Washing Feet

Help us to see with new eyes

and hear with new ears

the story of shame and triumph,

suffering and hope, that this week reveals.

Mold us to be like Jesus, dying and rising with him.

In the name of Christ, our Lord, Amen. (from Boston Square's Palm Sunday prayer of confession)

We have a calendar of family photos hanging on the wall in our kitchen, and one of the pictures for the month of April is of our kids washing each other’s feet. We try to do this every year before Easter, and every year I have idealistic expectations of how it will go – that it will be calm and peaceful and the water will be warm and soothing. Instead, we often we fight about who will wash the feet of whom, I lose my temper, and the water gets cold and all over everyone’s pants. And somehow something holy still happens. This gesture of love, the vulnerability of kneeling and receiving touch, shapes us.

We try to do it each year, because it’s a way to enter into the story of Holy Week, a way of doing what Jesus did. And it seems particularly important this year to remember with our bodies, to experience with our senses, this sign of Jesus’ love for us.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like I concentrate very well these days, remember things very well these days, even pray with words particularly well these days. I need practices that involve my body. It’s easy with all of the distancing to feel that God is distant too. I need tangible experiences of God’s love. I need to remember my baptism as I wash my hands. I need to taste Jesus’ love with my mouth each week during communion. And this week, I need to wash feet and let my feet be washed.

For those of us who are alone, I encourage you to lovingly wash your own feet. This much aloneness is hard; this is a way to treat yourself with tenderness. Embody and receive Jesus’ love for you, for your feet, his compassion for your struggles in these days.

For those of us who are with others, I encourage you to lovingly wash one another’s feet. This much togetherness is hard; this is a way to treat one another with tenderness. Receive Jesus’ love for you, for your feet, his compassion for your struggles in these days. Embody this love and compassion for those you live with by washing their feet.

It might be awkward – the bending and kneeling, touching someone else’s feet or your own, feeling their callouses, smelling their smell. If things at our house go as they have in the past, there might be arguing over who gets to go first and who washes whose feet, the water might get cold. But that’s all the point – that Jesus loves us, loves our bodies, even our feet; that Jesus’ compassion extends to us in all of our struggles. And when we experience and embody Jesus’ love in these practical, tangible ways, it shapes us to be more and more like him.