IN this Year of the Eucharist, note how the liturgy of Holy Thursday recalls two symbolic actions performed by Jesus on this last night with his disciples.
He washed their feet, and he gave himself to them as their food and drink in the bread and wine of the eucharist.
John’s Gospel introduces the scene: Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end (Jn 13:1).
Jesus, along with all his fellow Jews, remembered the original Passover. They recalled how God had delivered his people from foreign captivity and formed them as his own new people.
But now, in what Jesus was about to do, there would be an astonishing further manifestation of God’s saving love.
His decisive hour had come; all his life had looked to this moment. The months through which Jesus proclaimed God’s gift of salvation were now concentrated in what he was about to do. The world was to glimpse something it had never suspected as he entered into this final phase of God’s self-revelation.
He was leaving this world and going to God. But he was not leaving his own behind.
His going to the Father was his way of remaining always with them. It would disclose his love at its extreme, ‘unto the end’.
A heart-to-heart relationship to the Father had marked life (Jn 1:1,18).
Now, he was about to go forward into the house of his Father to prepare a place for those he was leaving behind (Jn14:2). He was to be the way they now had to follow (Jn 14:6).
It was an intensely dramatic hour. His love had to prove itself in the presence of the forces of evil: ‘The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas … to betray him’ (Jn 13:2).
The outreach of love is here confronting the intimate presence of rejection and betrayal. But it keeps on being love, ‘unto the end’.
At this point, Jesus is intensely aware of his mission to reveal the deepest truth about his Father.
As the Son, he knows ‘that the Father had given all things into his hands’ (Jn 3:3), and that he ‘had come from God and was going to God’.
With God as his origin and destiny, with God so present to him, how does he express what this God is like?
The disciples are astonished by a bewildering gesture. They watched in amazement.
He got up from the table, took off his outer garment, draped a towel around him, and poured water into a dish; and then began to wash the disciple’s feet and to dry them with the towel around him.
Peter protested. He could not go along with this! How could this leader of the Jesus’ disciples let his master demean himself in this way, and even dishonour the God he represented?
But Peter, ‘the Rock’, had to be reshaped.
What counted was not Peter’s view on how his master should act. He was being called to get beyond his set ideas on who God was and how God should act, and so to see things differently: ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me’ (Jn 13:8).
To be washed by the Lord was to be cleansed of the age-old grime that prevented us seeing the real God and kept him at a distance. Peter had to find himself anew.
The way of the true God was the way of love. And that way leads us to take the lowest place – to become the servants of others that they might be washed and nourished with the truth.
It was not only a matter of a disciple having his feet washed by Jesus. The story does not end with Peter humbling himself before the humble love of God.
This lowly, loving service of others had to continue. Jesus brings out the meaning of what he has done with the question, ‘Do you know what I have done to you?’ (v12).
And he answers it himself. We cannot use our religion to keep either God or our neighbour at a safe distance. We must allow ourselves to be drawn into the self-giving movement of God’s own love: ‘So, if I, your Teacher and Lord, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet’ (v14).
We can no longer love God because we love no one. We cannot serve God without serving one another.
In this gesture, Jesus is not simply proposing a sublime ideal. We are being invited to follow him in what was central to his life and its deepest movement: ‘For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you’ (v15).
The ‘life to the full’ (Jn 10:10) that Jesus promised has as its central feature and direction the humble service of others.
By sharing in his self-giving we are to be made like him: ‘Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another’ (Jn13:34).
In this way, Christians witness to the world. By being taken out of ourselves, and go beyond our self-serving egos, we form a new community of selfless love.
The world, in its frozen habits of self-promotion and rivalry, will be surprised by the grace of another possibility: ‘By this will everyone know that you are my disciples’ (v35).
St Paul invites the Philippians not ‘to look to your own interests, but to the interests of others’ (Phil 2:4).
He goes on to summon them to imitate the self-giving character of Jesus: ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus’ (Phil 2:5).
The overwhelming truth of the divine identity of Jesus was manifest in his unreserved service of others: ‘Though he was in the form of God É he emptied himself taking the form of a slave’ (Phil 2:6-8).
The mind of Jesus must guide all our actions, both among ourselves as Christians and in our relations to our neighbour everywhere.
The selfless love of Christ is the mark of all truly personal life, be it in God or in us, made in God’s image.
In Christian understanding, to be a person is to be for others. As he washes his disciples’ feet, Jesus is drawing us into the ‘love-life’ of the Trinity itself.
John writes in a letter composed after the Gospel, ‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love, does not know God, for God is love’ (1 Jn 4:7-8).
For John, the full meaning of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet is disclosed in the eucharist.
There, the mystery of love reaches its most intense expression. Jesus gives himself, body and blood, to be our food, our drink, as the source of new and endless life.
Fr Anthony Kelly is a Redemptorist priest, who is Professor of Theology in the Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology at Australian Catholic University in Brisbane and Australia’s representative on the International Theological Commission in Rome.
