While God stands by me, I will rise to the occasion by accepting his friendship on his term, just like Peter.
Holy Thursday C
(April 1, 2010, St. John the Baptist – El Cerrito)
While God stands by me, I will rise to the occasion by accepting his friendship on his term, just like Peter.
Scriptures: Ex 12: 1 -8, 11 -14; Ps 116; 1 Cor 11: 23 – 26; Jn 13: 1 -15
Theme: Ritual enacts life and turns us back to ordinary life.[1]
Introduction: Every year we celebrate Holy Thursday. The liturgy is one the permanent rituals of the Church, just as the celebration of the Jewish Passover was a permanent ritual for the people under Moses’ guidance. One of the most important components of this ritual of Holy Thursday is the Mandatum or the Washing of the feet in obedience to the command of the Lord that we should do likewise. This act is also the story of the gospel. I propose therefore to reflect upon the meaning of sacred ritual. It may be good to start with our own experiences of hospitality. How do we honor our guests when we throw a party and invite people dear to us? What is the one thing that cannot miss in a festive celebration in our home? Why is it so?
(1) Why we do rituals
Rituals constitute a living memory. They are an enactment and celebration of significant events in our lives or in the lives of those who passed on life to us: our ancestors, grandparents, parents. Rituals help us to remember and never to forget what matters in our lives. They also help us to experience again and again the realities that we remember. Memory is a life-giving power in that sense. Rituals also tend to produce some effects of what we re-enact. In the Scriptures of this day, we see these three understandings of “ritual” at play: remembrance, life-giving, effective actualization of what it recalls.
The Israelites are instructed to ritualize their freedom from the Egyptian slavery before heading out towards the Jordan. They are instructed to institute this event as a permanent ritual, for every year. Chronologically, they are about to depart for the great desert adventure under Moses and his God. It is a celebration in hope. This hope has already met its fulfillment at the reception of the Word of the Lord, commanding to do it. The institution of this ritual allows its remembrance forever and states its importance. It also offers the possibility to re-live the experience of God’s rescuing help in the present time. How is this happening? Current situations are never identical with the historical oppression of Israel by Pharaoh in Egypt. In the gospel indeed, Jesus speaks of another necessary condition to have fellowship with him, and affirms that he is giving his disciples an example to follow after him. Jesus is also doing this timely act just a few hours before his passing through death to his Father in heaven: it is another celebration in hope. What are the disciples to remember: (1) Love consists of extending hospitality to fellow believers, and we need to remember that; (2) by doing what the Lord had done, we experience the power of his own hospitable love for all of us; (3) we are empowered to live this way in the ordinary, the non-ritual parts of our lives. All the elements of rituals are taken from the ordinary actions of life and all of ritual actions lead back to the ordinary living of honest people. Meal is the one context today (one of the most ordinary actions in all earthy lives); but the sharing with others is what we want to make amicable and not hostile or conflictually competitive. By washing other’s feet we are inviting them to this holy meal in which we all find salvation. It is an entire part of the gathering liturgy of the holy people calling each other to worship (“Come and Go with me to my Father’s house!”). Salvation is to Jesus communion with him in his Kingdom, built by his Father. The importance of a given ritual lies therefore in the way in which we find salvation, however partially we grasp the meaning of ‘salvation’ for us. How do I feel about the nice (or shy) feeling of having my feet washed? How does that feeling mediate ‘salvation’ to me? How do I live from these revealing experiences of being washed and of washing?
(2) How we live our lives
Many among us enjoy being welcomed home when they return from work or journey by a kiss and a warm feeling from spouse, children, friends, or even pets. Even pets have ‘rituals’ of welcoming their master/friend home, in ‘instinctive remembrance’ of the good relationship experienced before the departure that preceded the return. This is a living reality in the present. It is an empowerment to achieve the friendship in successive acts. Many however have various understandings of living from rituals. Some emphasize singularly on the past that rituals represent. Rituals are primarily memorial celebrations of significant past events. If we dwell mostly on this aspect, we may lose the meaning of what we celebrate, except our honoring of the fourth commandment that consists of respecting our parents. If they did it this way, we also do likewise. The danger here is pure symbolism and no living experience of our own.
Some put the stress on the future. As we saw in the Passover and the Last Supper events, we celebrate in hope. Rituals therefore make present our dreams and our goals in life. We have series of these secular rituals in ordinary life: before music concerts, before sports’ games, before important moments like performing surgery etc, to compare with religious sacred rituals. We foresee what we aim at and we ritualize it. The danger here is excessive preoccupation with our concerns and needs to achieve, to win victories as purposes on their own. But the strength here is this trust in the future, the trust in God’s guiding the course of history while we freely do as best we can what we see and accept as our own responsibility given by God.
