This week’s Church Times had an article in which the writer complained that the Church in our own day concentrates too much on worship and so has too vague an idea of the jobs the Church is supposed to be doing. The writer listed these jobs: the Church is to make disciples of all nations; to preach the Gospel; to call people to repentance; to continue Jesus’ work of teaching, feeding and healing. And so on.
Now this is quite true as far as it goes. The Church should indeed be doing these things. But it worries me that there is so much focus on doing things in the Church today. The emphasis is all on human activity. It is as though we think the Church exists simply as an agency to promote moral improvement, or as a branch of social services. Current talk about the “Big Society” will only encourage this trend.
Today’s Gospel reading tells us something far deeper than this. The Church, the community of Christ’s disciples, is not first of all about doing anything. It is, rather, about being. And about being in love. Everything that the Church does flows from that.
John’s Gospel begins with the magnificent Prologue we read on Christmas day, “In the beginning was the Word”. That is an announcement of the supreme revelation of God in Jesus. The Word is God’s creative principle bringing everything into being, and the Word has become flesh as Jesus and lived among us. God has come to us in Jesus to make himself known.
That revelation, great as it is, is not complete in John Chapter 1. It continues to unfold through John’s Gospel, adding more detail and more depth. How does God make himself known? What does it mean to say that God is in Jesus? Tonight, in the intimacy of the upper room, Jesus with his disciples enters upon the last stage of that revelation, the revelation of Divine love. What has brought God into the world is not power but love. Jesus has come from the Father to share the Father’s love with humankind.
So Jesus, the eternal Word made flesh, takes off his robe and puts on a towel to wash his disciples’ feet. He is taking the role of a slave, the most menial servant. This is God “emptying himself” as St Paul says in Philippians. This is how God wants to be known. This is how God’s love manifests itself.
The washing of feet has been called by some of the ancient Fathers “the Sacrament of Christ”. Not that it is a particular sacrament of the Church, but rather that it is in the older meaning the sacramentum, the mystery of Christ, the sign which shows what the mission of Christ is all about. God has come into the world to serve, to share his love, and to make us clean or pure.
Jesus says to his disciples that they are “clean”. Jesus does not mean outward cleanliness, of which the foot washing is only a sign. Nor does he mean that the disciples can make themselves clean by some kind of moral self-improvement. No; to be clean or pure is to be in a spiritually purified state, free from sin. And this is God’s gift. Only God can make us clean. This is the meaning of the foot washing: we have to allow Jesus to do it for us. God humbles himself before us so that we can be humble enough to allow him to make us clean.
Our pride gets in the way of course, as it did with Peter. We don’t want God to be a slave, and we don’t want to submit ourselves to his slavery. We protest that we can manage by ourselves! And then what a sorry mess we make when we try. God has found that the only way to overcome our pride is to make himself as humble as possible before us.
Now we reach the heart of the mystery of the person and work of Christ. God makes us clean and pure so that we can share his life. And that life is love. Jesus gives us a new commandment, “Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
We miss the full meaning of this if we think that Jesus is simply telling us to imitate what he has done. Jesus has loved us with the love of God who empties himself and takes the place of a slave. We are to love one another with that same love. We cannot imitate God from our own resources. Rather, we are to love one another with the love with which God loves us.
We can only do this by finding our true selves, our true identity, in God. Our being is God’s gift, not something we construct for ourselves. Our love is God’s gift too, God’s own love in which we find ourselves.
Before Jesus gives his command to follow his example and to love as he loves, he first explains the foot washing to Peter: “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” In other words, you have no part in me. You will not find yourself in me, unless I make you clean.
Jesus cleanses us from sin so that we can enter into the mystery of God revealed in him. When we discover ourselves in God’s love, then we are able to love as God does. We love with the love in which God has found us. It is by living in Christ, living the new life that he gives, that we come to ourselves in love. It is only then that Jesus says to the disciples, and to us, do as I have shown you.
At the Last Supper Jesus established his church in the essential form that it will have until the end of time. Every particular church community celebrating the Eucharist stands in succession from that first community of the Apostles to whom the Lord gave his command to do this in memory of him. The Apostles’ teaching and fellowship has continued in every generation in the work of mission and evangelism. Christians down the ages have sought out and served those in need.
But none of this comes from ourselves. It all flows from the love of God made known to us in Jesus. It is Jesus himself who continues his work in his Church. Jesus has purified us from sin so that we can find ourselves in the life and love he shares with the Father. It is that love, communicated to us by the Holy Spirit, which works itself out in our lives and in the life of the Church in the world. It is by being in God’s love that we are able to do God’s work in the world.
The first priority for the Church in this age as in any other is not to be worried about what we should do. Our priority is to remain abiding in Jesus, to continually discover him in us and ourselves in him. As St Paul says in Galatians, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me”. The work of the Church is not the effort of a human group, but something that rises from the secret and inexhaustible depths of divine life which is God’s gift to us, the love in which God has found us, and in which we find our true selves.
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