Lectionary Commentaries for April 2, 2026
Maundy Thursday

The farewell discourse in John’s Gospel begins in John 14 and ends in John 17. John 13 serves as a precursor to the farewell discourse. Jesus performs the highly symbolic action of washing his disciples’ feet to prepare them for his farewell and departure, ensuring they understand the significance of his mission of love and can practice it in his absence.

The washing service takes place during the supper, before the Passover festival. Jesus sets an example of service, teaching his disciples not only through words but through his actions. At this moment, his act speaks louder than words, radically challenging social norms. Traditionally, servants washed the guests’ feet, or guests washed their own feet—never did the host perform this task. Yet, Jesus willingly performs this service during the supper, upending social hierarchies and expectations. Though he is the host, he acts like a servant, embodying the role of a true servant of God.

Jesus lowers himself to wash the feet of the disciples individually, one by one. While community and collective actions are important, at this moment, washing feet is a deeply personal and intimate act. Each disciple requires care, and Jesus tenderly attends to each individually, emphasizing that each person is precious before God. He touches and washes them, creating a physical connection through water and hands. As dirt falls away, Jesus wipes the feet clean with a towel.

This act of washing and being washed binds them with love—Jesus to each disciple, and all disciples to one another—except for Judas. 

Judas’s presence during the foot-washing is uncertain because there is an issue with the translation of the Greek phrase δείπνου γενομένου (deipnou genomenou). This phrase can be interpreted either as “during the supper” (the prevailing view in most modern translations) or “the supper being ended” (as in the King James Version). If Judas left immediately after eating the bread, and the washing occurred only after the meal was fully concluded, then he would have already been gone. This minority view suggests that Jesus’s comment about “not all being clean” was a retrospective reference to the man who had just departed, thereby preserving the foot-washing as a rite exclusively for the true believers.

Peter does not understand Jesus’s service of washing feet and initially refuses it. Jesus replies, “You do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand” (13:7). This response indicates that the act is not merely a ritual or a one-time event but a symbolic gesture connected to loving the world, even to the point of risking one’s life. Peter will only fully grasp the meaning of this love and service after Jesus departs.

Peter subsequently requests that Jesus wash his hands and head in addition to his feet, symbolizing the entire person. But that is his misunderstanding since foot-washing is a metaphor for service, love, and relational care. Feet, often perceived as dirty, weary, and vulnerable, necessitate compassionate care to foster a sense of being valued and loved.  

In this sense, love is neither naïve nor romantic; it is not a one-time feeling or act of charity. Instead, it requires unselfish commitment and a willingness to pay a price. This understanding of love aligns with Jesus’s broader teachings on discipleship and sacrifice throughout the Gospels. Jesus willingly embarks on this path, doing so gladly. He explains the reason for washing the disciples’ feet in 13:13–15. It is because he expects them to follow his example.

Washing one another’s feet requires humility and deep care for one another. It may put one’s life at risk because the world hates the children of light. Jesus knows this, as he warns: “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed” (3:19–20).

In Johannine theology, Jesus’s life is seen as an act of service, exemplified by the foot-washing and metaphors like “I am the bread of life.” Unlike some interpretations that focus only on his death, Johannine theology presents his life as a holistic series of interconnected acts of service. This differs from the Synoptic Gospels, which emphasize service but lack the foot-washing narrative.

After washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus announces his imminent departure, saying: “Where I am going, you cannot come” (13:33). In light of his absence, the disciples must continue his work. This is where Jesus gives a new commandment: to love one another. This point is significant. He does not say here to love others in general, but specifically to love one another within the community of disciples. If they do not do so, they are not his disciples (13:35; see also 8:31–32).  

This new commandment does not replace the Torah or the Old Testament. Instead, the Johannine Jesus emphasizes the importance of love within the community, seeing it as the foundation for their mission to others. Mutual love characterizes the identity of the Johannine community.

The implication is clear: The good news of God and Jesus will only be spread through love in action. People are not naïve and will not be attracted to the community through words alone. New life begins with love, which is demonstrated through God’s people and observed by others. The true measure of Jesus’s disciples is their love within the community and the willingness to extend it to others. As Jesus exemplifies this love throughout his life, his disciples are called to do the same.

This passage invites modern readers to reflect on how we embody the commandment of love in our own lives and communities. In a world often divided by self-interest, Jesus’s radical act of service and his command to love one another serve as a powerful countercultural message. They challenge us to consider how we treat others within our faith communities and how we extend that love to the broader world.

In conclusion, the foot-washing narrative in John 13 offers a profound lesson in humility, service, and love. It sets the stage for Jesus’s farewell discourse and exemplifies the kind of love and service that should define his followers. This act—symbolic, yet deeply personal—encapsulates Jesus’s mission and provides a model of discipleship that continues to challenge and inspire believers today.

