It is a great privilege and a joy to be with the Cathedral community for this Holy Week and I am grateful to Dean Catherine for her invitation and the warm welcome I’ve received. I’ve enjoyed listening to Canon Andy, Canon Tess and the Dean sharing something of how Holy Week has shaped their lives and faith and by way of introduction, perhaps I might add to their stories with a brief one of my own.
It didn’t happen during any Holy Week, but one October at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where my publishing work takes me each year. I hadn’t been ordained long and, in a lull between meetings, one of the other exhibitors asked, out of the blue, what was the one thing I most wanted from being a priest. I wasn’t expecting the question, and wasn’t prepared for it, and I needed to think, because the person asking it wasn’t just head of one of America’s finest religious publishing houses, the Paulist Press, but a Paulist father and a renowned preacher at the order’s cathedral-like church in New York. He was also an eminent clinical psychologist. I definitely needed to think about my answer.
My mind went to a hymn – an occupational hazard for the publisher of Hymns Ancient and Modern, I suppose – the hymn that we shall sing later, Brian Wren’s Great God, your love has called us here, and to two lines in particular,
‘We strain to glimpse your mercy seat,
And find you kneeling at our feet.’
I spoke them aloud, and said this is it, what I most wanted was to help people know that God is not far off, but is on his knees at their feet. It was a moment that crystallized everything I felt called to do, and also the beginning of a treasured friendship with Fr Mark-David Janus who helps me remain faithful to that desire, even if I’m not always faithful in carrying it out. So to be here with you when the lectionary gives us the reading that inspired the hymn that continues to inspire me, means more than I can say.
But it’s an odd reading for the celebration of the institution of holy communion because there is no reference to the Eucharist here. We have to turn to John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand in chapter 6 to hear Jesus talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.
Eucharist, along with Baptism, we know are the two sacraments that shape our identity and communal life as Christians, yet everything in this text says that the humble, loving service exemplified by Jesus in the washing of his disciples’ feet, is a sacrament too. No other passage in the Gospel of John has so many spotlights shining on it, every single one of them telling us to look closer, pay extra attention because something of huge importance is going on here.
The setting is loaded with significance. It is the eve of the Passover festival, when every household was getting ready to re-enact their ancestors’ liberation from slavery. As they are preparing the lamb they will eat as part of that, Jesus, who, as he walks on stage at the beginning of the gospel, is introduced to us as ‘the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’, is preparing for his death. The timing is climactic – the ‘hour’ when Jesus would complete his work and return to the Father, to which John has been pointing us throughout, is now here.
Other spotlights direct us to clues for interpreting what Jesus is doing here. It is a part of his Jesus loving his disciples ‘to the end’, which means to the point of death but also utterly, completely and perfectly. We are to pay as much attention to this simple gesture as to all the teaching, the parables and the miracles. It is also a startling demonstration of the kingdom where the first are last. There is no parallel anywhere else in ancient writing to Jesus becoming like those to whom we leave the most degrading work, and it upends every notion of privilege, power and authority by which the world determines who belongs in which group.
There is a beatitude here, ‘blessed are you if you do these things’; an I AM saying, ‘you call me Teacher and Lord and you are right – for that is what I AM’ – those two electrifying words, the divine name that signifies God’s immediate presence.
And there is a commandment, the mandatum that gives this day its name, ‘you also ought to wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.’ This is not a house rule for club members only, but is the church’s mandate for its life in the world. We are called to be Maundy Thursday people, sent into the world to do as Jesus did, to wash its feet.
Unless you are caring for the very young, the very old, or the very dependent, you may have little opportunity actually to wash feet, but Jesus’ capacious ‘as I have done’ is an invitation to improvise, to use our creativity and imagination to act in the spirit of what he has done. When we begin to look at the world this way, we will find that the opportunities are unlimited, the variations endless. A day will not go by that does not bring us chances to wash feet. It can be practiced in any circumstances. We can do it with our words, our listening, our time, our attention, our possessions, our forgiveness, our love, or with anything else at our disposal. And whenever we get down on our knees, we will find God is there too, working to let his glory shine in every life.
But there is one more thing to say about this text. There is a hidden gem here, a diamond glinting just beneath the surface. Before he picked up the bowl or the towel, we read that Jesus ‘got up’. A minor detail we may think. But turn to this verse in the Authorized Version and our skin should begin to tingle, ‘He riseth from supper.’ ‘Got up’ conceals the most thrilling word in all scripture. It’s the word Jesus uses when he says the temple of his own body will be raised after three days. It’s the word Luke uses in his predictions of the passion and it’s the word we will hear angels speak in three days’ time as they explain why the tomb is empty. ‘Got up’ is a foretaste of resurrection.
Jesus speaks the same word to the paralysed man beside the pool of Siloam, when he heals him, and he does far more than simply get him on his feet. He restores his humanity and dignity as someone made in God’s image. Enabling people to taste resurrection is what every act of washing feet is about.
Of course this night is not only about the washing of feet. A storm of fear, pain, grief, helplessness is about to break over us. When such storms come into our lives, or when the troubles of the world are too overwhelming and our resources too meagre, here is something to hold on to: every time we get up to wash feet, no matter how small the gesture, no matter how futile it seems, we usher in the power of God to raise the dead.
And if we ever forget this, or if we ever lose sight of the one we are trying to follow, we will know what to do. Not just look up to heaven, but look down too, because it’s there we will find him – kneeling at our feet.
