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SERMONS

Maundy Thursday
March 20, 2008

By The Rev. Sylvia Czarnetzky

Exodus 12:1-14a
Psalm 78:14-20, 23-25
1 Cor. 11:23-26
John 13:1-15

In a few minutes, we’ll invite those who wish to to come forward to participate in a Maundy Thursday tradition – the washing of the feet. We’ve just heard the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. Jesus gets up from his supper with his friends, and begins to move from person to person, washing and drying the feet of the people who have been the closest to him on earth. He takes his towel and his basin and moves from Thomas to James to John, stopping at the feet of each to perform this small task. Presumably Jesus also washed the feet of Judas as well.

Now to people in the first century in the Middle East, foot-washing is not as unusual a practice as it is for 21st century suburban Americans. In those days, people wore sandals instead of shoes, and they walked most places they went. So naturally, their feet got pretty dirty. So it was not uncommon for hosts, when welcoming guests into their homes, to make water available for guests to use to wash their own feet or, if you had servants, for the host to ask a servant to wash the guest’s feet. (O’Day 722)

Foot-washing usually took place at the beginning of your guest’s stay, before any food was served. It was a way for hosts offer guests hospitality after their dusty journeys in the desert. (722-23)

But Jesus washes the disciples’ feet kind of in the middle of supper, and I suppose that his gesture was in a sense one of hospitality. But Jesus is pretty explicit about what he’s up to here. After Jesus finishes washing their feet, he returns  to the supper table and asks them: “Do you know what I have done to you?” 

The gospel doesn’t say so, but I imagine there was a rather lengthy and uncomfortable silence, while they all looked at each other. Did any of them have any idea why he’d washed their feet?

Apparently not. So Jesus tries to tell them.  “[I]f I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.”  (Jn. 13:14-15) So, Jesus himself helps us understand one of the things this foot-washing business is all about -- it’s about servanthood. It’s about a teacher and leader taking the role of a servant, and welcoming guests to the fellowship of the table. Jesus acts as both servant and host -- “When Jesus wraps himself with the towel, he assumes the garb and position of the servant, but the act of hospitality he offers is” something a host would do. (O’Day 722-3)

We get another clue about footwashing from what Jesus says to Peter. Remember, when Jesus got to Peter, Peter resisted and at first flatly refused to let Jesus wash his feet!

But Jesus says to him: “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” And that’s what convinces Peter to let Jesus have his way, and wash Peter’s feet.

“Unless I wash you,” Jesus says, “you have no share with me.” Unless you let me take your feet in my hands and wash them, which, if you think about it, is a pretty intimate act, then you can’t share in my life, you can’t have fellowship with me, you can’t participate in my life.

Through the foot washing, Jesus unites the believer with him as he enters the events of” his final hours. Yet Peter wanted to remove himself from the circle – Peter didn’t want to allow Jesus to do this incredibly intimate thing, and by doing that tried to remove himself from Jesus and his promises.

“To have Jesus wash one’s feet is to receive from Jesus an act of hospitality that decisively alters one’s relationship to Jesus and, through Jesus, to God. One’s share with Jesus, then is the gift of full relationship with him, which he offers in the footwashing, relationship that opens the believer to Jesus’s...gift of eternal life.” (723)

So I think this gospel about footwashing is trying to tell us at least two important things about Jesus.  First, it tells us that Jesus set an example for us of humble servanthood by washing the disciples’ feet. And we are encouraged to follow that example in how we treat one another. (727)
                       
But I don’t think that’s the only point of the story. (727) Jesus was making an offer of himself to each of the disciples, one-by-one when he offered to wash their feet.

It was an offer of himself to each of them -- an offer of the possibility of an intimate, real relationship with him. The washing of feet reveals to them “Jesus’s unfettered love for the disciples, and it is this love that holds the promise of new life for the[m]. The call for the disciples is to allow themselves to be ministered to in this way, to accept Jesus’ gesture of love fully.” (727)

And that’s the call to us as well. Both a call to servanthood in how we treat one another, and a call to accept the love of Christ, so freely offered to us, and a “call to give as he gives, to love as he loves.” (728)

And as with all offers, this offer can be either accepted by us, or rejected. The choice is ours. And the time is now. Amen.

Works Cited

O’Day, Gail R. “The Gospel of John.” The New Interpreter’s Bible. IX. Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1995.