The Rev'd Emily Rose Proctor's Sermon for Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday – April 14, 2022
Sermon by Emily Rose Proctor
Christ the King Episcopal Church
Santa Rosa Beach, FL
John 13:1-17, 31b-35
Jesus must have known that some of us would need more than words to understand what he was trying to do.
I mean, we need words too, and he gave us good ones: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you…”
But he must have known that some of us would need more than that. Don’t just tell us. Show us. Give us a good visual. Give us something we can touch, something we can feel. Then maybe we’ll remember. Hit us with all our senses, and maybe it will sink in…
So, on the eve of his betrayal and arrest, Jesus gave his disciples—and us—two things. Two things to remember, two things to do: dinner and bath. See this is what you get when you let a mother of two small children into the pulpit. But hear me out…
He leaves his disciples with two experiences that, on the one hand, they are already very familiar with. Two things they are likely to experience again. A meal together and a foot washing—only he transforms them with his presence.
In the gospel of John, the focus is more on the foot washing than the meal. For us, foot washing isn’t really a thing that happens outside of Maundy Thursday services and nail salons.
For the disciples, it was something that would have happened frequently, but usually upon entering a house—not in the middle of a meal—and the disciples would have washed their own feet. Maybe if you were wealthy enough, or your host was, you might have an extremely devoted servant do it for you.
But even in our context, it’s not that hard to recreate the resistance welling up inside, as it surely must have done with the disciples that night when Jesus started making the rounds with the basin and the towel.
Only Peter, bless his heart, was unfiltered enough to vocalize it. “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Never.
For starters, it’s a little beneath Jesus, right? I mean you don’t see many CEOs cleaning the toilets or taking out the trash. Part of the benefit of being the boss, the professor, the President, the surgeon, is that you get to have other people do the dirty stuff, the menial stuff. I mean, even dentists now barely have to touch your teeth. They pay someone else to clean them before they even have a look! But apparently that is not how God—revealed to us in Christ Jesus—operates.
It started with the incarnation, right? Jesus laid aside his heavenly garments and put on the towel of human flesh. Not coincidentally, the verbs John uses to describe Jesus laying aside his outer garment and taking up his towel are the same ones that the gospel writer used to describe Jesus laying down and taking up his life in John 10. Jesus keeps laying aside power, prestige, condemnation, and taking up humility, suffering, mercy…
It's more than a little uncomfortable, isn’t? The way God is with us…in scripture… in real life. It’s too close. It’s too personal. It’s too subversive. It’s too much.
We have so many reasons to object to this kind of intimate encounter with God. To resist the Christ…or anyone else…washing our feet. Somehow, foot washing seems to draw right out our hesitation to being vulnerable in the presence of God—to being dependent on a God who sees every wart and flaw.
See if any of these objections sound like something you might say, when it comes to foot washing (or perhaps to any experience that might render you vulnerable and dependent):
I prefer to just watch, thanks.
I promise, you do NOT want to see, smell or touch what’s underneath these socks.
How about I just wash your feet.
I don’t think you understand how super sensitive my feet are.
Uh-uh—only if I get to pick the other person.
Can someone please explain to me again what the point of this is?
How about I just wash my own feet.
If only you would do it this other way…
If we’re honest, most of our objections to foot washing are about us wanting to be in control and NOT wanting to be vulnerable. Allowing our feet to be washed is something we can only do if we allow ourselves to trust the other person. And so what Jesus is asking his followers to do—not just with their words, but with their whole selves—is to trust him, to trust God completely. And then to create the kind of community where we can trust each other in the same way.
Do you hear how radical that is? How counter-cultural? I mean, who trusts anyone these days? There’s fake news and fake news about fake news. There are pre-nups and non-disclosure clauses and safety nets and malware protection software and identity theft insurance and the dark web and ransomware and conspiracy theories run wild.
The people of God mostly wanted a warrior king to ride in, drive out the Roman Army, and restore Jewish sovereignty. Instead, Jesus put on the equivalent of an apron and starts washing their feet. What do you think would happen if every legislative session or Supreme court hearing began with a foot washing? Could they do it? Can we do it?
