Foot Washing (Again)

I remembered this week that last year for Holy Week I’d written a midweek reflection about foot washing, and how it seemed especially important in those first few weeks of the pandemic. I looked it up in my files (and I’m drawing from it heavily), because foot washing feels really important again this week, this far into the pandemic.

I don’t know about you, but I am not having a particularly ‘holy’ Holy Week this year. In fact, despite working on worship services, I keep forgetting that Good Friday is two days away, that Easter is this weekend, that this is a week the church sets aside for prayer and meditation on Jesus’ death and resurrection. It feels more like any other week – trying to stay on top of the routine tasks, to faithfully keep going. Trying to keep straight which day it is and who has to be where when and what they need to take with them.

And dealing with a fair bit of weariness and anxiety. It’s still so hard to believe that we’re doing Easter virtually again. That some of us haven’t seen each other in over a year. That it still isn’t safe to gather. And there’s the heartbreaking, ongoing news in the world and in our personal lives – the death of dear friends, the devasting testimony in the Derek Chauvin trial, the awful attacks against Asian Americans, against women. So much collective grief and guilt and fear. It’s hard to make time and space to pray or to settle my mind and body when I do make time and space to pray.

As I wrote a year ago, our family tries to wash each other’s feet during Holy Week. And every time beforehand I have idealist expectations about how it will go – we’ll be calm and peaceful and the water will be warm and soothing. And instead, we usually fight over who will wash the feet of whom, I yell at everyone, and the water gets cold and all over everyone’s pants. And somehow, something holy happens anyway. This gesture of love, the vulnerability of kneeling and receiving touch, shapes and grounds us. It’s a concrete way to experience and express with our bodies Jesus’ love for us.

And, wow, do we ever need it. We need practices that involve our bodies, that remind us to treat our bodies and other people’s bodies with tenderness. We need physical reminders that Jesus holds us in love, that Jesus washes us: even our feet - even the parts of ourselves we may not like, the parts we’re ashamed of. We need embodied experiences of Jesus love in this long and complicated season of grief and loss. We need embodied reminders that Jesus cares about our bodies and the bodies of every other human being.

So, I encourage you again to practice footwashing this week:

For those of us who are alone, I encourage you to lovingly wash your own feet. This much aloneness for so long 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 for so long 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 feel 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 often do, there might be arguing over who gets to go first and who washes whose feet, I might lose my temper, the water might get cold. But that’s the point – that Jesus loves us in our weakness, loves our bodies, even our feet; that Jesus’ compassion extends to us in all of our struggles, whether we’re having a ‘holy’ Holy Week or not.