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Within the brief span of five days there took place two of the most famous feet washings in history. On the Saturday before Good Friday, a penitent Mary anointed the feet of Our Divine Savior; on Thursday of the following week, He washed the feet of His disciples. No defilement being in the Savior, His feet were anointed with fragrant spikenard; but so much of the dust of worldliness still adhered to the feet of the disciples that they had to be washed.
Before the Paschal feast began,
Jesus already knew that the time had come
For His passage from this world to the Father.
JOHN 13:1
His mind leaped back to the moment when the Father gave all things into His hands, and He came forth from Him. But now the Hour to return had come. The first part of His ministry was with those “who received Him not” the closing moments would be with those “who received Him,” whom He would assure He loved “unto the end.”
The hour of departure is always an hour of quickened affection. When the husband leaves the wife for a long journey, there are more tender acts of devotion shown than in the continuing presence in the home. Often Our Blessed Lord had addressed His Apostles with the words: “My brethren,” “My sheep,” “My friends,” “Mine,” but in this Hour He called them His “Own,” as if to imply the dearest kind of a relationship. He was about to leave the world, but His Apostles were to stay in it to preach His Gospel and establish His Church. His affection for them was such that not all the glories of heaven in the act of opening to receive Him could for a moment disturb His warm and compassionate love of them.
But the closer He got to the Cross, the more they quarreled among themselves.
And there was rivalry between them
Over the question,
Which of them was to be accounted the greatest.
LUKE 22:24
At the very hour when He would leave them the Memorial of His love, and when His tender heart would be pierced by the betrayal of Judas, they showed their contempt of His sacrifice by a vain dispute about precedence. He looked to the Cross; they disputed as if it did not mean self-abnegation. Their ambition blinded them to all His lessons about dominion, thinking a man was great because he exercised authority. This was the idea of greatness among the Gentiles, for which they must substitute unmeasured service to others:
But he told them, The kings of the Gentiles
Lord it over them, and those who bear rule over them
Win the name of benefactors.
With you it is not to be so;
No dif erence is to be made, among you,
Between the greatest and the youngest of all,
Between him who commands and him who serves.
Tell Me, which is greater, the man
Who sits at table, or the man who serves him?
Surely the man who sits at table;
Yet I am here among you as your servant.
LUKE 22:25–27
Our Lord admitted that, in a certain sense, His Apostles were kings; neither did He deny their instinct for aristocracy, but theirs was to be the nobility of humility, the greatest becoming the least. To drive the lesson home, He reminded them of the position He occupied among them, as Master and Lord of the table—and yet one in which every trace of superiority was killed. Many times He told them He came not to be served but to serve. To bear the burden of others and particularly their guilt was the reason He became the “Suffering Servant” foretold by Isaias. His previous words about making themselves servants, He now reinforced by example.
And now, rising from supper,
He laid His garments aside, took a towel,
And put it about Him; and then
He poured water into the basin, and began
To wash the feet of His disciples,
Wiping them with the towel that girded Him.
JOHN 13:4
The minuteness with which every action of Our Lord is related is striking, for no less than seven distinct actions are mentioned: rising, laying His garments aside, taking a towel, putting it about Him, pouring water, washing the feet, wiping with a towel. One can imagine an earthly king, just before he returns from a distant province, rendering a humble service to one of his subjects, but one would never say that he was doing it because he was returning again to his capital. But Our Blessed Lord is here described as washing the disciples’ feet because He is to go back again to the Father. He had taught humility by precept, “He that humbleth himself shall be exalted” by parable, as in the story of the Pharisee and Publican; by example, as when He took a child in His arms; and now by condescension.
The scene was a summary of His Incarnation. Rising up from the Heavenly Banquet in intimate union of nature with the Father, He laid aside the garments of His glory, wrapped about His Divinity the towel of human nature which He took from Mary; poured the laver of regeneration which is His Blood shed on the Cross to redeem men, and began washing the souls of His disciples and followers through the merits of His death, Resurrection and Ascension. St. Paul expressed it beautifully:
His nature is, from the first, Divine,
And yet He did not see, in the rank
Of Godhead, a prize to be coveted;
He dispossessed Himself,
And took the nature of a slave,
Fashioned in the likeness of men,
And presenting Himself to us in human form;
And then He lowered His own dignity,
Accepted an obedience which brought Him
To death, death on a Cross.
PHILIPPIANS 2:6–6
The disciples are motionless, lost in mute astonishment. When humility comes from the God-man as it does here, it is obvious that it will be through humility that men will go back to God. Each one would have pulled his feet out of the basin were it not for love which pervaded their hearts. This work of condescension proceeded in silence, until the Lord came to Peter who felt keenly this inversion of values.
Peter asked Him, Lord,
Is it for Thee to wash my feet?
