Holy Thursday 2025
Preaching by Sister Sara Fairbanks, OP

Thursday, April 17, 2025

“Lord, you wash my feet? You will never wash my feet!” Peter’s words could well voice the frustration of the entire group. “You are the Christ, the Messiah of God! We don’t need you to wash our feet! We need you to defeat our enemies, to liberate us from the tyranny of Rome! You were sent to bring the reign of God on earth! But wash our feet? Never!”

If you are anything like me, you might share the frustrations of Peter and some of those first women and men, who had their feet washed by Jesus. In the Holy Thursday liturgy, the Church invites us to imagine we are sitting with the disciples having our feet washed, how might you express the sentiment of Peter? Take a moment of silence and complete this sentence:  Jesus, I don’t need you to wash my feet, I need you to _____________. (Say what comes to your mind.) Jesus, I don’t need you to wash my feet, I need you to ____________.

I need you to restore my health, my well-being, end the quarantine! I need you to heal my sister friend, my dear family member. I need you to defeat the political forces that daily attack our democracy and upend our world in social and economic chaos. I need you to protect us against the devastation of our planet. “But wash my feet? Never.”

Jesus responds to us with a heart full of compassion, “You do not understand what I am doing. I have come not to reveal a God intent on rescuing you from life’s pain, and suffering. I come united in divine love, because LOVE is God’s only genuine power in the world, one that works through self-giving service, and nothing more.”

Jesus used the common practice of foot washing to symbolize God’s lavish hospitality, that welcomes everyone into the household of God. Our shared love-life with God begins with God’s invitation, God’s initiative. As the evangelist reminds us, “We love God, because God first loved us.”

Jesus says to Peter, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me. Do not resist God’s love. Do not be afraid. Learn to accept God’s love with an open and brave heart. Like the Samaritan woman I met at the well, receive God’s love like a fountain of life within you. Like Mary, who anointed my feet with oil and wiped them with her hair, the fragrance filling the whole house, savor the boundless love of God! When you savor God’s love within, you are ready to pour out that love in self-giving service to the world.” “So,” Jesus says, “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet…love one another as I have loved you.”

As the meal progresses, Jesus expands this teaching even further. Sister Mary McGlone writes, “Clearly aware that he was on the brink of suffering, Jesus summarized his mission as he blessed and broke the bread. He equated the bread with his body and the cup with his blood: his entire self. As he had done throughout his mission, he offered his whole self to them.” After they receive his body and blood, Jesus gives them the most challenging commandment of all: “Do this in memory of me.” This command means far more than to enact a ritual with bread and wine. Jesus asserts that communion with him means enfleshing God’s love through service and offering our lives for others, all the way to the cross.

This final command of Jesus, reminds me of our dear Sister, Catherine of Siena, who called Jesus a “gentle lover,” even a “mad lover.” She said, “Jesus ran to his cross like a mad lover. It was not nails but love that kept him on the cross.”

Now that we have contemplated the awesome gift of divine hospitality that Jesus wanted to communicate in the breaking of the bread and the washing of the feet, let’s imagine again Jesus kneeling before us with a basin of warm water, tenderly washing our feet and drying them with a towel, as if to say, “Welcome home to God’s household of unconditional love and connection. Savor God’s lifegiving love for you, and pour it out in service to our world.” As you imagine Jesus washing your feet, hear the concluding verses of Jan Richardson’s poem, “Blessing for the Brokenhearted”: 

“…a heart so broken can go on beating, as if it were made for precisely this—
as it knows the only cure for love is more of it,
as if it sees the heart’s sole remedy for breaking is to love still,
as if it trusts that its own persistent pulse is the rhythm of a blessing we cannot fathom but will save us nonetheless.”¹

 

¹In The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief by Jan Richarson, Wanton Gospeller Press, 2016