Today in the United States and elsewhere, fear, cruelty, and violence are breaking forcefully into public awareness, as in the brutal treatment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of those perceived as non-citizens. God’s instructions establishing the Passover festival in Exodus 12:1–14 interrupt a narrative about an ancient society built on exploitation and tyranny that similarly was spinning into chaos and death. 

Before the tragic 10th plague resulting from Pharaoh’s hardened heart, our attention abruptly turns to the institution of an annual memorial. Passover connects every succeeding generation to the central exodus story of deliverance and liberation. God intervenes to protect the Israelites’ firstborn sons and to free this beloved people from Egyptian bondage. This pivotal moment of redemption remains so central for Jewish identity that more than 3,000 years later, it continues to be celebrated each spring at the beginning of the liturgical year. 

The Passover sacrifice in Exodus 12:1–14 draws all members of the covenant community together in an egalitarian remembrance, as families of all sizes are included and meat is shared. The lamb or kid is slaughtered for feasting on this special occasion with none left over, and the blood of the animal serves as a protective sign on the lintels of the Israelites’ homes to ward off the destroyer (verse 23). The death of the Passover sacrifice means life for all inside, particularly for firstborn sons. 

The status of firstborn males as belonging to God is treated again in chapter 13, with provisions to redeem firstborn sons through sacrificing an animal. These theological concepts of life-giving blood and redemption through substitutionary death offer models for understanding the significance of Jesus’s death on the cross and the New Covenant in his blood (1 Corinthians 11:26).

Throughout the rest of Egypt, a “cry” reverberates from every home lamenting the deaths of firstborn males. This excruciating moment widens the suffering evident from the beginning of Exodus, where a new Pharaoh who did not know Joseph afflicted the Israelites with harsh labor and ordered the killing of all newborn males—not limited to firstborns. 

If the widespread violence shadowing the exodus story is not immediately evident, it is because the Bible focuses on heroic resistance to state-sponsored terror. Ordinary women—the midwives Shiphrah and Puah, Moses’s mother Jochebed and sister Miriam, and Pharaoh’s own daughter—refuse to accommodate Pharaoh’s genocidal edicts. 

The text also warns against resistance to cruelty that incites further violence, as when Moses intervenes to stop a beating and then must flee into exile after killing an Egyptian. 

Each plague intensifies the pressure on Pharaoh to act justly, but only the final plague breaks through his hardened heart when he himself feels the anguish of grief. At that point, Pharaoh not only lets the Hebrews go but expels them in haste and even asks for a blessing from their God (verse 32). This departure begins the Israelites’ perilous journey from Egypt to Sinai for the covenant gift of God’s revelation through Moses.

Significantly, the Egyptians and even Pharaoh himself are not demonized as pure evil in this narrative. Their humanity shows in their expressing deep pain at the loss of their sons, felt at all levels of society. Egyptian neighbors are viewed as sympathetic to the Israelites, speeding them on their way and giving them silver, gold, and clothing requested for their journey (verses 35–36). A mixed multitude (verse 38) of other ethnic groups expresses solidarity by joining the Israelites on their way toward freedom. Ultimately, the conflict is not between ethnic groups but expresses God’s judgment on the gods of Egypt (verse 12), who undergird the status quo of oppression and violence rather than love and compassion.

Reading about Passover in Exodus 12:1–14 on Maundy Thursday may be disorienting, since Passover is not the setting of the disciples’ last gathering in the Gospel of John. According to John’s chronology, Jesus is crucified on the day of preparation immediately before Passover, when the Passover lambs were sacrificed (John 19:14). John’s gospel presents Jesus as “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29; see also 1 Corinthians 5:7). For John, the detail that Jesus’s bones were not broken on the cross (John 19:33) confirms this association, since the Passover lamb was to have no broken bones (John 19:36; see also Exodus 12:46).

The powerful christological symbolism within the church during Holy Week of Jesus as the Passover lamb stands alongside the faithful Passover observance in Jewish communities all over the world at around the same time each spring. Practices associated with Passover have continued to evolve over the centuries. Even within the Bible the family context described in Exodus 12 shifts to a pilgrimage festival in Jerusalem, where Passover lambs were sacrificed in the Temple. This was the practice still in Jesus’s day. The Roman army’s destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. put an end to sacrifice in the Temple and brought a return to home observances. 

Today the holiday memorializing the exodus from Egypt involves a Seder or ritual order of symbolic foods, including unleavened bread and bitter herbs, and of a recounting of the Passover story as set forth in the liturgical book, the Haggadah (literally meaning the “retelling”). With the Temple no longer standing, lamb is generally not served in Jewish communities living within Christian lands. Out of empathy for the Egyptians’ grief, participants diminish their joy by removing drops of sanctified wine from their cups. 

