Like many of you, I am quite taken with the new Pope, Francis
I. As a lifelong skeptic about Vaticanal
things, I find my fascination to be a bit of a surprise. All of his recent gestures—moving into a
smaller apartment where he can be part of a community, refusing to wear ermine
capes and Prada shoes, paying his own hotel bill and canceling his newspaper
subscription—seem to strike just the right note of personal humility.
Perhaps the most striking thing he’s done, though, occurred
today. As part of his first Holy Week observance, Pope Francis travelled to Casal
del Marmo youth detention center in Rome to wash the feet of twelve young
prisoners there. This isn’t a new papal
gesture—Pope Benedict did it in 2007—but it is nevertheless in keeping with the
new Pope’s care of and advocacy for the poor and the marginalized.
Still, I wonder. Will the Pope, or any of his attendants, ask
the twelve young Italian prisoners to return the gesture and wash their feet? I
raise the question because, when I’m honest about it, I realize that for me
washing your feet is easy. The harder
part is letting you wash mine.
This difficulty arises not only from my reservations about
revealing my feet in all their imperfection.
It arises also from my innate sense that I owe God and you a lot more
than you or God owe me. This sense of one-way obligation is broadly shared in
our church culture. About a decade or so ago I attended a clergy conference led
by Martin Smith, a priest and monk and writer, who told a story about a
question he often poses to clergy coming to the monastery on retreat. On the
first night he tells them to go back to their rooms and ask themselves what
they would like Jesus to do for them. Without fail, he said, the next day the
clergy always show up with long lists of what they are supposed to do for
Jesus. No, Smith said, you didn’t hear me right. I didn’t want you to list what
Jesus wants you to do for him; I asked you to think about what you want Jesus
to do for you. Not surprisingly, when the question is put that way, his
retreatants have a very hard time coming up with any ideas at all. Jesus do
something for me? Isn’t that backwards?
That’s the way it is in this Gospel for Maundy Thursday. When
Jesus washes the disciples’ feet, Peter becomes distraught.
"Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." [John 13]
Though we are tempted to think of Peter as they guy who never
quite gets it, in tonight’s Gospel it looks to me as if he responds as any one
of us might. Jesus is the teacher, the disciples are his students. The normal
order of things in a hierarchical culture is for them to serve him. Jesus
calmly but radically turns that hierarchy upside down. He establishes the
primary obligation as being on his part, not theirs. He serves them.
Tonight let’s sit with Martin Smith’s question as we think
about the events we witness tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday. What would you like
Jesus to do for you? In our liturgy last Sunday we all shouted “Crucify him!”
as part of the dramatized Palm Sunday reading of the Passion Gospel. If you’re
anything like me, you’ve thought a lot this Lent about the many and myriad ways
in which you regularly let God and Jesus down. Fair enough.
But it’s too simple to say that we are only the crowd in that
Gospel. It’s more true to say that we are both the crowd and Jesu—betrayers and
betrayed. And tonight Jesus’s act of washing his companions’ feet asks us to
think about why God and Jesus are going through this whole experience of
betrayal, crucifixion, and death in the first place. They are going through it
for you and me. They are going through it because you and I are worth something
to them. They are going through it because we’re precious enough in Jesus’s
sight for it to be worth his while to wash our feet.
Maundy Thursday is both a penitential and joyous occasion: we
gather both to lament Judas’s betrayal of Jesus and to give thanks for Jesus’s
gift to us of the Eucharist as the way to be together in the world. As you
enter into these three days of betrayal and death and resurrection, what is it
that you want God to do for you? What is your need for God right now at this
moment in your life? What would grace look like for you now? How do you want
God to act toward and for you? How have you been betrayed or misunderstood or
mocked, yourself? How would God heal and restore you in the light of that? What
would new, risen life look like for you if you dared to ask for it?
"Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” If you’re
like me, you’d probably rather remain in your seat than come forward and have
your feet washed. If you’re like me, you
are powerfully more conscious of how much you owe than you are of what God
wants you to have. I will come forward
both to wash and be washed because in so doing I am allowing both God and you
to do something for me. And letting that
happen is the first step on the road to acknowledging that someone other than
me is in charge of the universe.
"Unless I wash you, you have no share with me,"
Jesus replied to Peter. In one sense we should hear that as judgment. But, in
the context of the infinite love which undergirds the mighty acts of these
three great days, we should hear that as a promise, too. Jesus washed his
companions’ feet; God hears our prayers not because we grovel but because we
are loved. Use the time between Maundy Thursday and Easter to ask yourself and
God what you need Jesus to do for you. And then do your best to live--
creatively and joyously and maybe even with a little bit of risk and a lot of
love-- into the answer you hear. Amen.
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