Trusting God, Washing Feet
By Lisa Clark-Diller
The Significance of Communion
This article is adapted from a presentation at The One Project in Newcastle, 2013—Editors
Hate is an ugly word. I have hated someone. Not a big epic hatred, but one of those ugly, small, mundane, ordinary hates. It could be a juicy story. We could have a little moment here where I tell you all about it. And I am sure that you would be just as outraged as I am, and be advocating for me. Either that or realize how small and petty I am. But let’s not get distracted with the details here. There are no innocent people in that story, even though I really felt very justified in my loathing. It was the kind of hatred and feeling where it made my skin crawl to be in the same room with the person — where other people saying nice things about them made me angry and frustrated, and even want to cry. My hatred took up a lot of emotional space occupying my thoughts and conversation way beyond anything it deserved. And most corrosively, I held on to that hatred in a way that I knew prevented me from entering the kingdom of God. On my knees before God, I would actually say, “I know I can't enter into the New Earth with this hatred, and I don't care. I don't want to change. “
Recently in the news, there was a happier story about hate changing to forgiveness. You may know the story of reconciliation I'm talking about. In June, the British government formally apologized to the Kikuyu people of Kenya for the torture and other horrific abuses they received at the hands of the colonial government in the 1950s. Almost 200 elderly Kikuyu people traveled to sit before the British High Commissioner in Nairobi to receive the apology. On behalf of the British government, this High Commissioner expresses sincere regret for what had taken place, announces payments of a little over 2,000 pounds to about 5 ,000 claimants, and urged that the process of healing begin for both nations.
The news coverage featured interviews with the elderly people who had received this abuse. There was one individual that caught my attention. Wemutwe Nagao, who was 82, had been tortured and mutilated so badly that he couldn't have children and had not been able to live any kind of normal life. He had been waiting for justice for 60 years. The emotions he expressed were similar to the other survivors that were interviewed. The news journalist asked, “How do you feel about this? Are you happy now that you have justice? Do you feel like these people have fulfilled their obligations to you because of this?” He said, “In my culture, if somebody apologizes to you — if they say they're sorry, you have to accept it.”
He made it very clear that the apology was worth way more than the paltry little sum of money that he'd received. That apology was valuable to him. Other countries, of course, have done this. The Australian National Sorry Day in 2008 was one of the most recent global examples of this kind of national collective attempt to come to grips with past injustice. In the US, I'm embarrassed to say, it took us until the 1990s to collectively apologize for legalized race -based slavery. Think about these situations for a moment. Who do you think has the harder part? The people being apologized to, or the people doing the apologizing? They're both really difficult situations to be in.
There are historical circumstances that explain why things happened. In the Kenyan case, neither the British Prime Minister nor the High Commissioner in Nairobi had participated in any of the atrocities. They weren't personally present. So these situations, my own little story, these bigger stories, kind of beg the question, how can reconciliation happen when there's been pain and hurt? How do people begin again to work to build the kingdom together?
The passages in John 12 and 13 are one way that Jesus models how this might happen. Look at what Jesus is doing here. In John 12, he claims that he reveals God. And He says that He reveals God's love by showing God's love. He reveals God himself by showing his love for the humans God created. But what’s even more shocking is that Jesus himself actually claims to be God. That’s a big claim! Not just that he's revealing God's love, but that he is God. It's his security in that claim that enables him to go on to do the rest of what he does there, that security in being God.
Jesus goes on to say, I'm gonna show my love for my disciples through what I'm doing, and he did so tangibly and physically by washing the feet of his disciples showing the full extent of his love. Why did he do that? There are theologically and historically rooted ideas for why he did that, but the text says he did it out of a full awareness of his power. Knowing who he was, he washes the feet of his disciples.
One thing I know is Jesus not only did what a servant would have done, but specifically what female servants did, if you had them. Otherwise it would be the wife, daughter, or mother of the house that would have done it. This was women's work. The Gospel of John is a full of expressions of Jesus acting as servant, as mother, as woman. His willingness to identify with the proletariat of his day. But to tell his male disciples to act as women in washing feet was powerful and upsetting. And you can see how outraged and confused they were by what was happening here.
