Lord, are you going to wash my feet?

For Maundy Thursday

Friends, today is Maundy Thursday, the first day in the Triduum (three days) leading up to Easter. Today, I wanted to share a story I’ve shared before about a Maundy Thursday service that made a deep impression on me. I hope you enjoy it.

It was Maundy Thursday and I almost didn’t go to church.

There had been a fire in my neighbor’s garden the previous week. My windows were open at the time, leaving my walls black and my bedsheets wreaking with a noxious, unhealthy odor. After overcoming their suspicion that I had somehow thus damaged the whole room with my one small, scented candle, the university provided me with a dark, dusty, windowless room in a Soviet-looking apartment complex near the shoreline to live in while the repairs were completed. It was all very inconvenient. I was elbow deep in an eight-thousand-word essay whose deadline loomed on the other side of Easter, and the extra slog up the steep hill into town made everything seem too much. After dinner, I lay in bed staring at the popcorn-textured ceiling, contemplating whether I really needed to go to church. But scruples had their way, and drawn by a mixture of guilt and desire, I resolved to go.

I hesitated long enough to arrive late, and thus scampered into the church at the end of the first hymn. Taking advantage of the muffled cacophony of the shuffling of shoes and groaning of old wood as everyone sat down for the gospel reading, I slid into the only available seat that wouldn’t make my arrival conspicuous: the corner on the back row. The readings sped by in a whir, and my mind wandered until Father Ambrose stepped into the center of the congregation, the warm glow of candles illuminating his perfectly round glasses right along with the gold strings of the beautifully embossed gospel book he held. He kissed the book, then calmly announced, “A reading from the gospel according to John,” in his wonderful tenor voice. And then he sang, with his mouth exactly the shape of an egg, the following passage:

Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

John 13:3–6

It is the last scene in John’s gospel before Jesus’ betrayal, trial, and crucifixion. I mulled over the arresting strangeness of the passage. Knowing he was about to be executed, you might think Jesus would do something grand, strategic, impressive. But, no. Knowing God had put all things into his power, knowing all that would come—the suffering, the insults, the pain—He washed their feet. Knowing that one of these would betray Him to His death, one deny Him, the rest scatter at His arrest, He washed their feet. Knowing He would rise again and conquer death, He washed their feet. Their Rabbi, master, friend, washed their feet. The long-awaited Messiah washed one hundred and twenty dusty man-toes. If I were to make up a religion, I thought to myself, I would not make this up.

Knowing that one of these would betray Him to His death, one deny Him, the rest scatter at His arrest, He washed their feet.

Lost to rumination, I remember almost nothing of the service until an usher gently tapped me on the shoulder.

“He will wash your feet,” he whispered almost inaudibly.

I tried not to look horrified, as he gestured down the aisle to a handful of people dutifully removing their shoes and socks. It began to dawn on me that it would have been a practical impossibility to wash everyone’s feet in an orderly and efficient manner, so only those sitting on the ends of the rows would have the honor. Feeling nothing but remorse for having arrived late and landed myself in that cursed chair, I nodded and started to take off my shoes so the usher would know I understood.

I began unknotting the laces on my H&M canvas shoes, whose once floral patterns were now almost indiscernible after one too many rainy days and muddy walks. I usually wouldn’t wear shoes like this to church, but in my rush to arrive I didn’t have time to change after a long day of tromping to and from town. I surveyed my mismatched socks with a pang of embarrassment; they were plastered to my feet after a rainstorm earlier in the day. Peeling them off revealed my wrinkled, pink, and puffy feet. And, oh! Oh, they smelled. Biology generally makes us inured to our own stench, so it’s a terrible sign if you can smell your own feet.

Father Max was doing the washing, Father Ambrose standing stalwartly beside him with fresh water and a towel. Father Max is an old priest, with snow white hair, a whiskery beard, and wild, ice blue eyes. He wore a purple stole, whose oversized shoulders jutted out like a suit of armor. He trembles slightly as he walks and speaks, but there is a wiry power in his presence. Mine were the last pair of feet to be washed, and as I beheld the priests’ slow journey toward my dark corner of the church, an embarrassed dread reached a low boil in my chest. I hadn’t bargained on another human being touching me that evening, and much less touching the most used, tired, dirty part of me.

