“YOUR LORD AND MASTER HAS WASHED YOUR FEET”
Saint John 13: 1-15
Holy Thursday: 13 April Anno Domini 2017
Father Jay Watson SSP
This is the night of His Church, you the Holy Bride, in which you celebrate and commemorate “…the same night in which He was betrayed.” But you do more than remember and hearken back. The New Testament Church receives the same New Testament—The Body and Blood of Christ, The Living God—as did the Apostolic “12.”
The Passover of The Lord wherein He killed Egypt’s first-born but saved the Hebrews—making them His very own “first-born” in love and Grace, is both culminated and superseded by this greater passover.
God did not pass-over the sins of the Hebrews, for they were sinners as great as you (re-read the Books of Exodus through Deuteronomy) but He paid for their sins by the blood substitution of thousands of innocent lambs. In the Blood is life. In the shed blood of the silent lambs the sinful blood of the Hebrews is made clean by imputation: God says so; He declares so; and it is. The people were made Israel, the children of God, by God’s saving activity. And, they were to walk in His ways and to do His will…His commandments. And when they failed, every day, they were to be absolved by sin offerings…yes, more blood. All of your past history as recorded in the God-breathed words of the Prophets was to get both they to look ahead, and you to look back, and the true Lamb of God Whose very own blood atones for the sin and sins of the world.
The Law is that you have sinned today. You know what you’ve done. You know you have not honored The Lord’s Name as you should have. You have not prayed and given thanks as an obedient child should so do to a loving Father. You have not loved your neighbor as yourself, with sacrificial help and aid. “Good thoughts sent your way” are of the devil. Pray and work…do…give.
The Good News is that this evening is not just a memory and not a re-creation. This evening IS…it just IS…because Jesus IS. He is the great and only I AM. He is present. He is here in as real a way as He was with the Disciples in the upper room.
After Maundy Thursday’s Sacrament of the Altar was over. Jesus washed their feet. He then went out into the night that He might set into motion the washing of the feet, the heads, the bodies, the souls, the everythings…of the whole world.
He does not die this night. He is not re-sacrificed this night. But He is here at Supper once again, as He was 2,000 years ago, to give the exact same precious Body and Blood for your forgiveness, life, and peace.
The devil was driven out of you in your Holy + Washings. You are not Judas Iscariot. You are the elect from before eternity…in and under the Blood of Christ. But you remain dirty daily because you are like Saint Peter and the rest of the flock. The first supper did in fact end. But what Christ instituted, the Church’s Supper, because it is HIS Supper, never ends. His Word endures. The consecration, His Verba endures—forever. The incarnate God/Man endures forever.
Jesus rises from the Water and now in a moment He rises from this pulpit. He lays aside His garments of Dominion and Rule that He might be “for you” a Servant, Shepherd, Pastor, Healer, and ultimate Care-Giver. He has already washed your whole body in Baptism as you were buried with Him under the waves of His own bloody suffering, death, and burial. You came forth from the tomb of the Font “clean every whit.” But like Peter you too need daily to be absolved of your sins…or at the very least absolved before coming to His Table. And the two are inexorably linked. The “institution narratives” of the synoptics (the Last Supper as recorded by Sts. Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and the Mandate example of the foot-washing as written down several decades later by St. John are tied together as closely as Christ’s two-natures, or as Good works proceeding from living faith. Did Peter not think he was sinful? No. The Prince of the Apostles knew he was a poor, miserable, sinner. Was Peter scandalized by having His Lord and God act like a menial, lowly, domestic—a slave of no worth or import? Yes. But it is sinful to try and mold Jesus into one’s own image or desires. Christ came to save. Christ came to bleed like a stuck lamb—gush like a sheep with a slit throat. Christ came to bend down half-naked and wash the muck, sand, grit, sweat, dead skin, and animal manure off of your filthy feet—i.e. to wash your daily trespasses away. That happens every time you receive Holy Absolution. That happens every time Jesus places His Body on your tongue and tips His Chalice into your mouths. To reject God almighty because He chooses to come to you in thin tasteless wafer and inexpensive Australian white wine is to reject God. For He spoke His words and He meant His words. It is His actual, real, true and historical Body which you eat. Likewise, with His Blood. It is the Blood which poured from His Body and which His still incarnate heart still beast and pumps through His still incarnate frame. And likewise, to receive the Grace of God in this meal of forgiveness and peace is to receive the strength and endurance and constraining will of The God/Man to do His will which is now your will. You are to wash one another’s feet. You are to serve your neighbor by your actions and interventions and monies and not just with spoken platitudes. You are, you must, you will forgive all those who trespass against you.
Feel inadequate, feel overwhelmed and insufficient for the task? Feel faint for weariness and scared and ashamed for the sin you know exists within you and which makes you sick? Come forward and have your feet washed again. Eat and drink your Lord and Master. He girds you not just with His royal garments but with Himself—really!
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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