Jesus showed the full extent of his love by acting in a way that was counterculture, radical, and upsetting, in order to serve and fully identify with those at the bottom of the power system. He knew that asking his disciples to do this would mean making them think about weaker people differently. The next thing Jesus does that's really interesting is he says, I do what I do without judgment. When Jesus modeled unity and reconciliation, he turned all the concerns about who is right and who is wrong upside down. His disciples had spent a lot of the previous few days arguing about who's more important, wracked by conflict and jealousy. Jesus hadn't done anything wrong. He needed to apologize for, but he did what he did because he wanted to move the ego -boosting conversation about position and policy-making out of the way.
It's hard to talk about things like that when you're busy washing feet. Look at the statements that Jesus is making about what he's doing. He says, I'm not judging the world. There is judgment, but Jesus distances himself from that in this moment. In these passages it’s interesting that He says, I trust my Father and you should do the same. This is about a revelation of love, bringing together God and humanity. His concern was with the serving and the saving, not the judgment or hell. He let that take care of itself.
I want to be really clear about something here, I am not saying that people are to submit to abusers and participate in the empowerment of evil. But the peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation that we're called to as God's children is more often challenged by our own hurt feelings and self-justification than it is by true victimization. I believe and I hope that communion and service-based peacemaking will clear the way for resistance to evil in all of its forms.
Jesus ends this act here by asking us to do as he did. We're his representatives in this world and we are to act as he did in the world. The meal and the deeds described in John 13 have remained the most sacred acts that Christians can participate in. In our tradition, we call this communion. It's how historically and into the present, the church has enacted its commitment to reconciliation, to being followers of Jesus, to participating in and acknowledging the incarnation. It was weird then and it's weird now. It requires that we act out in our bodies our ideas about God's love, about God becoming flesh, about service and identification with the poor and downtrodden. And we do it in such an odd and radical way that no one can mistake what we are doing for anything other than what we have declared it to symbolize. You don't accidentally do something like communion.
I want to be really clear that there is no such thing as a mere symbol. When you do something symbolically, you help make it happen. You make it real. There are no mere symbols. And participating in communion requires other people. Other people who might be messed up probably as you are. They might not totally believe the right way or live the right way. So in order to be part of this most identifying act within the Christian faith, we have to suspend a little bit of judgment about other people around us. And if we are to practice the foot washing part of communion, we see that we are to take the part both of the person forgiving and being forgiven.
This is fascinating because I kind of like to take the part of Jesus. I want to be magnanimous, I will serve you. I'm the one that's extending myself, right? But we have to play both parts. We're the ones that need to be forgiven as much as the ones that need to do the forgiving. It's not our job to tell the difference, so we do both. Part of what has made it so sad that the church has split into so many different denominations and competing factions over the centuries since Jesus came is that this has meant that we don't take communion together.
Historically up until about the 19th century, the reason the church is split is because they didn't want to take communion together. You had to have a different church because you couldn't be in communion with these other people because this is what Christians gathered to do. This act that was to unify us became the divider. A way of showing who's in and who's not. In some traditions it's something to aspire to. It reveals who is a fully fledged member, or who is totally mature in the faith. We have even split our church by gender for communion.
The early church never did this. The Greeks and the Romans criticized the early church because men and women worshipped and had communion together. They said they were sexually immoral and told all kinds of interesting stories about them. The church adopted this sexualization of foot washing, forgetting that Jesus crossed class and gender lines to do something a woman would have done and scandalized his disciples. Instead, we need to embrace the acts of communion as emblematic of how God wants us to be together. Participating in these acts actually creates the space where we can love and bond with each other. We can practice being the body of Christ together. What if communion became a time of radical boundary crossing for service to each other?