JOHN 13:6
Peter had difficulty with the humiliation the Cross demanded. When Our Blessed Lord at Caesarea Philippi told him that He was to go to Jerusalem to be crucified, Peter protested against the repugnance of that humiliation. The same state of mind appears again. Peter combined, on the one hand, a genuine recognition of the mastership of Our Divine Lord and, on the other hand, a determination that glory should be achieved without suffering. The hardest lesson for this self-confident man to learn was that he still had something to learn. Moments there are when man can wash his own cheeks with penitential tears, and Peter’s tears will flow within a few hours. But such tears fall only when man has let the Lord wash and clean him from sin. Then Jesus said to Peter:
It is not for thee to know, now,
What I am doing;
But thou wilt understand it afterwards.
JOHN 13:6
Such love and condescension Peter could not understand until the full humiliation on the Cross was crowned by His Resurrection and the gift of His Spirit. Peter before had rebuked the Cross; now he rebuked the example of humiliation that led to the Cross. Illumination of many mysteries belongs to the future; now we know only in part. A man may do and say many things which are confounding to the mind of a child; how much more is man confounded by the actions of the Infinite God! The humble man will wait, for it is the last act that crowns the play.
The Divine Master did not impart knowledge to Peter, and then ask him to submit. He asked him to submit, with the promise that it would all be made clear later on. The light became clearer as he followed it. If he had turned his back on it, the gloom would have increased. The Master washed clean, though Peter still protested, as the mother washes the face of her infant, though the child complains. The mother waits not for the child to know what she is doing, but completes her work of love. The tree does not understand the pruning, nor the land the plowing, nor can Peter understand the mystery of this great humiliation, as he vehemently says:
I will never let Thee wash my feet;
And Jesus answered him,
If I do not wash thee, it means
Thou hast no companionship with Me.
JOHN 13:8
Our Lord reminded Peter that true humility should not object to His humiliation, but, on the contrary, should recognize its necessity for mankind’s deliverance from sin. Why object to the Son of God made man washing external dirt from feet, when He Who is God had already humbled Himself in order to wash foulness from souls? Peter was ignoring his own need of inner redemption under the guise of protesting against a humiliation which was trivial when compared to the Incarnation. Was it a greater humiliation for the Word made flesh to gird Himself with a towel than it was for Him to be wrapped in swaddling bands and laid in a manger?
Our Lord went on to tell Peter that the condition of communion, fellowship, and companionship with Him was to be washed in a more effectual manner than the washing of feet. A refusal to accept Divine cleansing is exclusion from intimacy with Him. Not to understand that Divine love means sacrifice was to separate himself from the Master. The idea of having no part with Our Lord humbled him unspeakably, as he committed not his feet, but his whole being, to the Master:
Then wash my hands and my head too,
Not only my feet.
JOHN 13:9
It was not only his feet that were dirty, but even the deeds of his hands and the thoughts of his mind needed purification. Rather than persuade himself that sin was of no importance, and that a sense of guilt was abnormal, Peter in the presence of Innocence practically cried out: “Unclean! unclean!”
When Our Lord had finished washing their feet, He put on His garments, sat down, and taught them the lesson that if He Who was Lord and Master renounced Himself and even His very life, then they who were His disciples must do the same.
Do you understand what it is I have done to you?
You hail Me as the Master, and the Lord;
And you are right, it is what I am.
Why then, if I have washed your feet,
I Who am the Master and the Lord,
You in your turn ought to wash each other’s feet;
I have been setting you an example, which will
Teach you in your turn to do what I have done for you.
Believe me, no slave can be greater than his master,
No apostle greater than He by Whom he was sent.
JOHN 13:12–12
He had even washed the feet of Judas! But though He fulfilled the office of a menial slave, He was still “Master and Lord.” Never once while on earth did the Apostles address Him as Jesus, though that was the name given to Him by the angel, meaning “Savior.” When He asked for increased vocations for His missions, He told them to pray to the “Lord of the harvest” when He called for the donkey on Palm Sunday, He justified the claim saying, “The Lord hath need” and when He planned on using the upper room, it was the “Lord” who spoke of the need. The Apostles, too, called Him “Lord,” as Peter did when drowning, as James and John did when they sought to destroy the Samaritans, as they would do a few minutes later asking, “Lord, is it I?” On Easter, they would say the “Lord is risen.” Thomas later would call Him “Lord” so would John when He recognized Our Lord at the shore.
On the other hand, whenever the Gospels describe Our Lord, they always refer to Him as “Jesus,” e.g., “Jesus was tempted by the Devil,” and “Jesus taught.” The Gospels written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit used that name which became so glorious when He wrought Salvation and ascended into heaven. From then on, His name was often to be referred to as “the Holy Name of Jesus.”
God has given Him that Name
Which is greater than any other Name;
So that everything in heaven and on earth
And under the earth
Must bend the knee before the Name of Jesus,
And every tongue confess
Jesus Christ as the Lord, dwelling in
The glory of God the Father.
PHILIPPIANS 2:10
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