“Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

It is a theological seminary classroom on the last meeting of the semester. Our class has spent fourteen weeks studying the gospel according to St. John.

The fluorescent lights give the space a bright unforgiving light. The floor is linoleum. The seminar table is arranged in a rectangle with chairs pulled up to it. As the professor where I sit is at one of the narrower ends in front of the window.

We are assembled for the final student presentations. The room is silent.

Laura a member of the class, has brought a basin of water and a white rag. Handling it gingerly, she kneels down, she crawls between the legs of the seminar table and drags the basin and the rag toward her classmate on the left.  We look around at each other above the table, “Is this happening?”

Laura crawls under the table from person to person, counterclockwise, while we all observe. Time slows down. The silence echoes.  It seems interminable.

She doesn’t stop until she has worked her way around to every person in the rectangle. I am at the end of the line, the far right of the seminar table. When she’s done, she comes back up from the floor and goes to her seat. No words. No music. Just the ticking of the wall clock.

It is stunning. It is embarrassing, shocking. It’s awkward. It violates sacred conventions of the classroom, and it is utterly beautiful. The space now resonates with a hum of energy.

We have experienced this familiar story as if for the first time, feeling it’s shock, hearing its silence, bearing its humility. Awaiting our turn to be brought into this story whether we invited it or not.

Tonight, we share in the liturgy of Maundy Thursday when we commemorate the institution of the Lord’s Supper and the new commandment given by Jesus.

In the strange and wonderful gospel that is from John, at the crescendo of the Last Supper, the meal when Jesus gives his most important instructions for what the community is supposed to do forever after, when he explains in word and deed, everything that is going on with his death to come, he doesn’t tell them to do the eucharist as we know from the other gospels. He just gets up from supper, takes off his outer garment, ties a towel around his waist, pours water and washes the feet of his friends.

The sacred element isn’t bread or wine, but water, and the action isn’t eating, but touching – hands on feet, feet on hands.

In the Anglican tradition, this Johanine foot washing did not catch on liturgically the way the sacrament of the Eucharist did, so instead of doing this this example, every week or every day, we do it only once a year on Holy Thursday.

It’s a challenge to make it into a liturgy – It’s a challenge – it needs water and bare feet. When I grew up it was enough to read about it, not to do it physically…. then our revised prayer book brought back the washing… …

In some services twelve are washed, sometimes everyone. In some places it is danced or pantomimed, some places (missing the point entirely), instead of feet, they wash hands.

In the gospel of John Jesus does this prophetic sign; he gives this embodied sermon so we can understand our life with God.

It shows us our life as beloved disciples together  in the face of human death and inevitable goodbye, and it issues in the creative new life from Jesus’ death.

Jesus kneels and washes into being a new community – a scandalous community of friends, who serve each other as equals.  No more master and slave, no more teacher and student, no more host and guest. No more ruler and subject.

It is shocking how it overturns convention.

A man, foregoes his privilege, and kneels and washes and wipes, as Mary of Bethany prefigured in the anointing supper we remembered on Monday.

Whatever power we have as Christians, as as a disciples of Jesus, As a bishop, a deacon, a priest, it is this kind of power – no dominance, no submission but a relationship of friendship, more commonly known as love.

The physical sermon, this catechetical dance, of foot washing communicates relationship — physically close, hands touching feet, skin on skin, getting up, taking off an outer garment, tying a towel, pouring, washing, wiping. It is the same physical closeness in the posture of the disciple who reclines on the bread of Jesus, and the Son who is close to the Father’s bosom, who has made him known.

This is the ideal of life with God in the gospel of John – closeness, tightness, cheek to cheek of the Son and the Father, of friend and friend. It is a really intense, corporeal way of describing communion with God. For it’s really no more radical than “take, eat,” no more intimate than “that he may dwell in us and we in him,” but we have more practice with the weekly Eucharist.

I’ve always experienced Maundy Thursday as the saddest moment of Holy Week, the time during the Long Goodbye, when Jesus’ impending death, casts a shadow of grief over his loving action and his last commandment. For in kneeling down to wash their feet, he is laying down his life, he is going to die.

We are going to have to endure the stripping of the altar and the putting away of the shiny vessels and embroidered vestments.

We are going to ask ourselves,

“Will we be orphaned?

“Will we survive the loss of our friend?

It is Peter who speaks our objection to the reversal of status, alarm at the sacrifice made by a friend, grief at the inevitable and sorrowful parting by death.

“You will never wash my feet.”

Stunning, embarrassing, utterly beautiful.

Amen.