What if we were able to focus on that to the extent that we embraced the humility and the weirdness and physicality in order to say that service and love and giving and receiving of forgiveness is central to following Jesus? Communion could become the ordinary, regular way that we show up for worship and ministry, crossing boundaries to bond with those that we have challenges with, serving each other and enacting the truth that we are all forgiven and we need to forgive. We do this as part of our acts of worship, really the heart of our worship.
Then we must go beyond mere symbols to live out what we say and do in worship in our daily lives. What would it mean for us to wash the feet of the world? What would happen just stepped in to serve in ways that acted as if this is our natural role as Jesus did. We start with knowing who we are and who our fellow humans are before God. Jesus told the disciples they're already clean. They're saved. The foot washing wasn't about saving them, it was something else. It was the icing on the cake. It was giving them tangible physical reminders of who they were before God and who they were to be to each other. This wasn't about salvation. It was about receiving the blessing of being the beloved of God.
Like Jesus, we trust the Father to take care of the details, the judgment. This leads to reconciliation between and among us as we serve the world. We’re not trying to do this to save someone so we can check it off the list. We’re doing this because we both love and are loved. We want to show love to others. We want to identify with all God's children, especially the least of these, even if and when it isn't our fault that they are the least of these.
It's fascinating that Jesus asserts that he did this when the disciples didn't understand what he was doing. We participate in acts of identification, of service, even of worship, even before we understand how or why those acts are important. And perhaps we go through several levels of understanding in our spiritual walk. We might serve people and be served without knowing what's being done. And this isn't like an intellectual or symbolic exercise alone. I think Jesus asked his disciples to practice in their worship and this way of serving each other because he didn't want it to be a verbal metaphor, the way servant leadership can so often be. Jesus didn't just talk about being a servant of all, he walked across the street to the leprosarium. We become the body of Christ in the world through service, with and for each other. We wash the feet of the world, but only after we've practiced doing it with each other. Don't run away to the exotic land of serving the poor and working for justice together without also committing to regularly worshiping with the body of Christ, practicing and enacting forgiveness with each other in the Christian church.
Jesus asked us to meet together to enact our commitment to the incarnation because he knew we needed to be in each other's presence. We need to bump up against each other. We need to show up regularly in order to practice loving. You don't love at a distance. You love in the skin you're in. How can our worship and communion together become enactments of our faith? How can the practice of trusting God lead to serving each other and in the world in ways that make for peace?
A few years ago, a friend told me about someone she was having problems with. She couldn't stand being around them. She really, really didn't like this person. The advice she gave me about how she handled that situation really reflects good kingdom values. She said she would practice standing near this person when she was in a room with them. She wouldn’t talk to them necessarily, but just practice being near them. She said that it made it better. She saw them more as another human being and not just the annoying other. They became more real to her.
For my sordid little hatred, I had to be willing to put myself in a position where God could change me. This meant not running away from the other person. I said, well, I don't want to want to change, but if you change me, fine, but I’m not doing anything to help make it happen!” I ended up spending the better part of a summer in fairly close proximity with this person, doing mundane tasks like work and life together. And I don't know when or how it happened, but at the end of the summer, I didn't hate that person. Still not my best friend. But they're an ordinary human being, just like me. It remains one of the biggest miracles of my life. That imperceptible shift away from toxic hate to mutual living, mutual service. The seeing of the other as an ordinary human being.
This transformation of my own heart without me doing anything overt happened just by letting God do his thing while I was doing my thing. It's the tangible work of God in me — something I can bear witness to. And in the years since this has happened, I have also had to realize that like the Jew in the story of the good Samaritan, I'm on the receiving end of service a lot of times. I've had my feet and wounds washed by people I think are profoundly wrong. Am I ready to receive that service?
What kind of peace and reconciliation could happen when I receive the help of someone who's sexist or racist, who I think is dead wrong about how we should organize our church? Can I accept the love and service of those whose ideas and beliefs I find laughable or abhorrent? This is what Jesus is asking of me and of us. It can start in our worship and communion together, trusting God, washing feet, building the peaceable kingdom.
