MAUNDY THURSDAY | FOOT-WASHING | SELF-FORGETTING
Sermon: The Paradox of Christianity
Profound suffering; playful love
A sermon given at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Madison, CT, on Maundy Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Holy Week¹
Paradox
To be a Christian is to hold paradox in the heart; truths that are impossible to BE true at the same time. Paradox is maddening to our heads, and if you think too long on the paradoxes of Christianity, you’ll find yourself running around in circles, or you’ll walk away from it shaking your head, or more likely, you’ll settle for something that says that it is Christianity, but is not.
Only our hearts seem able to rest quietly with paradox, and then, only by letting go… letting go of what we think we know… letting go of who we think we are… letting go of how we think the world works. And letting go is very hard. When the tears begin to well up and spill over, take it as a sign that you might be getting close.
We encounter the Christian paradoxes most starkly during Holy Week as we watch Jesus walk toward a humiliating destruction at the hands of human powers, with his hapless disciples tagging along in his wake. In the end, the paradox is so strongly felt, so deeply disturbing, so unreconcilable, that Jesus is abandoned by those closest to him, and he is left alone, hanging on a cross.
The first Christian paradox is this: life comes out of death.² And by death, I don’t just mean the death we suffer at the end of our lives. I mean all the ways we die, great and small, during our lives as well. The death we suffer when we lose a job, when we experience homelessness, when we bully someone, when parents die, when a child dies, when we fail a math test, when the college we long to go to declines to accept us, when we witness injustice or cause injustice, when we suffer debilitating illness. All the deaths that wound and confound us. Christianity tells us that life, this life that we live, comes out of deep, deep suffering.
The second paradox is harder to accept: that weakness is strength; that in acts that seem like folly, there is wisdom; that in self-forgetting, the self is found.
These two paradoxes are not plucked out of the air. We learn them from Jesus about God. They are the way Jesus is, and so they are also the way that God is. Jesus embodied these paradoxes during his life and most profoundly during these three days that we begin to celebrate tonight.
Both paradoxes come from the fundamental paradox of God; that the Creator of the Universe loves us deeply, wants to be with us with all God’s heart, and the WAY God does this is by self-emptying into creation. And because God is this way, and Jesus is this way, we are invited to respond by self-emptying ourselves into God and into one another in the same way. We have to hold two opposites in our hearts if we are going to follow Jesus:
- First, profound human suffering and tragedy,
- At the same time, the playful love of God.
A Play in Four Acts
Profound suffering; playful love. Can you hold those together? In tonight’s gospel, Jesus puts on a four-part play for his disciples that tries to demonstrate these paradoxes:
- Jesus gets up from the table and takes off his outer robe. This is Jesus leaving heaven and self-emptying, taking off the power of God.
- Then, he ties a towel around himself. This is Jesus incarnating as a human, and putting on the role of a servant; the lowest of the low. This is deeper self-emptying.
- Then he pours water into a basin and begins to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that is tied around him. This is Jesus dealing with human suffering on the one hand, the road-dirt that we pick up as we walk in the world, and on the other hand, doing it with the absolute tenderness of human touch. It is an act that acknowledges that we pick up the grime and suffering of the world. And then, if we deal with it the way God deals with it, we clean off the grime from one another with self-forgetting love and tenderness.
- After he washes their feet, he puts on his robe and returns to the table. He once again dons the power of God and goes back to heaven, leaving us transformed, cleansed and changed and taught how to love one another.
The play makes the point so well, that some of the disciples find it too disturbing to accept. Let’s consider two of them.
An Angry Man
First, Judas. The gospels suggest that Judas betrayed Jesus for the money. I’m not so sure, because in the end, Judas kills himself. I think he did that because Judas had a plan; a plan that didn’t work the way he thought it would.
I think Judas is an angry man; angry at the Romans, angry with the leaders of his nation for collaborating with the Romans, angry at the suffering of the people under a system of oppression that is not unlike many of the oppressions we are experiencing today. If you are angry at what is going on in the world today, you might have a little insight into Judas’ anger.
As Judas is having his feet washed by Jesus, I think he is incandescently angry at Jesus. Judas thinks to himself, “This is just weak, it’s folly, it’s self-defeating… what we really need is what you’re supposed to be doing, Jesus, as Israel’s Messiah, raising an Army to crush the Romans!” Judas already knows what he will do. He will create a crisis by helping the authorities to arrest Jesus. He knows some of the disciples have swords. When the arrest comes, the swords will start swinging, and the revolution will be underway. Jesus will have no choice but to lead it then, and Judas will join him as one of Jesus’ military commanders. That’s his plan… that’s what he thinks will happen.
I’m sure Judas loves Jesus deeply, and, he is angry at Jesus. Judas cannot hold the paradox of Jesus in his mind, and his heart has been taken over by other concerns that he cannot release. Judas thinks that the way of the world, dominating military power, is the way out of the world’s suffering. He thinks that Jesus is a weak leader who is over his head. Jesus needs a forceful nudge by someone who understands the truth of the world; someone like Judas, to fulfill the destiny of his people to rule the world. When Judas doesn’t get that, it is more than Judas can bear.
Then, there’s Peter
Peter is embarrassed for Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah, God’s anointed one, and washing feet is not what Messiahs do; it is what servants do. Now, Peter is a poor fisherman. I’m sure he washed his own feet because he couldn’t afford servants. But along the way with Jesus, the disciples ate with wealthy people, and what they experienced was servants washing their feet, an act of hospitality that the rich could afford. It was probably deeply embarrassing for Peter to have someone serve him in this way. So, to watch Jesus take on the servant’s role is mortifying to Peter.
Peter practically orders Jesus: “You will NEVER wash my feet!” Then he turns it around so that Jesus gets to be the Messiah he thinks Jesus is supposed to be… “wash all of me… let ME be the servant who is cleansed by his Messiah”.
“No,” Jesus insists, “I have to be the lowest servant who invites you to receive this service. And if this seems too debased for you, you have no idea how utterly debased I’m going to be in 24 hours. If you can’t receive the kindness of a foot washing, how will you accept the self-emptying salvation that I am offering to all of humanity?”
So there it is, a small play about the paradox of God’s self-emptying love.
Self-forgetting
There are so many parallels between the world of the Roman Emperor and the world of today. They are not so very different. How are you responding to it? Are you angry like Judas? Are you embarrassed like Peter? Are you just confused and trying to understand, like most of the rest of the disciples?
Can you accept the way that Jesus responded? Can you wash the grime off your neighbor? Can you receive a washing from your neighbor? Can you do it with tenderness and love? Can you hold in your heart both the profound suffering of your neighbor and the playful love of God?
I invite you to try to act that out tonight, to respond to the suffering of today’s world, by washing your neighbor’s feet and letting them wash yours. I know this seems hard. But there is something that might happen to you if you can do it. You might find that, in the middle of it, you forget yourself. You just focus on the person you are washing, and the one who is washing you… the warmth of the water… the feel of human skin on your own… the gentleness of their touch… the heft of the towel in your hands as you dry them off. It’s the self-forgetting that is the point, I think. You just might find that your heart is more capable of holding paradox than you think.
¹ John 13:1–17, 31b-35 (NRSV)
Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.
He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”
After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord — and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
² Some themes for this sermon are derived from Ross, M. (1987). The Fountain & the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. Paulist Press.
Refresh the Soul writer writes about a few favorite affirmations, among which are several about getting past the ego so that the real parts can shine through. We’re not so very far apart, I’m thinking…
The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.
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