That first reading tonight reminds us that while we think of Passover as a feast for our Jewish brothers and sisters, it has a deep meaning for us too. Because it reminds us, as it does them, that God wants our freedom from captivity, that in fact God wants to give freedom over and over from whatever keeps us from being closer to God, and whatever holds us back from being the people he created out of love.
On this feast of Holy Thursday we have to remember that that also is what the eucharist does for us. It offers us the presence of the risen Christ, this liberated Christ not just truly present in the bread and wine but really present inside of us, changing us, breaking down every barrier, allowing him to be deeply inside us. That gives us freedom.
When we hear that we’re being offered freedom, different images will come to our minds. But tonight, here is what freedom looks like. It looks like the gospel reading we just heard. Because what we see there is that Jesus has taken down the barriers we all have built in our minds between ourselves and God, and between ourselves and everyone else in creation. On this last night Jesus is alive, this is the message he wanted to leave with his disciples: it is that there are no barriers left between him and them. All that sense of being far away from God, that sense of unworthiness of being washed clean by God’s hands, Jesus says tonight, just stop that, and allow me to do this for you. You have to. This is how you now need to think of what God desires to do for you.
With this commandment to wash one another’s feet we are also set free from everything that keeps us distant from others, all the anger or fear that keeps us from seeing the radical equality of other people, people that we should be glad to go down on our hands and knees in front of, to do for them what God has done for us, whether in our minds they are worthy of it or not. If we truly understand what has been done for us tonight in this gospel, we might realize that the only possible way to be grateful is offering it to others.
This is not an easy freedom we’re being offered, it’s freedom to embrace the life of following Christ without anything holding us back. It is hard for us to grasp living like that, it is normal life turned upside down. This is just not how many of us were taught to picture God when we pray, on his hands and knees in front of us reaching out to touch us, to wash us clean, to get us ready to stand up and return to life. Even Peter who knew and loved Jesus could not imagine this, it seemed fundamentally wrong for Jesus to wash his feet, as maybe it still does to us.
And yet here it is, reality revealed to us, here on this last night before his death, this is what Jesus wanted remembered. This completely free and liberating gift of his love, and the promise he wanted us to make to do the same thing with one another. On this last night he wanted a new reality to enter into the lives of his disciples, he wants a new state of affairs in their lives with no boundaries between them and him. And he gave them this simple image of a towel and the water, and above all being on their knees, to show them what love without boundaries could look like.
So tonight we remember all this. We remember the Exoduses we have experienced in our own lives, the times we have felt God’s presence, the gifts of freedom that we can still use in service of others. We see other people who need to be set free from what holds them captive, sometimes all too literally captive, and we see that in God’s eyes we and those other captive people are one. Above all we ask God for liberation for everyone who needs freedom from whatever holds them back from the life they are called to. The desire of Jesus the night before he died was for us to see and feel that we are all servants to one another. If we realize what great love has already been given to us, we realize we have been set free for a purpose, and that is to bow down in front of and love someone else who does not deserve it.