Jesus

by James Martin

  Think of all the places Jesus took his body. Even confining ourselves to the sites mentioned in the Gospels, we know that he walked from Nazareth to Capernaum. He visited places around the Sea of Galilee: Bethsaida, Gerasa, Tabgha. He traveled to Bethany and Jericho and Cana. He went to the region of Tyre and Sidon and to Caesarea Philippi. In all likelihood he went to places not mentioned in the Gospels (Sepphoris, for example). During his time of preparation he took his body into the harsh Judean desert. This took its toll. We know Jesus grew tired because he falls dead asleep in the boat during a howling storm. At times he no doubt went without sleep: “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” he said.24

  When I lifted the host, I realized that Jesus took his body to so many places; he gave his body to people, physically. He brought himself to people—saying, in essence, “This is my body. Here I am.” It helped me think of the familiar words “This is my body” in a new light.

  Jesus also offered himself to and for God the Father—as well as for imperfect disciples and followers who, during his Passion, denied and betrayed their friend. You cannot get more imperfect than that. Jesus’s generosity did not depend on people’s appreciation. These two ways of offering himself—by going where people needed him and by offering his actions for imperfect followers—were united at the Crucifixion, when he offered his entire body for an imperfect humanity.

  We are called to give of ourselves as Jesus did. To bring our bodies—ourselves—to places where we are needed: at home in a delicate family situation, in a hospital beside the bed of a dying friend, at work listening to a troubled coworker. But it can be difficult. Selflessness costs because we are always giving for an imperfect person or group; the gift may not be appreciated or even acknowledged. A few years ago I read about a young gay man who was studying theology in preparation for work in the Catholic church. At times he felt unwelcome in the church (for a variety of reasons), but he compared his situation to a family you love even though you occasionally disagree with them and even though they occasionally don’t understand you. He gave of himself generously anyway.

  Think of parents bringing up children who afford them little respect, disobey them, or are overtly rude. Think of men and women striving to love husbands or wives who are sullen, uncommunicative, or mean. Think of children caring for aging parents who have turned truculent. A friend told me that shortly after his father had developed Alzheimer’s disease, he became astonishingly callous. “Shut up!” he would say to the son who was caring for him. “I hate you!” It’s hard to give yourself, to say in all these situations, “This is my body (energy, emotion, strength), given for you.”

  Two things that strengthened Jesus can strengthen us. First, Jesus did this for God the Father. God sees our hidden sacrifices and knows their cost, even when others don’t. Second, with this kind of radical self-gift can come new life. We give not because Christianity is a masochistic religion, but because it is a way of love and a path to life. Jesus’s death on the Cross led to an outpouring of love and an explosion of new life.

  So Jesus says, “Do this in memory of me,” not simply to the priest who celebrates Mass, but to all who would give their own lives out of love.

  AS I SAT ON the bench in the Cenacle I thought of something else Jesus did during the Last Supper, and something that happened to me earlier. The day before, while scouting around for the Cenacle, I chanced upon a room on the floor below. A sign on the wall read “The Room of the Washing of the Feet.”

  When I poked my head into the cramped, dark room, an elderly man greeted me and told me that Jesus washed the disciples’ feet here, directly below the Cenacle. I didn’t want to offend him by saying that (a) I had never heard of such a place and (b) neither had any of my guidebooks. After parting with a few shekels, I was shown a cistern in the floor. He yanked up a bucket of water on a rope from what looked like a considerable depth. “Wash,” he said. So I plunged my hands into the cold water. “That,” he said triumphantly, “is the water that Jesus used during the Last Supper!”

  After I returned to the States I found no mention of this holy site in any guidebook. So I e-mailed my Jesuit friend David, back in Jerusalem, for an answer. He promised to reconnoiter. A few days later he wrote back, “I found the place, just at the entrance, on the right-hand side as you go into the compound of David’s Tomb. The man smiled when I asked about the washing of the feet (I think he had heard it before) and said that it was nonsense. The place, he said, is a ritual washing place for Jews who want to pray at David’s Tomb.” A mikvah, then. Whoever was there that day had told me the opposite. I suppose he could tell a tourist from a local.

  But that fake site led to some real emotions. When I plunged my hands into the cold water, I thought of a friend who during theology studies wrote his master’s thesis on Jesus’s washing the feet of the disciples. At the time I thought, The Washing of the Feet? What an odd topic. What about the Last Supper, the institution of the Eucharist, which is more important? But the longer I live the more I wonder how different the church would be if we spent as much time thinking about the Washing of the Feet as we do about Transubstantiation.

  THE STORY APPEARS ONLY in the Gospel of John, where it serves as the beginning of the Passion narrative. We haven’t spent as much time with the Gospel of John as we have with the Synoptic Gospels. John wrote his story of Jesus later than the Synoptic authors—around AD 100—for a group of Jewish Christians in the process of distancing themselves from Jewish synagogues. As we’ve seen, John sometimes sets up a dichotomy between the followers of Christ and, to use a shorthand, “the Jews.”

