Jesus washes the feet of his disciples in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John. By this time in the narrative, water has repeatedly been established as a sign of life, of transformation, of renewal, of purification, of the Spirit. We’ve seen Jesus transform water into wine at the wedding in Cana, for instance. We’ve heard him speak of the water of life with the Samaritan woman at the well, after asking that she give him a drink. We’ve witnessed the healing of a man at the Pool of Bethesda. We could go on listing examples. In the thirteenth chapter of John, in any case, Jesus washes the feet of his disciples.
In the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus weeps. His tears spring forth as he sees that Mary of Bethany has thrown herself at his feet, and that she and her friends are weeping from the sorrow of having lost Lazarus, Mary’s brother whom Jesus will raise. No doubt, the pain of Lazarus’s death is accompanied by a kind of psychological strain, as Mary and Martha both fight to hold on to faith, to accept what Jesus is telling them about life and resurrection. Grief and bafflement and perhaps frustration and anger pour forth from Mary in her tears, as she tells the truth: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Without exactly explaining or giving her an answer, Jesus weeps. This is one of the most powerfully visceral moments in the Gospel, if you ask me. I’m not really able to feel or comprehend the physical pain of the crucifixion, but bursting into tears when my friends do? That’s an experience I know and can feel.
So, in the eleventh chapter of John, we add the tears of Jesus, shared and perhaps brought on sympathetically by the tears of Mary and the others, to the list of powerful signs. Jesus is giving his followers the water of life here, too, the water of a mysterious transformation that includes sorrow and suffering and emotion, and even a near-involuntary responsiveness to the pain of others that makes Jesus weep when his friends do. Salvation is becoming very physical here, a very human process as well as a divine one. Love and physical presence are also miracles of grace when God catches them up in the person of Jesus.
The tears of Mary of Bethany are richly transformed again in the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel. This time, wonderfully, she seems to transform them herself by the power of her gratitude for the saving of Lazarus. John tells us that Jesus has returned to Bethany six days before the Passover, so this story takes place during the very period of time we are observing as Holy Week. At that dinner in Jesus’s honor, Mary takes a pint of pure nard, a precious and strong perfume, and she opens it and pours all of it on the feet of Jesus. Like the smell of death that surrounded the tomb of Lazarus, the odor of this perfume fills the house, John tells us, enveloping Jesus and all of the company in an atmosphere of reverence and love and beauty. Like the tears she had cried at Jesus’s feet a chapter earlier, tears that caught up Jesus and his followers in a shared weeping, this costly liquid is an outpouring, an overflowing, and a marking of deep connection.
Mary dries Jesus’s feet with her hair, hair that is scandalously unbound about her shoulders at this moment. Again, salvation is physical, and shared, and mysterious. Mary strikes that same physical posture she had taken while weeping, prostrate at his feet. She doesn’t hold back. Jesus doesn’t shrink from her or ask her to explain. At the wedding in Cana water turned to wine. Here, water has become perfume, tears have become an anointing, death has given way to resurrection, and grief has become gratitude.
And now tonight in the thirteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, when the time for the Passover has come, Jesus picks up a basin of water and kneels at the feet of his disciples. He ties a towel about himself, and washes and dries their feet. Peter is horrified by the reversal of roles, but the master humbles himself before his disciples and honors them with an act of kindness and hospitality and care. We needn’t imagine that Mary of Bethany has taught Jesus how to do this by prostrating herself before him on two earlier occasions. But we might register that in this act of tenderness, as Jesus shows extravagant love for his friends, he echoes some of the love and grief that his dear friend Mary has shown him.
Maybe too there is a kind of reverence here, as Jesus acknowledges that long walk his disciples have taken, the growth and risk and urgency and incomprehension that have drawn them forward to follow him, one dusty foot in front of another. Maybe there is grief in anticipation of his own suffering. Maybe there is deep acceptance of the betrayals that are already circulating in the group. Judas has conspired against him. Peter still doesn’t know his own capacity to fail as a disciple. Jesus knows, that is, that he must do the work for which his Father sent him, and he knows that his friends are not ready for that work, any more than they were ready to watch Lazarus die. Could there be a kind of gratitude at play for Jesus, as there was for Mary? His friends will hurt him deeply but they are part of the great mystery of death and resurrection. Without understanding or being ready, they are embraced by the atmosphere of divine love that surrounds Jesus. Yes he is being kind and hospitable here, but might he also feel a sense of wonder and awe? There is an almost unbearable human dignity in the disciples as they stumble and fail. Like us, they will stumble forward to be the church. Does Jesus feel a reverence for their own tragedy?
There are so many beautiful forms of mirroring and grace and love and respect in these three chapters from the Gospel of John. Mary’s devotion to Jesus, mirrored in Jesus’s own tears, has been caught up into this larger wave of grace and blessing and love and reverence that spills over into the washing of the disciples’ feet. Her tears have become an anointing for his burial. His act of washing the disciples’ feet has become their commissioning: “As I have done to you,” he says, “so must you do to one another.” And he does, in a sense, what Mary has done for him.
As he unites his disciples around that table by moving from one to another to show his love and his compassion for them, he expresses again the communion into which he has drawn them, the life for which he is preparing them, the suffering that is to come. Just as, in the other three Gospels, Jesus takes up bread and wine to proclaim that they are his body, so here he takes up what they bring--Mary’s tears, Peter’s impetuosity, Judas’s betrayal--and makes a sacrament of real presence. Real, shared, love that is the bedrock and resting place of the church.
At this end of this evening’s Mass, we will gather up the supreme sacrament of presence that Jesus gave his disciples at another supper. We will carry this Body of Christ lovingly through the church, to the altar of repose in the Lady Chapel. We will carry the Body of Christ with love and reverence because we are the body of Christ. Jesus has washed us in baptism. Jesus has given us the water of life. Water and blood have flowed from his side at the crucifixion, and they flow sacramentally through the long years to spring up again among us this evening.
As we bring the Blessed Sacrament to the Lady Chapel and set it on the Altar of Repose, we are accompanied by the whole Body of Christ, the Communion of Saints, the community of the faithful. And as we kneel in prayer in that chapel tonight, if our eyes wander a bit, we may see that to our right, on the wall behind the altar, there is a beautiful silver statue of Mary of Bethany, looking down on us and accompanying us in our reverent love for Jesus. You’ll see her along with a statue of Mary Magdalene on the other side of the chapel. Both Marys hold jars of perfume, as if ready to anoint Jesus again for his burial.
Those jars, we may imagine, hold some of the perfume of real presence, of love that echoes back and forth from God to us in the person of Jesus, and back through Jesus to the source of all being. In that shared reverence and awe, Jesus catches up all of our love and our grief and our misunderstanding, and the deep desire we may feel to draw closer to him, to pour out our souls and he pours out his life for us. And so, because we remember the bending down of Jesus to care for us, and because in his bending he remembers the figure of Mary bent before him, and remembers countless others who have given themselves in loving response to his love—because we remember such outpourings, we prostrate ourselves before the Blessed Sacrament of the Real Presence of our God.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
Maundy Thursday 2023
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
