The ritual we are going to see in just a couple of minutes I would say that most Catholics have never seen in their lifetimes. I can say that with some confidence because we only see this ritual on Holy Thursday, when we read John’s gospel of the last supper, the only gospel where we hear about Christ washing the disciples’ feet. And so the only people who get to see this are you, who are among the elite who have figured out that this next three days, no offense meant to anything else, but this three days are really the best thing the Catholic Church has to offer all year.
Even tonight though, we only see with our eyes one part of what this ritual is trying to tell us. Because the liturgy only asks us to re-enact the first part of the ritual — Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. What we don’t see is what Jesus asked to have happen next: that they should all wash one another’s feet. Over the church’s history there have been times and places where this foot-washing was taken very seriously as a public remembrance of what Jesus was trying to get across. There have been religious communities where everyone washed one another’s feet at different times during the year; in many monasteries it was the custom for centuries for the feet of every arriving guest to be washed by the abbot and all the other monks as a sign of honor and hospitality and a sign that Christ was present in every visitor.
But this custom has fallen away in a lot of places. I have been to any number of monasteries over the years as a guest and never had my feet washed. Not that I really want them washed, that’s not the point. But there’s something here that Jesus really wanted us to see and experience up close.
You might ask why this custom has faded the way it has. Well, I’m sure at some point people decided that it made too much of a mess; I can almost picture the monastery meeting where they talked about all the work it involved with water and towels and probably mops and buckets. This is a messy activity, like most of what Jesus asked us to do. But maybe on a deeper level there’s another reason we don’t often see it. It’s still too dramatic for the people involved in it. And by dramatic I mean this. Maybe you can picture what it would be like to get on your hands and knees in front of another person and take the place of a servant to them, and actually touch them; it’s uncomfortable and we feel vulnerable and we wonder how we ended up on the floor in front of another person, perhaps someone we don’t know or don’t like or don’t respect. And yet maybe it’s only by being on the floor ourselves that we would finally get the message that really, we are asked to be a servant to everyone, no distinctions.
What Jesus was doing here after the last supper was at one level showing these disciples how much he loved them, what he was willing to do for them. But he was also breaking a barrier,and showing them that there was an equality between them that was one of the gifts that he was trying to leave us. He took a task that was usually performed only by slaves and women and he broke that open, and showed that every person who was his disciple should show honor and deference to every other person. Even Judas the betrayer of Jesus has his feet washed at this emotional moment.
If we were ever on our hands and knees like that maybe it would be harder for us to accept a world that is divided into us and them. By doing this for us Jesus broke down the barrier between slaves and free people, between teacher and follower, and really between every other barrier that humans like to put up between people. In a polarized world where people see enemies everywhere, this is the kind of church we are supposed to be, the one in this gospel, caring for one another without distinction, not a place with a system for sorting who’s in and who’s out, who’s a good Catholic and a bad one, who isn’t worthy to have their feet washed, who’s too good to do the washing.
And it’s not a coincidence at all that we do this ritual of footwashing on the feast that is also the night when we give thanks for the gift of the eucharist. This is what Christ’s presence in the eucharist is supposed to do for us, to remind us to serve other people without distinction, as Jesus did, it’s to show us what self-giving service looks like, as he also did. The eucharist is a gift to enable us to become Christ’s presence, to enable our hearts to be put into action, and this self-giving love we see in this gospel tells us something about what that action looks like.
It’s uncomfortable, and it’s not the way the world usually works. In fact it is the world turned upside down. But if we want people to believe in Christ’s real presence in this church and in us, this is how they will know it’s real: when they see people doing something foolishly generous for others, maybe even on their hands and knees doing it, and not worrying at all about whether it’s worth doing.