March 29, 2018 Chapter 32A A Table. A Basin. Some Food. Some Friends. (Holy Thursday)
A few years ago I heard Sr. Barbar Fiand, SNDdeN speak about the Feast of the Foot Washers. The main point of her talk was that she believes that we have too easily separated the Eucharist that Jesus instituted on Holy Thursday from the washing of the feet that he did that same night. "Why," she asks, "Do we celebrate one each week and the other only once a year?" She then asks if it is really possible to separate one from the other?
I know her answer is that we cannot separate them. They are the same event. This bread is his body and so are we. We are called to be Eucharist through service to one another, by washing each other's feet.
That is precisely why I love inviting the entire congregation to have their feet washed and to wash another's feet. It is Jesus command just as much as the Eucharist is his command. When he says, "do THIS in memory of me." I believe the "this" is both the Eucharist and the washing of the feet.
May you do both today and every today to come!
This is a wonderful chapter. My favorite line was "And in this context he asks us to remember him-not primarily for his great miracles, notbprimarily for his brilliant teaching but primarily, essentially, for this: that he gives himself like food for us, and for the whole world." This is the heart of who Jesus was. Not just for me, not just for us but for the whole world!
ReplyDeleteThe perspective of being placed in that moment where he is talking about the bread and the wine made me think about what had to happen before that.
ReplyDeleteThose words must have been a little "out there." He then proceeds to wash feet..absolutely breaking the mold that a "leader" shouldn't be doing those things.
I then jumped to the present; where most of the "leaders" I have experienced are allegedly Christians but seem to have forgotten the service part.
There really is a big gap between knowing and doing something.