Maundy Mandate: Love One Another
It is 20 degrees outside, all the crocuses are frozen to the ground like murdered ballerinas. Donald Trump is hawking Bibles on the internet. And it’s Maundy Thursday.
Maundy Thursday is the day on the church calendar when the Last Supper is commemorated–the final dinner Jesus had with his disciples. In the next twenty-four hours he would be arrested, tried, and executed. In a memorable gesture, he knelt and washed the feet of his disciples. He said to them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” This explains why the day has come to be called “Maundy” Thursday: “Maundy” comes from the same root as “mandate,” meaning “command.” The day before his execution, Jesus commanded his disciples to choose love over hatred, fear, or revenge.
Which makes it darkly ironic that an ex-president who explicitly tells his followers “I am your vengeance” is selling Bibles to raise money for his campaign. The radical mandate to love your neighbor–even your enemy–is what differentiates Jesus from many of those that claim to be his followers. Yet a large number of Christians seem to be more intoxicated by vengeance than love; more motivated by Christian nationalism than Christian charity.
The poem posted below is about a Christian who believed in nationalism more than love: Colonel John Chivington, the Methodist pastor and Sunday-school teacher who led the Third Colorado Cavalry to massacre a peaceful band of Cheyenne and Arapahoe people in 1864. Most of the victims were women and children. They were killed while standing under the American flag.
At the end of the poem I reference Wounded Knee, where, on December 29, 1890, innocent women and children were machine-gunned or hunted down on horseback and slaughtered by the U.S. Army. The bodies were left to freeze in the snow. A reporter in the local paper wrote: “our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands.” I think you, dear reader, can connect the dots to our current politics, both here and abroad.
The true meaning of Easter is not that believers have a “get to heaven” ticket, but that they are given a mandate: to love one another. Without that mandate, Christianity is just another brutal cult.
