Maundy Thursday
By Very Reverend John Arnold, Thursday 21st April, 2011
Pedilavium 2011
The simple and egalitarian act of eating and drinking together, which all the gospels tell us Jesus did with his disciples on his last evening on earth, soon developed into the central act of Christian worship, whereas the foot washing, which is only mentioned by St John, is much more rarely used. John omits the institution of Holy Communion from his account of the last supper, replacing it with this act of love and the command to love. Perhaps by the time he wrote his gospel the two great sacraments of baptism and holy communion were already established in the early church; and he felt that the emphasis on communion in bread and wine needed supplementing with an allusion to baptism and to the role of water as the bearer par excellence of the gift of the spirit of Christ. But, as in all sacramental acts, it is the personal meaning given by Jesus, which matters, both in word and deed.
He wraps a towel round his waist, pours water into a basin and bends down to wash the disciples’ feet. This is an act of identification – with the disciples it is true – but much more with the despised and rejected, the insulted and the humiliated of the earth for washing the feet of guests was not something, which a freeborn Jewish man like Jesus did, however hospitable he was. It was the work of a slave, preferably a Gentile, or of a woman. By this act Jesus identifies himself with these three categories of person, who incidentally now as then make up the overwhelming majority of human kind – slaves, Gentiles and women.
Later St Paul was to see and then proclaim at immense personal cost that in Christ Jesus these distinctions no longer count, slave or free, Jew or Gentile, male or female. It is taking us a long time to understand the implications, in church and society, of that. The New Testament records the convulsions which church and synagogue went through during the first century in wrestling with the first – the abolition of the distinction between Jew and Gentile, which is at the heart of the gospel according to St Paul and which in places tarnishes with bitterness the gospel according to St John. It took until the nineteenth century for the implications of the abolition of the distinction between slave and free to be heeded and acted upon in the British Empire, in the United States and in Russia. That struggle is not over yet. And now it is given to us in our generation at the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian era to tangle with the third and deepest division, that between the sexes, which goes to the very core of what it means to be human. It is not surprising that we are making heavy weather of it. But however heavy the weather is, the direction of the wind is clear.
Now John, as a master storyteller, holds up his narrative at this point as none of the other evangelists does, because he wants to draw out a moral and teach us the lesson, which Peter learnt by trial and error and Paul learnt later by revelation on the road to Damascus. That lesson is very simple and at the same time very difficult. It is that we are all part of one body.
Everything in our developing self-consciousness, in our education and formation, in our culture and imagery, points in the opposite direction. We learn that we are first and foremost individuals, discrete physical objects, differentiated by our bodies, our minds, our attainments or lack of them, even by such absolutely superficial trivialities as class, race, gender, accent and nation from one another, destined to exaggerated difference by competition and, if we are religiously inclined, to thank God that we are not like other people. The moment we do that, we reveal that we are like other people, because everyone is doing it. Jesus, in all his words and deeds but supremely in this act, offers a radical alternative, which is to step out of being ‘in Adam’ and to be, to stay, to dwell ‘in him’, as St Paul says, to live ‘in Christ’, which is the way not only of differentiation but also of assimilation, neither confounding the distinct persons nor dividing the single substance of humankind. To be oneself is to give oneself wholly to Christ; to be united with him is the God-given way of being united with all. Any other way is partial and only leads to new divisions and new conflicts. Just look at Marxism.
Peter was someone who was always trying to be either above or below other people. So Jesus taught him a lesson by washing his feet, but not overdoing it by washing his hands and head as well. Paul was someone who had always tried to be different from other people; he defined himself by his race, his tribe, his city of origin, his Roman citizenship, his trade and profession, his religious allegiance – until he met the Risen Christ on the Damascus Road. After that, he said that all these distinctions were dross, simply scum on the top of the pot, worthless off-scourings. The Risen Christ had stooped down to him and asked, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ But he was not persecuting Jesus; he was persecuting the early Christians. At that moment, when all was revealed to him, one of the revelations was that the followers of Jesus were not a mere agglomeration of separate individuals, but a single body, a body of which Christ was the head and to which Christ referred simply as ‘me’. It is this insight which lead him to develop, as in his first letter to the Corinthians, the image of the body of Christ, beginning [1 Corinthians 1212f] ‘Just as the body is one and has many members – and all the members of the body though many are one body – so it is with Christ, for in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free’ and ending: ‘Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it’ [1 Corinthians 1227].
In the middle he has an amusing dialogue between the various parts of the body – rather playful for St Paul – about whether they belong, or not, summed up by saying ‘The head cannot say to the feet: I do not need you’. I think there is an allusion her to the moment when Jesus, the Head of the Apostolic band, bent over the smelly feet of Peter to wash them; and I also think, though this is pure speculation, that Paul got this story directly from Peter himself. After all, St John’s Gospel had not yet been written. For all the diversity, which scholars find in the New Testament, there is an astonishing unity too – coherence between the experience, which Peter has of the community between head and feet, the story John tells of the foot-washing, and the letters of Paul. It parallels the unity and diversity of the human race, which is achieved not just by natural selection nor by any human effort or achievement, but by the example, the obedience, the self-giving, the humility, the Cross of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
