The Nature of Grace, Made Plain by Its Absence

Imagine a world without redemption. Daily life continues as it always has: the morning commute, trips to the grocery store, folding laundry, dinner and the dishes. Marriages come and go. People who do wrong are punished, everyone getting what they deserve, more or less. Life and death pass along like far off ocean liners. The Cross is an irrelevant symbol, as rare as a rhombus.

Every Maundy Thursday, we are given a chance to conceive a world without redemption. As the service ends, the altar is stripped of all its linens, paraments and ornaments so that not even a candlestick remains. Veils are draped over every cross, hiding them from view. It can be a jarring experience, watching the liturgical colors slowly drain away until all that remains is black on wood. Flannery O’Connor once said, “Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.” So it goes with our salvation. We never realized how much we needed it until it’s seemingly taken away.

What we experience symbolically reflects the actual experience of the disciples. In this fictive recital of historical events, we are invited to place ourselves in the disciples’ shoes. We strip the altar in reverence to the night they were stripped of their Redeemer. Hours before, they had hovered over Jesus as he instituted communion and washed their feet. Retreating to a garden for respite, Jesus is unexpectedly arrested, his hands bound and led away. The disciples stand in the garden alone, defenseless. And what happens? They immediately flee the scene. Strike the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.

To be clear, the disciples could not plead ignorance about what took place that night. Jesus had been telling them how everything would unfold throughout his ministry. The fact that Peter drew a sword at Jesus’ arrest tells us that he was not entirely caught off guard. And yet, as soon as Jesus is taken from them, the disciples fall apart entirely. There is something about the absence of Jesus that invites all hell to break loose. Like a wheel without a hub, the spokes collapse into a pile of sticks. Without their rabbi, the disciples become just another a disparate collection of nobodies.

Many a Maundy Thursday sermon has aspired to rephrase Jesus’ famous command to the disciples. “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another,” he says, drying the last of their feet with the towel wrapped around his waist. And yet, several hours after instituting this new law, in the immediate aftermath of his arrest, the disciples desert Jesus and flee. Those who were instructed to love perfectly are suddenly completely incapable of loving each other at all. It turns out the disciples are only unafraid when Jesus is by their side. He was the source of their security and life’s purpose. What happens when the source runs dry? Perfect love may cast out fear, but as soon as Perfect Love exits stage left, fear makes itself right at home.

The same goes for us. On Maundy Thursday we imagine our lives as unredeemed. Without the Cross, we are abandoned to ourselves, left to bear the world on its own terms. Without Jesus by our side, we are faced with the horrifying possibility that our life is in our own hands. That our days on this earth are nothing but what we make of them, that we really are, at the end of the day, alone. As the disciples watched their savior escorted away, they must have felt like the ground fell out from under their feet. Up was now down, right was now wrong, joy and hope dissolved into nothingness. The light of the world was snuffed out and all they could see was the bleak darkness of a life without the one thing that made it all worthwhile. In that moment, the only world they had was the one they have suffered for most of their lives. Left to their own devices, the disciples head for the hills.

I remember the first time I attended a Maundy Thursday service, watching the altar cross disappear under a black veil, and being completely undone. “There goes my redemption,” I thought to myself. “Take away the Cross and you may as well take away everything else.” Until that moment, it did not occur to me that my entire life was hinged upon Jesus’ death and resurrection. Without it, I am, as the hymn says, “laden with guilt and full of fear” with no relief in sight, left to face the judge without an advocate. The nature of grace was made painfully plain by describing its absence.

As the final cross is veiled on Maundy Thursday, we might feel as the disciples did, cast out into the night, defenseless and afraid. On our way home however, we may catch sight of a cross — on top of a steeple or on a bumper sticker or the pendant of a necklace — and not only be reminded that the world has been redeemed, but that our Redeemer lives.