Hate is an ugly word. I have hated someone. Not a big epic hatred, but one of those ugly, small, mundane, ordinary hates. It could be a juicy story. We could have a little moment here where I tell you all about it. And I am sure that you would be just as outraged as I am, and be advocating for me. Either that or realize how small and petty I am. But let’s not get distracted with the details here. There are no innocent people in that story, even though I really felt very justified in my loathing. It was the kind of hatred and feeling where it made my skin crawl to be in the same room with the person — where other people saying nice things about them made me angry and frustrated, and even want to cry. My hatred took up a lot of emotional space occupying my thoughts and conversation way beyond anything it deserved. And most corrosively, I held on to that hatred in a way that I knew prevented me from entering the kingdom of God. On my knees before God, I would actually say, “I know I can't enter into the New Earth with this hatred, and I don't care. I don't want to change. “
Recently in the news, there was a happier story about hate changing to forgiveness. You may know the story of reconciliation I'm talking about. In June, the British government formally apologized to the Kikuyu people of Kenya for the torture and other horrific abuses they received at the hands of the colonial government in the 1950s. Almost 200 elderly Kikuyu people traveled to sit before the British High Commissioner in Nairobi to receive the apology. On behalf of the British government, this High Commissioner expresses sincere regret for what had taken place, announces payments of a little over 2,000 pounds to about 5 ,000 claimants, and urged that the process of healing begin for both nations.
The news coverage featured interviews with the elderly people who had received this abuse. There was one individual that caught my attention. Wemutwe Nagao, who was 82, had been tortured and mutilated so badly that he couldn't have children and had not been able to live any kind of normal life. He had been waiting for justice for 60 years. The emotions he expressed were similar to the other survivors that were interviewed. The news journalist asked, “How do you feel about this? Are you happy now that you have justice? Do you feel like these people have fulfilled their obligations to you because of this?” He said, “In my culture, if somebody apologizes to you — if they say they're sorry, you have to accept it.”
He made it very clear that the apology was worth way more than the paltry little sum of money that he'd received. That apology was valuable to him. Other countries, of course, have done this. The Australian National Sorry Day in 2008 was one of the most recent global examples of this kind of national collective attempt to come to grips with past injustice. In the US, I'm embarrassed to say, it took us until the 1990s to collectively apologize for legalized race -based slavery. Think about these situations for a moment. Who do you think has the harder part? The people being apologized to, or the people doing the apologizing? They're both really difficult situations to be in.
There are historical circumstances that explain why things happened. In the Kenyan case, neither the British Prime Minister nor the High Commissioner in Nairobi had participated in any of the atrocities. They weren't personally present. So these situations, my own little story, these bigger stories, kind of beg the question, how can reconciliation happen when there's been pain and hurt? How do people begin again to work to build the kingdom together?
The passages in John 12 and 13 are one way that Jesus models how this might happen. Look at what Jesus is doing here. In John 12, he claims that he reveals God. And He says that He reveals God's love by showing God's love. He reveals God himself by showing his love for the humans God created. But what’s even more shocking is that Jesus himself actually claims to be God. That’s a big claim! Not just that he's revealing God's love, but that he is God. It's his security in that claim that enables him to go on to do the rest of what he does there, that security in being God.
Jesus goes on to say, I'm gonna show my love for my disciples through what I'm doing, and he did so tangibly and physically by washing the feet of his disciples showing the full extent of his love. Why did he do that? There are theologically and historically rooted ideas for why he did that, but the text says he did it out of a full awareness of his power. Knowing who he was, he washes the feet of his disciples.
One thing I know is Jesus not only did what a servant would have done, but specifically what female servants did, if you had them. Otherwise it would be the wife, daughter, or mother of the house that would have done it. This was women's work. The Gospel of John is a full of expressions of Jesus acting as servant, as mother, as woman. His willingness to identify with the proletariat of his day. But to tell his male disciples to act as women in washing feet was powerful and upsetting. And you can see how outraged and confused they were by what was happening here.
