Jesus Washes The Feet Of His Disciples – A Lesson In Humility
St Augustine had a profound sense of humility. The three essentials of any spiritual life, he once said, are humility and humility and humility. Predictably he is moved as Jesus washes the feet of the disciples. This is a clear lesson in humility for us all. “It is He into whose hands the Father had given all things, who now washes the disciples’ feet: and it was precisely while knowing that ‘He had come from God, and was going to God,’ that He performed this task of a servant – a servant to human beings.”
The astounding thing, is that Jesus was genuinely humble; he wasn’t just going through the motions. His washing their feet was in keeping with his whole life. According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke He had queued up with sinners for John’s baptism of repentance.
Theologian Romano Guardini says that “the attitude of our littleness bowing down in front of the great is not yet an attitude of humility. It is simply, an attitude to truth. But when The Great bows down before our littleness that is true humility”. This is why Jesus Christ is really humble. Before this humble Christ our usual patterns shatter. Jesus Christ turns human values over while inviting us to follow him to build a better and different world based on service.
I cannot Emphasize this more so let me put it again. In Jesus’ time, washing feet was usually the menial task of a household slave. It was a lowly, extremely humble form of service to wash someone’s feet. No wonder, then, that Peter was scandalized that his master willingly stooped to perform such a task!
The whole Triduum is like that: unfathomable. As poor, limited humans, we are incapable of grasping the magnitude of what God was doing, of what God is still doing for us today, here and now. His gift of the ordained priesthood, the unimaginable gift of the Eucharist, His excruciating suffering and shameful manner of execution, and then, incredibly, His victorious resurrection – all of it is so far beyond us, it will take more than we have in this life to fully appreciate it all, to “get it.”
But, like Peter, we don’t have to understand it all, we just have to accept it. Like Peter, we will understand it later. All of it! We will understand the lesson in humility Jesus was trying to teach his disciples then, and us now in the washing of the feet.
