Love One Another

Photo of the Rev. Canon Sue Sommer by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

I seem to have reached a point in my life where I am more and more becoming my mother. I see her eyes and her mouth in the mirror when I apply my makeup in the morning; I hear her voice when I argue with my daughter. And just within the last year or so, I have begun to see intimations of her feet when I step out of the shower and look down.

I have a memory of my mother’s feet in particular, because in the days leading to her death when she was unable to see or speak or move, I spent time smoothing lotion onto them.  These were feet that had seen eighty-plus years of hard use. Barely 5 feet tall, my mother wore heels for most of her adult life, and her feet had long paid the price for her choice of footwear. By the time my mom was my age now, she had already undergone several orthopedic surgeries, and ultimately was left with feet that were criss-crossed with surgical scars, misshapen with arthritis. I couldn’t do much for mom in the last days of her life, but I could massage her feet. And so I did. And on one of days, early in the week in which she died, the hospice nurse happened to enter the room just as I was finishing. "Do you see any changes?" she asked, gesturing at my mother's feet. I didn't understand the question. What change was she talking about? The nurse motioned me to join her in the hallway, out of my mother’s earshot. She then explained that as patients like my mom approach death, their extremities – their feet – can gradually begin to turn dark. From that point on, I watched my mom's feet for signs of approaching, encroaching death. And I found, as the days wore on, that the nurse had indeed spoken the truth.

The images of feet and approaching death came to mind as I re-read our familiar passage from John's gospel. Only, the feet, of course, belong to the disciples; the approaching death belongs to Jesus. Time is short – a few hours at best to communicate to his disciples what he would have them know. This is John’s gospel, and in the Gospel of John, Jesus acts and then teaches the disciples what the action reveals. The revelation – the teaching – will take four chapters. We’ve come to know it as the Farewell Discourse wherein Jesus distills a lifetime of revelation into the teaching, “Love one another as I have loved you.” But on this night, on Maundy Thursday, we hear of the action itself. John tells us that Jesus stripped off his outer garments and knelt at the feet of his disciples. Over the protests of Peter, in violation of the norms of his culture which would have relegated the task to a servant, Jesus began to wash their feet. Even in a culture where men touched each other with less embarrassment or self-consciousness than in our own, it was an act of astonishing intimacy.

John of course doesn't go into the humdrum details. But I find myself thinking about the scene of Jesus kneeling at his disciples' feet. Those feet probably were big, rough, calloused feet, hardened from years of walking, nails ragged and broken or missing altogether, dust embedded in the creases. These were the feet that had carried the disciples the length and breadth of Israel during the time of their master's ministry. These were the feet that must someday soon journey to distant lands, so that the message of the Messiah might be proclaimed to others. These were the feet that would themselves one day discolor as death approached the disciples as well.

On that night in Jerusalem, when death lay close to life, when the disciples' feet will soon flee into darkness and Jesus's own feet will walk with measured step toward a trial on trumped up charges, Jesus used a baptismal symbol of life and death – water – and performed an act of loving servanthood. Then he told his disciples that they must do the same.

It is the mandatum, the mandate of Maundy Thursday – to do for one another what Christ has done for us. It remains our mandate to embrace a posture of humility and to serve one another. It remains our mandate to love one another in tangible ways, refusing to allow love to become an abstraction. It remains our mandate to handle gently those aspects of one another that are perhaps wounded and scarred, worn and rough, calloused, maybe even unpleasant. It remains our mandate to acknowledge our shared humanity, the death that awaits us all, and the love of God that transcends our death. Most of all, it remains our mandate to do it now, because time is short.