Some would rather practice rituals just in the moment and see it as their life. ‘We’ve just have received Baptism, therefore we are ‘saved’’. The power of this view is to allow a live experience of the actions performed, the personal understanding and appropriation of their benefits in the moments of enactment. An example of this would likewise be for one to feel “reconciled” because he or she’ s just gotten back from Confession, or “united” to God because he or she’s just had Eucharistic Communion. We may not see the other sections of our daily lives around other people, particularly those closest to us who are also the living body of Christ, the challenges of Christ, calling us to reconcile and live in dynamic peace.
The First Reading gives us two rituals that symbolize the ordinary lives of the people involved in them: (1) the ritual of the Passover lamb that was the symbol for the life of herders, and the (2) ritual of unleavened bread that celebrates the farming. The two rituals celebrate the goodness of God to his people in the present time, in faithfulness to the past promises and in anticipation of the fulfillment to come after these days of preliminary intensive experience of God’s presence, defeating the suffering of captivity. The Egyptian captivity tended to relegate those competences of shepherding and digging earth behind the slavish constructions of monuments for the captors. The rituals meant for the people, lives dedicated to the freedom from Pharaoh’s dominion and for faithfulness to the God who saves, first in the desert and then in the land (I could translate this pair as good and bad times, anywhere). Finding strength from remembered past or envisioned future is a daily action for most of us when in doubt. In this, we apply (in a sense) ritual to reality. It is always about two: (1) the present moment of our needs and awareness, and (2) the power we draw from our relations to past or future or other people and realities mediating God.[2] In the Gospel, Jesus the true Master is hospitable to his disciples and by this he empowers them for the action of doing likewise. Is it doing the ritual likewise or is it living as the Master lived? It is always both. It is about the pair of freedom from bad and for good, just like other pairs of the dialectic of Holy Thursday. The message of the Lord today is therefore, “Live as I live in the world!” And our lives are patterned according to the Eucharist.
(3) The Eucharist as ‘ritual’ of life
The first part and first point of the Eucharist is God’s people gathered together. See around you and notice the numbers and diversities. What makes us one if not the Lord? In this first part is the liturgy of the Word. If we counted the people involved in all three or four readings today, they also represent a variety of places, times and cultures that we are interacting with: from Moses to Paul and our community here gathered. What is common to all of these if not the Lord? The second part of the Eucharistic ritual is made of several sections including the invocation of the Lord to make our gifts acceptable to Him that is ‘holy’. We recall the events that saved us from the sin of hatred and division among other sins. We receive the body and blood of the Lord as our way of saying “Yes Lord, wash my feet!” A positive response to the hospitality of Christ is a healing from the sin of hatred and division (made possible by easy angers and blind indignations without any recourse to the Lord of suffering, death and resurrection, who alone can judge with justice and help us to do our part rightly) of the social body of Christ, the people intimate with us, those most difficult to forgive and to love, for they hold a great power to betray. Jesus cannot miss making us aware of the needs of his people around us when we come to the Eucharistic table. He invites us to live this healing from hatred and division daily and ordinarily as he rejoices in coming into our ‘home’ through our reception of his body and blood. This healing is not simply ‘therapeutic’ in our simple self-interest. It is a power to be hospitable to others, to never be ashamed of serving, since we can enjoy being served. Our task consists of just saying “Yes” to the Lord who can confront our “Egyptian gods” with his power of true love and self-sacrifice.
Conclusion: As we come to have our feet washed, let us be aware of two realities: (1) the Lord inviting us into his friendship. That is the purpose to which Peter submits with excessive zeal. This is the purpose of our doing it. (2) Our own feelings of this experience: some of the disciples in the gospel are silently sad; Peter first rejects the servanthood of the Lord, before enthusiasm for its benefits. Let us be aware of any sense of sadness or separation from the Lord or any acute sense of our unfaithfulness to his love; and step up in hope. The vision of the Lord Jesus is that we need a welcoming host and a model to follow. If he sees our lives that way, who am I to reject his invitation? I will step up and say, “Yes Lord, please wash my feet, though I may feel unworthy of your love!” What we see in the washing of feet is what we are called to practice on others, just like Peter who is called to dispense the hospitable forgiveness of the Lord to both Jews and gentiles through Baptism and the Eucharist, the two major rituals and Sacraments of the Church for our salvation in Christ.
Let us pray that we may become what we celebrate: one body in Christ and happy members that invite each other to the feast of God’s self-giving love in Christ.
[1] The Eucharist as a Sacrament is not another among rituals, for it has its own purpose in itself that is Communion with God the overall meaning of Salvation, though it is anticipation here on Earth of the fullness that comes when all is recapitulated in Christ and when ‘we see God face to face’.
[2] The Scriptures present to us several pairs: (1) Lamb-bread, (2) Highest God-Egyptian gods, (3) doorpost-doorpost, 4() Master-disciple, (5) eating-acting, (6) Hospitality-Acceptance, (7) Institution-faithfulness… (8) Lord-servant.