Jesus showed the full extent of his love by acting in a way that was counterculture, radical, and upsetting, in order to serve and fully identify with those at the bottom of the power system. He knew that asking his disciples to do this would mean making them think about weaker people differently. The next thing Jesus does that's really interesting is he says, I do what I do without judgment. When Jesus modeled unity and reconciliation, he turned all the concerns about who is right and who is wrong upside down. His disciples had spent a lot of the previous few days arguing about who's more important, wracked by conflict and jealousy. Jesus hadn't done anything wrong. He needed to apologize for, but he did what he did because he wanted to move the ego -boosting conversation about position and policy-making out of the way.
It's hard to talk about things like that when you're busy washing feet. Look at the statements that Jesus is making about what he's doing. He says, I'm not judging the world. There is judgment, but Jesus distances himself from that in this moment. In these passages it’s interesting that He says, I trust my Father and you should do the same. This is about a revelation of love, bringing together God and humanity. His concern was with the serving and the saving, not the judgment or hell. He let that take care of itself.
I want to be really clear about something here, I am not saying that people are to submit to abusers and participate in the empowerment of evil. But the peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation that we're called to as God's children is more often challenged by our own hurt feelings and self-justification than it is by true victimization. I believe and I hope that communion and service-based peacemaking will clear the way for resistance to evil in all of its forms.
Jesus ends this act here by asking us to do as he did. We're his representatives in this world and we are to act as he did in the world. The meal and the deeds described in John 13 have remained the most sacred acts that Christians can participate in. In our tradition, we call this communion. It's how historically and into the present, the church has enacted its commitment to reconciliation, to being followers of Jesus, to participating in and acknowledging the incarnation. It was weird then and it's weird now. It requires that we act out in our bodies our ideas about God's love, about God becoming flesh, about service and identification with the poor and downtrodden. And we do it in such an odd and radical way that no one can mistake what we are doing for anything other than what we have declared it to symbolize. You don't accidentally do something like communion.
I want to be really clear that there is no such thing as a mere symbol. When you do something symbolically, you help make it happen. You make it real. There are no mere symbols. And participating in communion requires other people. Other people who might be messed up probably as you are. They might not totally believe the right way or live the right way. So in order to be part of this most identifying act within the Christian faith, we have to suspend a little bit of judgment about other people around us. And if we are to practice the foot washing part of communion, we see that we are to take the part both of the person forgiving and being forgiven.
This is fascinating because I kind of like to take the part of Jesus. I want to be magnanimous, I will serve you. I'm the one that's extending myself, right? But we have to play both parts. We're the ones that need to be forgiven as much as the ones that need to do the forgiving. It's not our job to tell the difference, so we do both. Part of what has made it so sad that the church has split into so many different denominations and competing factions over the centuries since Jesus came is that this has meant that we don't take communion together.
Historically up until about the 19th century, the reason the church is split is because they didn't want to take communion together. You had to have a different church because you couldn't be in communion with these other people because this is what Christians gathered to do. This act that was to unify us became the divider. A way of showing who's in and who's not. In some traditions it's something to aspire to. It reveals who is a fully fledged member, or who is totally mature in the faith. We have even split our church by gender for communion.
The early church never did this. The Greeks and the Romans criticized the early church because men and women worshipped and had communion together. They said they were sexually immoral and told all kinds of interesting stories about them. The church adopted this sexualization of foot washing, forgetting that Jesus crossed class and gender lines to do something a woman would have done and scandalized his disciples. Instead, we need to embrace the acts of communion as emblematic of how God wants us to be together. Participating in these acts actually creates the space where we can love and bond with each other. We can practice being the body of Christ together. What if communion became a time of radical boundary crossing for service to each other?