Jews and Christians draw upon our common scriptural heritage in distinctive and life-giving ways, as the passage about the Passover celebration in Exodus 12 shows. Brought by God’s steadfast love into enduring covenantal communities, Christians and Jews learn about God’s character from the story of the exodus. We know that our God is responsive to suffering, passionate for liberation, and committed to bringing life and joy out of pain and humiliation. Today more than ever, as fear, cruelty, and violence surround us, we are called to believe and to act in the assurance that the God who led the exodus of Israel from Egypt has the final word.

Maundy Thursday is all about remembering commandments—mandates (from the Latin mandatum)—that God has given to the worshiping community.¹ As a complement to the stories of God giving instructions regarding Passover, Paul giving instructions regarding the Lord’s Supper, Jesus modeling service by washing feet, and the overarching divine command to love others, the reading from Psalm 116 voices the psalmist’s commitment to keep these commandments. 

An overview of Psalm 116

Psalm 116 is one of the “Hallel Psalms,” a description that reflects the characteristic call to praise the Lord (Hebrew often uses the term hallelu-yah) that recurs in Psalms 113–118. This group of psalms is also characterized by frequent references to God’s deliverance of the Israelites, and especially the deliverance from Egypt, which likely accounts for the association of these psalms with the celebration of Passover. 

The structure and content of Psalm 116 make it a thanksgiving psalm. Like others in this category of psalms, the psalm begins with an expression of gratitude, tells the story of how God has acted on behalf of the psalmist, and concludes with a renewed expression of gratitude or call to give thanks. Psalm 116 actually features repeated narrations of divine deliverance:

• God listened to the psalmist (verses 1–2)
• God saved the psalmist from a low place (verses 3–6)
• God delivered the psalmist from death (verse 8)
• God loosened the psalmist’s bonds (verse 16)

For the psalmist, God’s acts of hearing (verses 1–2) and defending (verses 6, 8) prove that God is gracious, righteous, and merciful (verse 5)—therefore worthy of the psalmist’s love, trust, worship, and obedience. The observation in verse 15 that God sees as “precious” the “death of his faithful ones” should not be understood as saying that God enjoys these deaths but rather that God considers the lives of those in the faith community to be precious. Their deaths are costly to God, which is yet another indicator of God’s worthiness to receive the worship and obedience of the psalmist. 

The final section of the psalm (verses 12–19) is an extended promise the psalmist makes to God. Because of who God is and what God has done, the psalmist vows to offer sacrifices to God. This ritual involves lifting up the “cup of salvation,” which became a very literal part of the Jewish worship practices during the Passover meal. 

Significantly, the psalmist’s offering of thanksgiving sacrifices is done in the presence of the whole community: in the presence of all God’s people (verses 14, 18), in the courts of the house of the Lord, in the middle of Jerusalem (verse 19). Telling the story of who God is and what God has done is part of worship, part of thanksgiving, and therefore part of the life of obedience to which God calls God’s people. 

Psalm 116 and Holy Week

As with the other psalms that appear in the lectionary readings for Holy Week, Psalm 116 provides a kind of emotional-psychological soundtrack to the events the Gospels narrate. This psalm draws our attention forward to the promise of ultimate salvation that lies on the other side of Friday’s crucifixion. 

Distress, anguish, affliction, and death are still ahead of us—both within the story of the passion and in the lives of those worshiping today—but we can find hope and inspiration in the confident testimony of the psalmist. The God of the past heard, cared, and delivered, so we can be sure that God will continue to do so. “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death [and suffering] of his faithful ones” (verse 15), so we can be sure that God does not take our pain lightly. At the same time, the psalmist does not try to minimize the pain that has been experienced. This song-prayer is about resilience in the face of hardship and not about denial of hardship’s reality. 

In Christian tradition, the Eucharist (from the Greek word eucharistia, “thanksgiving”) is an outgrowth of the Passover meal that included the “cup of salvation” associated with Psalm 116 and its promises to offer thanks and worship to the God who saves. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper in Christian worship—which is itself another commandment, or mandate, that Jesus gives to his followers—is therefore an echo of the kind of thanksgiving Psalm 116 exemplifies. 

A model prayer

In preaching Psalm 116 on Maundy Thursday, one might consider embracing the role of the psalms as models for our own prayers. The psalmist of Psalm 116 goes through a process of remembering and naming challenging times, acknowledging and celebrating divine response, and worshiping and vowing obedience to God. The first-person language of the psalm invites us each to take on the psalmist’s voice and consider what stories, experiences, and promises we might have to share:

“I love the LORD because he has heard my voice and my supplications.” (verse 1)

• When have you cried out to God and received an answer of some kind?
• What prayers have you seen answered?

“What shall I return to the LORD for all his bounty to me?” (verse 12) 

• What has God done for you that deserves thanks?

