I had the opportunity last Wednesday to be at the Duke University Divinity School. It also happened to be chapel day and I was able to be present for that. Their Holy Week service turned out to include foot washing. While this has not often been a part of my tradition (actually I don’t think it ever has), I was moved by the proclaimer of the day in what he said about this ancient tradition. These are the words of Andrew Keck, a young Methodist minister at the divinity school, about Jesus’ act of washing the feet of the disciples:

Jesus’ act is a model of humility and service that is hard for the church to emulate. The servant is not greater than the master; and the posture of washing feet vividly upends that truth before our eyes. But Jesus could not have meant for this to be followed literally – what kind of world would this be if CEO’s started washing the feet of janitors, homeless people started washing the feet of senators, whites washing the feet of blacks, gays washing the feet of straights. It could be literally everybody –no tests, no checklists, no qualifications. Churches would have to set up footwashing stations at the malls, the truck stops, the factories, and the state fair. Just think about all the water, the basins, the people, the strange looks, the liability, and all the towels.  It just isn’t practical or all that appealing when get right down to it.

Water bubbles up throughout John’s Gospel. Jesus pours out water much as he poured out his own life. He responds to a human need. Dirt on the road is one thing. There is something about grime and filth on the body that repels us. We are drawn and resistant to him who comes to serve us and cleans us from the dirt we carry within: the stain of guilt, twisted thoughts, soiled values, corrosive hates. John witnesses to the cleansing that come into our lives through him who poured out his life that we might become whole and clean, thoroughly washed. He is the cleansing and life-giving water.

In the Jewish tradition, foot washing was one of the few things that a slave could not be required to do for his master. Since most traveling in Jesus day was done by foot, one’s feet became quite filthy. I’m reminded of A Charlie Brown Christmas where Frieda complains about PigPen’s dust taking the curl out of her naturally curly hair. “Don’t think of it as dust,” Charlie Brown suggests. “Think of it as maybe the soil of some great, past civilization. Maybe the soil of ancient Babylon. It staggers the imagination. You may be carrying soil that was tread on by Solomon. Or even Nebuchadnezzar.” There’s some truth to this. The dirt on our feet as much as the dust on our brows connects us to the past. Not only to the places that we have been but to all places and times. 

The feet not only carried stories of where one had been but also what one had been doing: the sweat from labor, the sores and callouses from rough terrain, the cuts from fishing. The combination of mud, sand, sweat, and blood would become all caked on the bottom of one’s feet. Dirt collected from the places you had been mixed with the sweat and blood from the things that you did.

Washing one’s feet was not an obsessive remembering but a grace-filled forgetting  – a wiping away the record of where you have been and what you have done.  A burning of the diary, a wiping of the Blackberry, an expunging of the email, a clearing of the browser cache.

And notice by the very nature of the command, it is something we are to do for one another. What does it mean to have your feet washed by another? To have another see what you have done and where you been – and to simply wipe it away? What does it mean for you to see where you neighbor has been and what your neighbor has done – and to simply wipe it away? Are not both positions of humility? Are not both positions of equality? Is it not a mutual encouragement, a lifting up of our true humanity that God calls upon us to fulfill?  Is it not a public witness? A coming out of the Christian closet? A breaking down of the barriers between us and them so as to affirm and reaffirm the Lordship of Jesus Christ in each of our lives?

In verse 34, Jesus reiterates his expression of foot washing in the form of a new commandment. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  An action that wipes away the past of where we have been.  An action that wipes away the past of what we have done. A holy and grace-filled forgetting that we can’t do for ourselves. But also an action that reminds us of whose we are under the Lordship of Jesus Christ

Jesus commands, not asks, not requests, but commands us to love each other by helping one another clean what is most sore, most infected, most filthy, and most disgusting about ourselves. To help one another forget and clean away the muck of this world. Jesus does not want us to revel in the past but instead to reveal the present to us: the truth of who we are and who we are called to be.