  If you read the Synoptics first and then come upon John’s Gospel, you’re in for a surprise: Jesus seems quite different. In the Synoptics Jesus is an earthy and sometimes excitable preacher and healer; in John he often seems a calm and imperturbable sage, the oracle. Some of the long discourses, particularly those after the Last Supper, which in even a small-print Bible can run for several pages, contrast with the fast-paced stories in the Synoptics, where everything seems to happen “immediately.” In John, one is privileged to see more easily the divine side of Jesus, which is revealed even in his choice of words. Here, for example, is a brief passage from one of the farewell discourses at the Last Supper:

  Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.25

  That doesn’t sound much like the carpenter from Nazareth.

  Such high-flown theological disquisitions may distance a few people from the Gospel of John. On the other hand, many Christians prefer John, even love John. But the question remains: Why does Jesus sound so different in this Gospel? Mainly because John is writing after the Synoptic authors, for a different audience, is thus emphasizing a different aspect of Jesus, and often draws on different oral traditions. Most likely Jesus did not give an hour-long oration to his followers at the Last Supper. John is probably compressing several talks and perhaps fleshing things out. But then again, who knows? Maybe at his last meal Jesus did sum up things at length for fearful disciples desperate for some comfort.

  For me, John is slower than the fast-paced Synoptics. I prefer texts written closer to the actual events, so I prefer the Synoptics, especially Mark. As many believers do, I sometimes find myself comparing the Synoptic Jesus with the “Johannine” Jesus.

  But many parts of John I treasure, and as central as the Synoptics’ account of the bread and the wine is to my spirituality, I find myself returning in prayer to John’s version of the Last Supper, for he begins the second half of his Gospel with a startling portrait of humble service.

  JOHN SITUATES THE STORY slightly earli
er than the Synoptics do: “Now before the festival of the Passover,” he begins. At the Last Supper, he tells us, Jesus “knew that his hour had come.” At this point Judas has already decided to betray Jesus. Again, John portrays Jesus in command, possessing full knowledge of what is about to happen. The supper in John is not, strictly speaking, a Passover meal: it lacks the paschal lamb. In John there is also no focus on the familiar bread and wine.26 And in John’s account, before the meal, Jesus does something striking.

  He takes off or “lays aside” his outer robe, ties a towel around himself, pours water into a basin, washes the disciples’ feet, and wipes them with the towel. At the time, foot washing was seen as a mark of hospitality, but also a menial task often performed by slaves to welcome a dignitary hosted by the slave’s master.27 To the disciples it would have been an unmistakable demonstration of humility, something an inferior would do for a superior. Raymond Brown calls it a “loving act of abasement.”28

  Jesus’s odd gesture offers the disciples a symbol of service and self-gift, prefiguring the total act of service and self-gift that comes with his death. Indeed, the Greek used for Jesus’s “laying aside” (tithēsin) his outer robe is the same used—several times—when Jesus earlier speaks of himself as the Good Shepherd who “lays down” his life for his flock.29 Jesus lays everything down for others in service to God—his outer garment and, then, his inner garment: his body.

  You don’t need to know any Greek to anticipate the disciples’ shock: their master is acting like a servant, a slave. According to Gerhard Lohfink, it was also the opposite of the custom of students of the day. Rabbinic traditions list forty-eight ways through which knowledge of the Torah is acquired; one is “serving the wise,” which Lohfink calls “a very beautiful and moving tradition” of providing personal service for the rabbis. Among these duties are serving at table, cleaning house, and washing the feet.30 Thus, the normal expectations are upended once again by Jesus.

  When he approaches Peter to wash his feet, Peter expresses confusion. “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” he asks. Jesus says that though Peter may not understand what he is doing now, it will become clear later. Still, Peter protests: “You will never wash my feet!” That response has always seemed to me infinitely sad; knowing that Jesus may die, Peter is consumed with sorrow, perhaps thinking, Lord, how much will you abase yourself? At least avoid this degradation. Peter’s comment is not a command as much as a loving plea. It’s similar to watching a friend doing something that seems humiliating. To give it a contemporary spin, imagine going to a wedding and seeing the bride and groom having to clean up an overturned trash can at their wedding reception, because no one else will. We would say, like Peter, “Don’t do that!”

  Perhaps it’s even more radical than that. In her book Written That You May Believe, Sandra Schneiders, IHM, a New Testament scholar, suggests another possible meaning. She believes that in John’s Gospel the Foot Washing is more about the mutual service of friendship, a mutual sharing of gifts that in no way implies any sort of domination. The message is not so much that the master has become the slave, but that all are on the same level. After Jesus has washed the disciples’ feet, he challenges them to do the same for each other and to see that all are equal friends in the kingdom; nobody is above or below in any way.