Some of us may balk at having our feet literally washed tonight, but I know there are some foot washers among us. I know because they’ve brought us a meal or offered to watch our kids. I know because I’ve seen them dusting pews, pressure washing the church on a Saturday, carefully arranging flowers for the altar, folding palm crosses and stuffing easter eggs.
But the thing about the way Jesus washed his disciples’ feet is that it isn’t just about serving others. Because some of us are good at serving because it’s how we hide, or avoid pain, or make ourselves look or feel good.
First and foremost, Jesus’ washing his disciples’ feet was about allowing God into the most intimate parts of our lives, trusting God with the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, and experiencing that incredible combination of being seen completely and still being loved and cared for that is life-transforming. It was about experiencing a God would get down on God’s knees and wash the feet of those who would deny, abandon, betray and not understand him.
Sometimes I think one of the hardest parts of my job as the Director of Outreach at Caring and Sharing of South Walton is that I don’t really know the whole stories of those we are helping. I see only in part.
A lot of the time we don’t really know what combination of trauma, bad luck, generational poverty, systemic injustice, addiction, mental illness, abuse, racism and poor choices have led to the kinds of crises our clients experience. We help as much as we can, as best we can with limited information and resources. I wish sometimes that people came with lights that would flash specific colors if they were dealing with addiction or domestic violence or mental illness. Not so that we could avoid helping them, but so that we could help them better.
But we never really know the whole truth about anyone. And that’s true for our encounters with most everyone, really. I sit next to you in the pew, but I don’t really know you. Most of us only know the most visible and public parts of each other’s stories. And most of us try to only show our good sides.
But occasionally the harder parts of someone’s story are a tad more visible. For example, the other day we had someone come into Caring and Sharing with a giant swastika tattooed on their neck and a criminal history that had been all over the news. I had to leave early that day, so I heard about it second hand.
But it has since occurred to me that although most of us may do a pretty good job most of the time hiding our sins, addictions, traumas and brokenness from the public, in God’s eyes they probably look a lot like giant neck tattoos.
God knows about our drinking, our passive aggressive ways, our judginess, our self-loathing.
God knows about our small-mindedness, our laziness, our avoidance of other people’s pain, our obsession with our bodies.
God knows about our selfishness, our greed, our emotional affairs, our drinking. God knows about our sick fantasies, our racist tendencies, our shallowness, our self-righteousness.
God knows how we love to play the victim and blame others for all our problems or pretend like there are no problems, no problems here... God knows about the pills. God knows about the gossip.
God knows about the way we use others, how we make idols out of our own security and comfort, how we create false images of ourselves on Instagram or with plastic surgery or the stories we tell or never tell.
God knows about the binging and the exercise addiction and the days we didn’t get out of bed or pulled our hair out and the times we yelled at our kids or worse.
God knows about all the prayers we didn’t say, and the prayers that were all about us, the songs we sang but didn’t mean. God sees all our brokenness and all our BS as if it were tattooed on our necks.
And what does God do with all this intimate, damning knowledge? God kneels down and cradles our smelly, dirty, ugly sin-tattooed feet in his hands and he washes them and dries them with a towel.
God invites us to the table, the very people who will betray, deny, abandon him, and God takes the bread and breaks it and gives it to us, saying, this is my body, given for you.
God bathes us with his presence. God feeds us with God’s very own life. And it is only by receiving it that we are transformed.
Maybe that’s why Jesus said that if you want to enter the kingdom you must be like a little child. Children know what it is to receive—they are accustomed to being washed and fed by someone they trust completely.
May we too be like little children tonight. May the living God in Christ wash us of everything that keeps us from God and one another. And may the bread of life that is Christ’s love for us fill every hunger, every empty place.
And then, washed cleaned and filled to the brim with love, let us go and do likewise—really seeing those we serve. Let us serve one another in ways that subvert traditional hierarchies and power structures. Let us see each other through the lens of our own forgiven-ness.