What if we were able to focus on that to the extent that we embraced the humility and the weirdness and physicality in order to say that service and love and giving and receiving of forgiveness is central to following Jesus? Communion could become the ordinary, regular way that we show up for worship and ministry, crossing boundaries to bond with those that we have challenges with, serving each other and enacting the truth that we are all forgiven and we need to forgive. We do this as part of our acts of worship, really the heart of our worship.
Then we must go beyond mere symbols to live out what we say and do in worship in our daily lives. What would it mean for us to wash the feet of the world? What would happen just stepped in to serve in ways that acted as if this is our natural role as Jesus did. We start with knowing who we are and who our fellow humans are before God. Jesus told the disciples they're already clean. They're saved. The foot washing wasn't about saving them, it was something else. It was the icing on the cake. It was giving them tangible physical reminders of who they were before God and who they were to be to each other. This wasn't about salvation. It was about receiving the blessing of being the beloved of God.
Like Jesus, we trust the Father to take care of the details, the judgment. This leads to reconciliation between and among us as we serve the world. We’re not trying to do this to save someone so we can check it off the list. We’re doing this because we both love and are loved. We want to show love to others. We want to identify with all God's children, especially the least of these, even if and when it isn't our fault that they are the least of these.
It's fascinating that Jesus asserts that he did this when the disciples didn't understand what he was doing. We participate in acts of identification, of service, even of worship, even before we understand how or why those acts are important. And perhaps we go through several levels of understanding in our spiritual walk. We might serve people and be served without knowing what's being done. And this isn't like an intellectual or symbolic exercise alone. I think Jesus asked his disciples to practice in their worship and this way of serving each other because he didn't want it to be a verbal metaphor, the way servant leadership can so often be. Jesus didn't just talk about being a servant of all, he walked across the street to the leprosarium. We become the body of Christ in the world through service, with and for each other. We wash the feet of the world, but only after we've practiced doing it with each other. Don't run away to the exotic land of serving the poor and working for justice together without also committing to regularly worshiping with the body of Christ, practicing and enacting forgiveness with each other in the Christian church.
Jesus asked us to meet together to enact our commitment to the incarnation because he knew we needed to be in each other's presence. We need to bump up against each other. We need to show up regularly in order to practice loving. You don't love at a distance. You love in the skin you're in. How can our worship and communion together become enactments of our faith? How can the practice of trusting God lead to serving each other and in the world in ways that make for peace?
A few years ago, a friend told me about someone she was having problems with. She couldn't stand being around them. She really, really didn't like this person. The advice she gave me about how she handled that situation really reflects good kingdom values. She said she would practice standing near this person when she was in a room with them. She wouldn’t talk to them necessarily, but just practice being near them. She said that it made it better. She saw them more as another human being and not just the annoying other. They became more real to her.
For my sordid little hatred, I had to be willing to put myself in a position where God could change me. This meant not running away from the other person. I said, well, I don't want to want to change, but if you change me, fine, but I’m not doing anything to help make it happen!” I ended up spending the better part of a summer in fairly close proximity with this person, doing mundane tasks like work and life together. And I don't know when or how it happened, but at the end of the summer, I didn't hate that person. Still not my best friend. But they're an ordinary human being, just like me. It remains one of the biggest miracles of my life. That imperceptible shift away from toxic hate to mutual living, mutual service. The seeing of the other as an ordinary human being.
This transformation of my own heart without me doing anything overt happened just by letting God do his thing while I was doing my thing. It's the tangible work of God in me — something I can bear witness to. And in the years since this has happened, I have also had to realize that like the Jew in the story of the good Samaritan, I'm on the receiving end of service a lot of times. I've had my feet and wounds washed by people I think are profoundly wrong. Am I ready to receive that service?
What kind of peace and reconciliation could happen when I receive the help of someone who's sexist or racist, who I think is dead wrong about how we should organize our church? Can I accept the love and service of those whose ideas and beliefs I find laughable or abhorrent? This is what Jesus is asking of me and of us. It can start in our worship and communion together, trusting God, washing feet, building the peaceable kingdom.