HOLY THURSDAY. THE LAST SUPPER

HOLY THURSDAY

Throughout the 20^th century worked the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. She was born in Philadelphia in 1901 and lived through until 1978. It is hard to imagine another anthropologist who has taught us as much about the nature of human community. Of her it was written,

As an anthropologist, Mead had been trained to think in terms of the interconnection of all aspects of human life. The production of food cannot be separated from ritual and belief, and politics cannot be separated from childrearing or art. This holistic understanding of human adaptation allowed Mead to speak out on a very wide range of issues. She affirmed the possibility of learning from other groups, above all by applying the knowledge she brought back from the field to issues of modern life. Thus, she insisted that human diversity is a resource, not a handicap, that all human beings have the capacity to learn from and teach each other. Her delight in learning from others showed in the way she was able to address the public with affection and respect.

Mead was once asked what sign we had about when civilisation began. The expectation was that her reply would concern the discovery of some ancient artefact such as a tool, or a weapon, or a segment of art. Instead, she simply replied, “a healed femur.”

A healed femur bone is the sign we have of the beginnings of civilisation. Why did Mead claim this? She claimed this because for the first time we had an indication that a community had cared for someone. Previously, there would be no evidence of a healed femur, for the person who had experienced a broken femur would be left to die. There comes a point in human history, however, when someone with a broken femur is cared for. Since a broken femur takes many months to heal, the person whose healed bone was discovered would have been cared for consistently for a good length of time. Their every need would have required attention. For Margaret Mead the indication of this attention was the sure sign of the beginning of human civilisation. Human civilisation begins as the culture of care is evidenced, a culture in which human beings give themselves over to one another in care for each other.

If this be so for human civilisation, then the divine civilisation, itself, becomes apparent on this evening. It does not begin on this evening but it is given its greatest transparency. It is given its truest indication and we left the surest fossil of its realisation, so to speak. Divine civilisation becomes apparent in the simple gesture of Jesus own care of his friends. He washes their feet. In Jesus, God becomes absorbed in service of us and in his attention to the most humble part of ourselves.

God is attention without distraction, declared the great mystic of the 1940s, Simone Weil.[1] The divine civilisation, revealed and enacted in Jesus, attends to us. God attends to us in all that we consider all too-human for him to become involved in

· The ambiguous ways in which we search for love in our life;

· The uncertainties we have about our identity and our future

· The angst that consumes us about our children and that keeps us awake at night.

· Our fears about our partners and how we can maintain them in the bonds of relationship

· In the helplessness we feel in the face of the demise of someone we love but feel powerless to assist.

· In the memories that haunt us

· In the failures and mistakes of our life that continue to subvert our best aspirations

· In our struggle to believe, to hope and to trust.

If Jesus washes the feet of his friends, these are the experiences with which he involves himself. It is to these experiences of our life, and more, that he attends. As he says to Peter, he says to us, “if I do not find you there in those experiences in which you discover the weight of your humanity, you cannot understand me.”

As God washes our feet, we wash each others. For Simone Weil “compassion consists in paying attention the one who is afflicted and identifying oneself with [them] in thought.” For Weil, attention is the key that opens the door to compassion for those suffering, "Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention” Human attention means “giving to those who have been stripped of their humanity an existence apart from their affliction. It is an action requiring considerable sensitivity, courage and sacrifice--a detachment from self and complete focus on the other person. It is what was required millennia ago to heal a broken femur.

As it is with us so too it is with God himself in Jesus. In other words human civilisation begins when it starts to mirror the divine civilisation as disclosed in the story of this evening. May the divine civilization of attention, care and involvement that we celebrate this evening as God in Jesus washes us and feeds us in the starkness of our humanity, become the model of what constructs our human civilisation.

For in the story of this night divine civilisation and human civilisation have become united.

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