularly in his letters to the Romans and the Ephesians. But the kindness that Julian sees in God requires her to identify in God not just male kinship but female kinship. So we have this famous passage from Chapter 59: 

Our great Father, almighty God, who is being, knows us and loved us before time began. Out of this knowledge, in his most wonderful deep love, by the prescient eternal counsel of all the blessed Trinity, he wanted the second person to become our Mother, our brother and our saviour. From this it follows that as truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. 

The role of footwashing was performed by slaves, and Jesus was demonstrating profound humility in this action at the last supper. But it also feels like it has the qualities of kinship, something a mother would do, something a brother would do. In washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus is building a circle of kinship, a circle of kindness. Earlier in his ministry he has asked, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?… whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”  

I find this unsettling. If Jesus’ command to love one another was just a call to service, that would be much less threatening. We can dish out food at a soup kitchen or volunteer our time to some charity and still feel quite distant (even superior to?) those whom we’re serving. But Jesus’s command is more demanding: it is to be kind, which means recognising all people as our kin. 

We know that in our age of anger this has become an unfashionable idea. On the Right we are told that it’s fine to see people of other nationalities and cultures as different and less deserving than ourselves. On the Left we are told that to imagine we could be kin to people of different identities is appropriation of their experience; we can’t be kin we can only be allies. 

But I fear that for Jesus neither position will do. They say that blood is thicker than water but, hard as it is to accept, the waters of baptism are thicker than blood. The water of the footwashing is like the wine that at this Last Supper becomes the blood of the body, our body, the Body of Christ. This is the mandatum novum: a new kinship, a new human family. The Eucharist that is inaugurated on this night does not remember a sacrifice to appease an angry God; it is the ultimate sign of the kindness of God, the God who is our kin and who calls us to expand that kinship to all of humanity.