Exodus 12.1-4,11-14; John 13.1-17,31b-35
Jesus has been caring for his disciples for years. He has fed them, taught them, answered questions and been patient, led them around the countryside, comforted them, and inspired and baffled them by turns. But when it comes to physical touch, we see very little record of it before this moment of the Passover meal. Jesus has touched and been touched by others seeking healing, he has raised people from the dead, he has had his feet and body anointed with perfume.
But this is the most physically intimate moment we see him sharing with his twelve disciples. It is his last evening with his disciples, and John’s gospel is careful to emphasise that Jesus is aware of this. It’s his last meal, his last chance to teach, to show, to model what it is he’s been going on about for years. So he takes off his nice clothes, takes off the disciples’ sandals, and gets down and dirty with a bunch of gnarly feet.
Now, all of us start life needing to be cared for by someone else, and many of us will end life that way too. Many of us here will have experience in looking after someone, whether a child or an adult, and we know that it is a strange mixture of intimacy, vulnerability, duty, and love. Both to care and be cared for requires a level of openness, of willingness to be very close to another human, that we aren’t always willing to demonstrate.
Perhaps you’d have had a similar reaction. If taken unawares, if someone you admired suddenly asked to wash your feet, you’d probably feel a bit embarrassed. Peter simply vocalises what probably most or all of the disciples were feeling. That desire to pull away. The sense of wanting to preserve some line of privacy. Feeling that it is undignified, inappropriate, too frighteningly vulnerable, to allow such an intimate act to take place.
And yet, this is where Jesus meets us.
The place which we feel is too personal, the sides of ourselves that we’d want to gloss over or manicure, the things we hide away, our weaknesses and failings. To truly allow Jesus to shape who we are as people, we have to be honest with ourselves about these aspects of who we are, and then to be willing to open them up to change.
Our faith asks more of us than just head knowledge, or an academic understanding of theology or the Bible. It requires more than simply turning up and sitting through a service. Instead it gets up close and personal. It asks us to peel away our layers of careful presentation, and to admit that we have grubby feet just like anyone else, and that they are in need of washing.
Jesus’ washing of these particular feet, these feet that have followed him for years and many miles, asks us to know each other as family. He does this strangely intimate thing, and tells us to love one another, to copy him, to imitate the essence of what he models for us. This is how people will know, Jesus says, who you are. This is how you will be seen by the world. This is how we proclaim what we believe and why it matters. To both wash and be washed brings you into relationship with the other. So if we are willing to crack our defences open and share our fragile deep selves with each other, then we will be able to both give and receive this love that cares, that nurtures, that echoes the final acts of service of our God.
This is why the idea of us all being the body of Christ together is so beautiful. We can’t function as individuals standing alone, instead we have to be willing to be vulnerable with each other, so that together we can tend to the wounds and hold together broken pieces, so that we can rejoice and weep and dream together and take delight in the complexities and differences of each of us, all made in the image of God and burning with that spark of the divine within.
It may have been a practical action on that night. A normal part of everyday life, albeit unexpectedly undertaken by someone considered too important for such lowly work. But there is such a deep spirituality here. The act of washing is symbolic as well as practical. For the disciples, at this point their feet needed washing. But we also don’t have any record of them being baptised, so this moment of Jesus pouring water over them, cleaning away the dust and dirt, asking them to accept him and all that he is and represents, could also be seen as a moment of spiritual significance.
And Peter’s request, that Jesus would wash him from head to toe so that he might be as fully united with him as possible, is a beautiful statement of intent. He may have got it wrong a lot, but his heart was completely in the right place. He always wanted to be the best disciple that he could, as close to Jesus as he could get. We laugh at him sometimes as being rather slow on the uptake, but Peter is admirable for his wholehearted enthusiasm.
I wonder how often we prefer to keep ourselves a little locked away. How often do we avoid being open, with ourselves, with God, with each other? How often would we rather wash our own feet, or go without washing at all, rather than risk vulnerability?
But Jesus invites us into community together and asks us to love one another. To love with this two way openness that gives, receives, accepts care, and cherishes the other. For this is how the world will know that we are of God, disciples ourselves, seeking oneness with the divine in love.
Amen.
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