Finally, it was my turn.

With difficulty, Father Max stooped to his knees as I presented my offensive feet. He tenderly placed my foot in the fresh lukewarm water. It was no symbolic foot washing; he really did wash my feet thoroughly, and dried each toe with the towel, like I was a little child being bundled off to bed after a warm bath. And then, with solemn dignity and unspeakable tenderness, he bent all the way to the ground, his white head shaking, and kissed my feet.

Tears sprang into my eyes, welling up from some deep, untouched chasm in my heart. I didn’t know where to look. As Father Max stood, with effort and dignity, a prayer rose in my heart:

Lord, are you going to wash my feet?

All I remember after that is stepping out into the damp spring air and watching as the golden light of evening bathed the broken cobblestones. I thought of the old cathedral, whose broken body had been used to build many homes in the old gray town. It was like Jesus, who loved dearly enough to break His own body.

****

Twentieth-century Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote this:

In every man’s life there are moments when there is a lifting of the veil at the horizon of the known, opening a sight of the eternal. Each of us has at least once in his life experienced the momentous reality of God. Each of us has once caught a glimpse of the beauty, peace and power that flow through the souls of those who are devoted to Him. . . . Faith is faithfulness, loyalty to an event, loyalty to our response.^[1]

That Maundy Thursday is such a moment for me. It is an experience that no matter where I wander, what I doubt, how I fail, I cannot forget. I feel a strange sense of loyalty to that memory, because it was, in the true sense of the word, an apocalypse. While most of us associate that word with zombies and the end of the world, its meaning is much simpler and more beautiful; it is an unveiling, a revelation, a disclosure of things as they really are. As I witnessed Father Max’s aged head stoop to kiss my feet, I saw with sudden clarity the fire that burns at the heart of Christianity: that God became man, not to rule, to crush, and to judge, but to gird himself about with a towel, to wash the feet of the disciples He loved, to tell them to love one another, and then to offer himself up, to die. His broken body has built the church, and one day the whole cosmos will be the wound from which life springs anew.

Maundy Thursday derives its name from the Latin word mandatum, meaning “commandment,” the vulgate’s translation of Jesus’ words: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34). The foot-washing service is an ancient service reenacting, since the earliest days of the church, Christ’s final night as the priest washes the feet of the congregation, taking literally Jesus’ words: “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14). And so, all these millennia later, we still do.

It is easy to lose a sense of the strangeness and wonder of this story, living in a world as thoroughly converted (and de-converted) as our own. But it’s good to try. God revealing himself in humility and vulnerability is not an obvious, expected thing. In Philippians Paul says that even though Jesus “already existed in the form of God, [He] did not consider equality with God something to be grasped” (2:6 nasb). The gods of Greece and Rome did not wash the feet of their followers; they punished and pillaged and raped; they grasped. They were capricious, and confusing, and unpredictable. But here is God in Christ, stooped, gentle, washing twenty-four dirty feet, telling us to do the same.

All this, I glimpsed in the bent, white head of Father Max, and I have felt a duty to live in faithfulness to that revelation, in “loyalty to an event” as Heschel would put it. I have not always found this faithfulness easy. Not because it is too wonderful a story to believe; the world is full of all sorts of strange things. And not because it is too hard; all He asks is that we let Him wash us clean. No, I find it difficult because I find it hard to believe and really act like God always and truly loves me. Because I find myself difficult to love sometimes. Because I can’t shake the suspicion that nothing is free, that surely, eventually God will get tired of my failing and flailing and give up on me. Because I find it hard to believe He could survey the tardy, wrinkled, and smelly feet of my soul, and bend to kiss them.

Lord, are you going to wash my feet?

(an excerpt from Aggressively Happy: a realist’s guide to believing in the goodness of life)

This is the picture I took of the street walking out from the church in the story above.

^[1] Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951, 1979), 165.