17 April 2025 - Maundy Thursday
Ex 12:1...14; 1 Cor 11:23-26; Jn 13:1-15
Homily
The Old Testament book of Deuteronomy ends with the story of the death of Moses, just before the people of Israel entered the promised land, which Moses himself did not enter. Before he died, Moses recited a long hymn of thanksgiving and pronounced a long blessing over the twelve tribes of Israel. Before that, he wrote the entire text of the Law, which was to be deposited next to the Lord's Ark of the Covenant, which was to accompany the people to the Promised Land. And the account in Deuteronomy says that Moses wrote these articles of the Law ‘to the end’.
Given that the account of Jesus' last meal with his disciples is clearly inspired on several points by this account of Moses' last moments, we can certainly draw a parallel between this text, which says that Moses wrote the articles of the Law ‘to the end’, and the first sentence of the text from Saint John that we have just heard: ‘Knowing that the hour had come for him to pass from this world to his Father, Jesus, having loved his own... loved them to the end’. This love, then, will be the new Scripture, the new Law, which Jesus will substitute for the old.
We know how Saint John, who is a great mystic, likes to emphasize the apparently opposite but complementary aspects of the same realities. For him, the world is both the world that God loves and to which he has sent His Son, and the world that has rejected His Son. He tells His disciples that they must be in the world and at the service of the world, but not of the world. John's Gospel begins with the statement that the Word became flesh, that he came to His own and that His own did not receive Him. The same Gospel ends with the statement that Jesus, when He passed from this world to His Father, having loved His own who were in the world, loved them to the end. His own whom He loves to the end are precisely those who have not received Him, just as much as those who have received Him. This is symbolised by the fact that, among the privileged disciples with whom He celebrates this farewell meal, there are not only the eleven who are - or at least would like to be - faithful to Him, but also the one who will betray Him. It is to all of them that Jesus washes the feet and all of them that he welcomes to His table.
Here we have the revelation of the most profoundly new and disturbing aspect of Christian love. It is a love that extends - that must extend - even to enemies; otherwise it is not Christian and not true.
In our liturgical celebrations, as in our lives, we tend to give great importance to symbolic gestures, sometimes even trying to discover or invent new symbols when the traditional ones no longer speak. But Jesus in the Gospel never makes symbolic gestures. Instead, He constantly makes real, concrete gestures with immense symbolic power. Jesus' death was not a ritual sacrifice; He was simply murdered. The Last Supper was not a ritual gesture. It was a real farewell meal. The washing of the feet was not a symbol for Jesus. In the Palestine of Jesus' time, washing your feet or having them washed by a servant before approaching the banquet table was a concrete gesture that was necessary when you had just stepped in the dust or mud.
For Jesus, there are no classes or categories in the community of His disciples. There is simply a variety of services. Moreover, it is not said in what order Jesus washes the feet of His disciples. Moreover, Peter does not seem to be the first to whom He washes them, since the text says: ‘When He came to Peter...’. When He, Jesus, who is performing the service of Master, takes off His cloak, girds Himself with an apron and bends down before the feet of His disciples to wash them; and when He says to them ‘you also, do likewise’, He is teaching them that whoever performs a service towards his brothers, must be prepared to put his hands and even his nose in the dust and mud of everyday life in which we all walk. The superiority is not in the title or the function, but in the quality of the service. In this Gospel, Jesus calls us to put ourselves at the service of all our brothers and sisters, in other words all human beings.
Armand Veilleux