“I will … call on the name of the LORD; I will pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people. … I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice!” (verses 13–19) 

• What vows can you make to God as a “thanksgiving sacrifice”?
• Who might need to hear your story? 
• What can you do this week to obey God’s commands, which are summarized with “love God and love neighbor”? 

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website for March 28, 2024.

My recommendation for preaching Maundy Thursday is not to “preach on” 1 Corinthians, but to use Paul’s strategy in crafting 1 Corinthians 11 to bring the presence of Christ palpably among your own people while preaching on the dramatic gospel from John 13 and leaving room for the liturgy itself to preach. The meals are not the same in the Gospel and the epistle, but Maundy Thursday commemorates both the institution of the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 11:23–26) and the foot-washing mandate (John 13:14–15). 

Whether you expand the reading for that evening or not, I suggest you familiarize yourself with at least 1 Corinthians 11:20–29. By adding the verses before and after the lectionary reading, you can see how skillfully Paul brings together the Lord’s Supper narrative with its moral implication of attention to those with the least power and status, thus bringing together Eucharist and foot-washing. 

Those who attend the Maundy Thursday services generally come for the very sense of intimacy with Christ that Paul conveys as he focuses simply and intently on the words of Jesus: “This is my body that is for you. This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” Each word is intended to drop into the hearts and consciences of the hearers.

1 Corinthians 11:23–25

These verses are the powerful rhetorical center of 1 Corinthians 11:17–34, where the presence of Christ himself is brought into the midst of the congregation as they listen to the letter being read.

• For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you: One of the first things we notice in verse 23 is Paul’s sense of immediacy with Christ in the receiving and passing on of his words. It is that intimacy and urgency of Jesus’s words that he intends to pass on to the Corinthians as both assurance and challenge.

Now Paul entrusts his hearers with the treasure. He wants to be sure that the assembly understands the full implications of Jesus’s statements, because they will be the foundation for their acts of living remembrance.

• This is my body that is for you: This statement sums up how Jesus lived and ministered. He had a body that was profoundly “for” others—for me, for you— God’s means of compassionate presence and care. The body of Christ that is the community of the baptized is likewise a body for others. This is the heart of Paul’s message in 1 Corinthians as a whole, and most particularly in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34 (see especially the importance of “discerning the body” at 11:29).

• This cup is the new covenant in my blood: There are several places where Paul echoes Jeremiah in his letters, and this is likely one of them: “This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days [the deportation to Babylon and destruction of Jerusalem], says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD” (Jeremiah 31:33–34).

The intimacy of the people around the Maundy Thursday meal extends to intimacy and mutual knowing of God. For Paul, genuine knowledge of God is love of God and, even more importantly, being loved by God: “We know that “all of us possess knowledge.” Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Anyone who claims to know something does not yet have the necessary knowledge; but anyone who loves God is known by him” (1 Corinthians 8:1b–3).

Maundy Thursday is an occasion for immersing the congregation in God’s unbounded love, especially on the eve of Good Friday.

• Do this in remembrance of me: What is “this” that the community is to do in remembrance? The obvious connection is with how they commemorate the Lord’s Supper. When they do so, they are to recall Jesus’s words: “This is my body that is for you. This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” But the remainder of the passage will suggest a much wider frame of reference for re-membering Jesus in daily life.

1 Corinthians 11:26 and beyond

• For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes: Paul keeps his interpretation of the Lord’s Supper closely tied to the crucifixion. By ending the reading here, the lectionary stays very closely focused on Christ and honors the unfolding of the liturgical sequence of Maundy Thursday – Good Friday – Holy Saturday – Easter. But it misses the practical moral implications that were Paul’s original point.

• When you come together to eat: Paul is concerned that “when you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s Supper” (11:20), because the assembly is just repeating the social norms of the surrounding culture. Those who have plenty arrive early to the shared meal, and by the time day laborers or small shop owners arrive with whatever they might be able to contribute, the early comers have drunk and eaten their fill (“one goes hungry and another becomes drunk,” 11:21). 

The dramatic presentation of Jesus’s words and the seriousness of all that he gave his life for are summed up by very precise corrections to how this congregation should honor Christ at the Lord’s Supper: “My brothers and sisters, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If you are hungry, eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for your condemnation.”

• This teaching seems so small compared to the drama of Christ’s words at the table, and his impending death. But it underscores the centrality, the holy necessity of the body of Christ, the church, living as Christ in every detail of daily life.

• The calling of the baptized to live as Christ is the daunting mystery that underlies all of Holy Week: that there is a holy death to the self that is linked by unfathomable love to all that will rise by the power of God.

Resources

I have spent a lot of time with this beautiful passage. I explore it in depth in a chapter of my book Keeping the Feast: Metaphors of Sacrifice in 1 Corinthians and Philippians, Early Christianity and Its Literature 16 (Atlanta: SBL, 2015).