Homily | (Maundy Thursday) 🦶Getting washed is harder than washing

Maundy Thursday

Christ Lutheran Church in Aptos, CA

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Welcome to Maundy Thursday, the great foot-washing. Like most of the stories in the Bible, over time, we’ve domesticated this story.

We’ve turned it into a tidy lesson about servant leadership. A model for good Christian living. A visual aid of sorts. It’s perfect... We have Jesus, the master teacher, demonstrating the principle: Take notes, class. Then go and do likewise. And we leave with our little to-do list: be humble, serve others, wash some feet. But this, I’m afraid, misses the entire point.

Jesus doesn’t begin this scene as a teacher. He begins (and ends) as a host.

He got up from the table. Yes, He... The one John has spent thirteen chapters telling us is the Word made flesh, the one in whom all things hold together, the one who was with God and was God... He gets up, ties a towel around his waist, and kneels at your feet.

And your only job
in this moment
is to let him.

That’s it. That’s the whole gospel, actually.

But we’re terrible at this. Especially we Christians, who’ve made an art form of busyness and usefulness and spiritual productivity. We’d rather serve than be served. Give than receive. We’d rather be Peter at the beginning of this story — Lord, let me die for you! — than sit still and let someone clean us. Especially in as intimate of a way as Jesus cleans his disciples. He cleans... Their feet. The lowest, dirtiest, funkiest part of them.

Receiving this kind of intimate care requires something harder than effort. It requires vulnerability. Honesty. It requires admitting that we’re tired, worn down, and in need. That we’ve been walking on some really rough roads, accumulating grime that digs into our heels, and we cannot clean ourselves up enough to be fit for God’s table.

Peter’s protest — You will never wash my feet — sounds like humility. But it’s self-protection. It’s the place in us that would rather manage our own need than vulnerably expose it. That would rather stay in control and initiate the transaction.

And Jesus says, If I do not wash you, you have no part with me.

This is very direct. Not a suggestion. It’s the threshold condition of the whole relationship between you and your God. You cannot follow Jesus away from here if you will not first be knelt under, and tended to, and loved in the places you’d rather no one touched.

Whatever that looks like for you tonight — feet, hands, or simply sitting with open hands in your pew, which is also fine — the invitation is the same.

The foot-washing is deeper than a surface-level cosmetic washing. It has a deeper soul-level meaning. It’s about you and me learning to receive from God, from the Source of Life itself. It’s not primarily about what you’re supposed to go do. It is God, on his knees, saying, “Stop. Just stop... Let me.” And everything in us that wants to earn this, manage this, be worthy of this MUST go quiet.

If at no other time, at least for tonight.

At least long enough to feel the water, and the hands, and the terrible, specific, unchosen grace of being hosted by the one who made you.

Jesus asks,

Do you know what I have done to you?

No... Not yet, probably. But tonight, this first night of the Triduum, is where we begin to find out.