It is the Tuesday of Holy Week.

Do you need to RSVP your congregation’s Maundy Thursday service?  

I believe Holy Week both should and should not be personalized. There is real value in each of us imagining Jesus washing our own feet; we can rightly picture ourselves at the table with Jesus and the other disciples at his last meal, accompanying his long night of prayer, fighting and eventually losing the struggle to stay awake. Each of us may sit in the silence of the tomb and discover that his lonely night speaks directly to our own nights of fear, grief, and abandonment. A morning Holy Week devotional read as part of a personal quiet time, an individual sojourn through a labyrinth, or self-directed Stations of the Cross can help us journey with Christ on a personal level.  

I believe Jesus loves all of us and Jesus loves each of us. I believe both statements are true, but they are not the same thing. We need the congregational and the personal; the we-hymns and the I-hymns; the gathering and the scattering.  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Let the one who cannot be alone beware of community. Let the one who is not in community beware of being alone. Each by itself has profound perils and pitfalls. The one who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and the one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self‑infatuation, and despair” (*Life Together*).  

I’ll speak for myself, and if you relate, you can track with me (if not, maybe you can still empathize). I can become so focused on the personal, individual experience that I lose sight of the communal, congregational, social, and political dimensions of the gospel. Though I am an extrovert, I find that I treasure “me and Jesus” over “Jesus and my community.” Yet my preferences are not supported by the biblical witness.  

Within Matthew’s chronology of Holy Week we encounter several crucial teachings about the connection between the believer’s devotion to God and the believer’s responsibility to neighbor. In Matthew 22:34–40, we read the dialogue between a lawyer and Jesus about the greatest commandment (singular). Jesus placed two commands in the same breath, perhaps even implying that they are inseparable: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” Later that same day (or week), Jesus challenged those who “tithe mint, dill, and cumin” while neglecting “the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23, with a nod to Micah 6:8).  

Most Bible students draw the line of demarcation between Christ’s ministry and Christ’s passion at the end of Matthew 25. So the last great teaching in the first Gospel is Matthew 25:31–46, and it sits within this stream of Jesus’s teaching. Acceptability before the divine authority is not measured by precision of practice or correctness of doctrine, but by concrete acts of mercy toward “the least of these”: the hungry, the thirsty, the vulnerable, the stranger, the sick, the imprisoned. The Jesus we encounter in Matthew (and elsewhere, I think) is highly critical of those who maintain meticulous religious observance (Matthew 5:23–26; 6:14–15; 12:1–8; 15:1–9; 18:15–22; 22:34–40; and pretty much all of chapter 23) at the expense of family obligation, compassionate service, relational repair, or justice. In this apocalyptic vision, the One we worship as Lord identifies so completely with vulnerable neighbors that our treatment of them is reckoned as our treatment of him.  

As we experience Maundy Thursday seeking the real presence of Christ, I believe that we will encounter Christ both in the consecrated bread and cup and in our neighbors, the strangers, and even our enemies. From my reading of Scripture, I believe that Christ’s teaching throughout the full gospel is deeply individual, but never separated from the mutual participation of the lives gathered around the table and the gathered community’s service to the world—beginning at our doorsteps and extending to the ends of the earth.  

Maybe you’ve heard the teaching about the cross: that its vertical and horizontal beams can help us name how love of God and love of neighbor must never be torn apart. The vertical beam reminds us of our relationship with God in practices like prayer, worship, adoration, repentance, and the mystery of Christ’s self‑offering for the life of the world. The horizontal beam reminds us of our relationship with one another and our shared burdens, acts of mercy, hospitality, reconciliation, and justice. Discipleship finds itself where love of God and love of neighbor are held together in a single, cruciform life.  

While that imagery comes from a common and perhaps overused sermon illustration or pastor’s‑class teaching, it also aligns with biblical teaching. In the second chapter of Ephesians, after the writer has worked through the principles of salvation by grace through faith as God’s gift and the subsequent sanctification, the writer speaks of the ways Christ proclaimed peace to those near and far and, through his death on the cross, destroyed the barriers that would keep persons separated from one another. The cross insists that the two dimensions belong together. Christ reconciles us to God, and that reconciliation with God is the foundation of our reconciliation with others.  

This Holy Week will again place us at that intersection of the vertical and the horizontal. The love and welcome we feel in the upper room with Jesus has implications on the ground, where we must assess our complicity in and participation with patterns of cruelty inconsistent with God’s vision for humanity. Congregations will gather around their varied tables and receive the bread and cup in memory of Christ, but they will also look into one another’s faces and recognize that Christ is present there as well. The One who reconciles us to God is the same One who meets us in “the least of these,” whether they sit in the next pew, live on the margins of our communities, or suffer far beyond our sight. And when Holy Saturday’s silence settles in, we wait together—as many congregations but as one body—for the dawn of resurrection that renews both our worship of God and our shared responsibility to neighbor.