  Schneiders objects to an overemphasis on “humble service” in the Foot Washing, because of the power dynamics this interpretation may suggest. There is no domination by anyone, but rather an invitation to equality. This may help to explain Peter’s strong reaction; he sees that this requires, as Schneiders says, “a radical reinterpretation of his own life-world, a genuine conversion of some kind which he was not prepared to undergo.”31

  Peter’s response may also betoken an overall lack of openness to the unusual ways of God. Most of the time, not surprisingly, we are resistant to negative change. “This is not the way it’s supposed to be,” we say. Even in our spiritual lives, we can be resistant to the actions of God. We tend to box God in, saying, “This cannot be the action of God.” We may want to create a God in our image, when God wants to create us in God’s. Peter may be similarly inclined, “I don’t want a God who serves.” Or “I don’t want to be asked by God to serve in this way.”32

  A darker reason for Peter’s hesitancy came to me one time in prayer. Perhaps Peter already knew that he wouldn’t be able to accompany Jesus until the end, and that recognition made him feel doubly unworthy.

  Jesus gives Peter an opaque answer: “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Scripture scholars suggest that this comment may relate to baptism, a practice that had already taken hold in the community for whom John wrote. If you are not cleansed from your sins, then you cannot be disciples.33 More to the point, Jesus seems to be telling Peter that service is a way his disciples can take part in him, in his ministry of total self-giving. Or perhaps it is a way of saying that to love other people you must first accept love—in whatever form it comes. And notice that Jesus calmly continues his symbolic action in the midst of confusion and doubt among the disciples. It does not trouble him that people don’t understand his gift. They will.

  Peter—confused, anguished, impetuous—leaps to the challenge. As it often is, it’s all or nothing for the fisherman from Galilee. “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” he says. Jesus may have smiled inwardly, touched by Peter’s enthusiasm: Anything for you, Lord! But Jesus gently tells him that this is not necessary: “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean.” The word used for “who has bathed” is ho leloumenos and implies a total immersion, perhaps another nod to baptism.

  There is a magnificent rendition of this precise moment by the English Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown, who painted “Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet” (1852–56). Jesus kneels on the floor, clad in a grasshopper-green robe, a dun-colored towel tightly gathered around his waist. He firmly grasps the right foot of Peter, who is seated higher than Jesus, head sunk onto his chest, looking intently at his master. Peter’s left foot dangles in a basin of water. The look on Peter’s face perfectly illustrates the Gospel: at once embarrassed, downcast, and uncomfortable. Behind them, at table, sit the disciples: one loosens the thongs of his sandals, readying for his washing; another peers over Peter to see what is going on; another holds his anguished face in his hands. Some disciples are easily seen; others recede into the gloom of the space. Brown painted several of his friends into the scene, adding to the tenderness of the moment.

  What captivates me about this image is the force with which Jesus holds onto Peter’s foot. This is not a merely symbolic washing; he takes a firm grip, vigorously wiping off the fisherman’s dirty foot. Peter is clearly appalled by what Jesus is doing.

  A preliminary version painted by Brown, still seen in an extant watercolor, depicts Jesus only partially clad, with a bare torso, wearing a loincloth, and with the towel tied around his waist. The display of the painting caused an outcry, and Brown later clothed his Jesus. Besides the usual Victorian proprieties, the idea of an utterly human Jesus washing feet still may have been too much for viewers to accept.

  Once finished with the ablutions, Jesus clothes himself and resumes his place with the disciples. And now he explains things to them, in case there is any doubt. Rather than summarizing let me share what he says in John’s Gospel in full:

  Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. (Ei tauta oidate, makarioi este, ean poiēte auta.)

  May I ask you to read that last sentence again? Jesus asks them to move from knowledge to action. It takes the form of a comm
and; Jesus is speaking as Teacher and Lord, from a position of authority. So the disciples are expected to heed his message: It’s not enough to have knowledge of Christ, you must let it inform your life’s decisions. Blessedness comes not only from words and thoughts, but also from deeds. Or as St. Ignatius Loyola wrote, “Love shows itself more in actions than in words.”

  Whenever I hear this reading proclaimed on Holy Thursday, I never fail to think how different Christian churches would be if, in addition to our weekly celebrations of the Eucharist, we celebrated the Foot Washing. It may sound crazy, and it would be terribly complicated to arrange every Sunday—all those basins of water and towels and shoes and socks! But imagine the symbolism if every week the presider laid aside his vestments and got down on his hands and knees to scrub the feet of his parishioners. What a reminder it would be to all of us—priests included—that this is what Christ asked us to do in addition to the celebration of the Eucharist. After all, what he says about the Eucharist, “Do this in memory of me” at the Last Supper in the Synoptics, he also says about the Foot Washing in John: “If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

  Seen every Sunday, over and over, the washing of the feet might help us see how power is more intimately linked to service.

  How different would our churches be if we modeled a ministry of humble service on Sundays—or at critical moments when forgiveness is demanded? At the beginning of the sexual-abuse crisis that rocked the Catholic Church, someone suggested to me that in addition to removing priests from ministry, holding bishops accountable, making restitution to victims, and implementing programs to prevent abuse from happening, a foot washing of victims might be a powerful symbol of humility. Several bishops did this, in fact, but more would have been better.

  Early in Pope Francis’s pontificate, when it was announced that he would spend Holy Thursday not in the great St. Peter’s Basilica or the grand Basilica of St. John Lateran, as was the custom, but at a juvenile detention center, people responded with surprise and admiration. How striking it seemed that this pope, the first to take the name of Francis, the apostle of humility, was getting down on his hands and knees to minister to poor and troubled youth.