As I read again the familiar story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet at their last supper together (Jn 13:1-15), I wonder if we’re not as shocked as we should be.
In the long history of the Church there have been periods when Jesus was seen as almost inaccessibly distant. Jesus the Son of God was as far distant from normal mortals as God the Father, or God in general. Because of that distance people were drawn to devotions to Mary and other saints as somehow more accessible, on “our” level as it were. And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with such devotions, but they are not an alternative to our relationship with God himself.
In those periods the idea that the Son of God could do something as demeaning as wash people’s feet would indeed seem shocking. Doing their laundry would be less of a disgrace.
In our age we maybe have a sense of a closer relationship with Jesus and relate perhaps more strongly with his human nature than his divine nature. That’s no bad thing and helps protect us from the extremes of feeling so far distant that it’s hard to imagine any loving relationship between us. But as we enter into this time of Easter we need to balance our appreciation of Jesus humanity with an awareness of his divinity. The fact of his death is significant precisely because of his divinity. The meaning and impact of his death is because he was God, not just a wonderful human being.
In this way, the story that John tells of that last meal is something of a warm-up exercise for what comes next. John, of all the evangelists, has the most developed and explicit recognition of Jesus as divine (right from the first sentence of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”). Washing feet is just a preamble to what Jesus will do over the next couple of days.
This is not how a god should behave. As Paul put it in the letter we heard last Sunday: “He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but humbled himself” (Phil 2:6-11). Starting with washing feet and ending striped naked and mocked, hanging on a cross, dying from asphyxiation.
This is what God does for us. Shocking but true.