04/17/2025
Friends, in today’s Gospel (John 13:1–15), Jesus gathers with his chosen Twelve at the climax of his life and does something so strange that we still wonder at it two thousand years later: he takes off his outer garment, puts a towel around his waist, and begins to wash his disciples’ feet.
The nineteenth-century philosopher Hegel said that all human society, to varying degrees, is characterized by the master-slave dynamic. Long before Hegel, the great St. Augustine noticed what he called the “libido dominandi,” the “lust to dominate,” as the mark of a dysfunctional society. Long before Augustine, the authors of the Old Testament were also interested in this problem, because the central story of the Scriptures is that of slavery and liberation from slavery—the Passover event.
But we see now in John’s Gospel how the distinctive mark of Jesus’ kingdom is precisely the overturning of the master-slave dynamic. Jesus bends down to do the work that was so lowly and frankly gross that only the lowest of the slaves were expected to do it, and he says, “As I have done for you, you should also do.” And what does he do later at the same supper? He gives himself away entirely in the Eucharist: “This is my body, which will be given for you.”
It is into this new dynamic that we are invited by Jesus: the washing of the feet, the giving away of body and blood.
