Are you ready to challenge your notions of service and faith? That's exactly what we're going to do as we delve into the profound meaning behind a humble act - the washing of the feet. A tradition once considered menial and performed by the lowest individual in a household, Jesus transformed it into a powerful testament of humility and love. Walk with us as we explore Peter's initial refusal to have his feet washed, a reflection of our own battles with pride and scrupulosity. We'll also shed light on the concept of confessing sins and the role of intentionality in penance.
But there's more. This episode isn't just about washing feet - it's about the deep-seated connections between the Eucharist, service, and faith. We're going to uncover the importance of service in the context of the Eucharist, and the way Jesus drew attention to this connection in the Bread of Life discourse. Discover how the Last Supper served as a platform for Jesus to emphasize service, and how his self-reference as "I am" in the face of impending betrayal underlined the importance of service in the institution of the Eucharist. Saddle up for a journey that promises to reshape your perceptions of service, faith, and the Christian doctrine.
Are you ready to challenge your notions of service and faith? That's exactly what we're going to do as we delve into the profound meaning behind a humble act - the washing of the feet. A tradition once considered menial and performed by the lowest individual in a household, Jesus transformed it into a powerful testament of humility and love. Walk with us as we explore Peter's initial refusal to have his feet washed, a reflection of our own battles with pride and scrupulosity. We'll also shed light on the concept of confessing sins and the role of intentionality in penance.
But there's more. This episode isn't just about washing feet - it's about the deep-seated connections between the Eucharist, service, and faith. We're going to uncover the importance of service in the context of the Eucharist, and the way Jesus drew attention to this connection in the Bread of Life discourse. Discover how the Last Supper served as a platform for Jesus to emphasize service, and how his self-reference as "I am" in the face of impending betrayal underlined the importance of service in the institution of the Eucharist. Saddle up for a journey that promises to reshape your perceptions of service, faith, and the Christian doctrine.
Speaker 1:
Father Andrew, would you like to do the intro? Father Chris did it last time, so he did. Do you think you're prepared? Do you think you're ready? I can't remember what we're actually doing.
Speaker 2:
Hi, I'm Father Andrew Hamilton, and this is the Catholic Accent Podcast. I'm here with Jordan Whiteco, of course, and then our other gracious guest, Father Christopher Ujjil. So what are we talking about today, gentlemen?
Speaker 1:
Today we're going to be talking about the washing of the feet. The disciples were shocked that Jesus wanted to wash their feet.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely In Jesus' time. The roads were so filthy and there was no sewage system. Right and the sketchers didn't exist.
Speaker 1:
What did they wear Like?
Speaker 3:
moccasins or something oh, like little leather sandals and kind of like Father Chris's Birkenstocks if he bumps around the record Birkenstocks, that's true, those do have that look.
Speaker 1:
Jesus wished in the disciples they wished, they had Birkenstocks, so what would it have been to wash them back then?
Speaker 3:
The roads would have been filthy and dusty and really oftentimes they're walking through sewage and so when you would arrive at someone's home, the lowest person or the slave of the household would wash the guest's feet and because really it was such a menial job. And also we have to remember we've talked before about the laws of purity and cleanliness and doing Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Speaker 1:
It is. That's what I was taught.
Speaker 3:
It is. You should practice that a little more often.
Speaker 1:
Jordan.
Speaker 3:
But so then they would wash the feet. And here though, jesus turns that all upside down. So the disciples arrive at the upper room for the celebration of the Last Supper, and instead of the slave washing the disciples' feet, jesus himself takes off his outer garment, ties the towel around his waist, gets the basin and the pitcher and kneels down and begins to wash the disciples' feet himself.
Speaker 1:
So it was like him being humble. He's not above getting down and washing someone's Absolutely.
Speaker 2:
Which is a great microcosm of what Jesus is already doing, which is showing the love of God in action in the world. God not staying on the outside or the outskirts, but rather entering intimately into the world to be of service, to save, to be in the midst of us.
Speaker 1:
And turning everything upside down, all right. So my boy, peter, at first was hesitant to let Jesus wash his feet. But Jesus insists that if Peter wants the promise that Jesus offers his disciples, at which point he asks us to wash his whole body. So Peter was a little extra there.
Speaker 2:
Even before we get to that. I think Peter's hesitancy is seen actually earlier in Scripture as well, with John the Baptist who basically says I'm not even worthy to untie the sandals of the Lord and then baptize him. So there is this great kind of sense of Christ's holiness and like we don't equal up to that, and I think all of us feel that in a certain way, that like we're all broken and we need the Lord, and for him to come to us and to serve us we should be the ones being the servant. And so he flips everything upside down, as Father Chris had said before. But in that great humility he shows us how to lead, how to be humble ourselves.
Speaker 3:
And again we see Peter in his pride here too, Like Lord, yeah, I'm really filthy, so wash my feet, but if you're going to do it, do wash my head too in my hands. Because Peter couldn't allow himself, because he was seeing the Messiah as Jesus right, and he's finally getting to understand this and it didn't fit up with his idea of what the Messiah would look like, and so that's why you can see him like kind of pushing back almost in his own pride, and we fall into that too, so it's typical for Peter to put his foot in his mouth.
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:
Excuse the pun, exotic Peter as well too, I think he does something that we often do today, which is some of us might even struggle with scrupulosity, right, the small scruples of like. Well, we're never actually holy enough or good enough and do we really feel cleansed whenever we maybe go to the sacrament of penance of confession? Did I say everything perfectly and just right to get it.
Speaker 2:
Could I have thought of every single thing possible within that sacrament and told the priests and everything else. But the Lord doesn't want us there in this instability, uncertainty of always worrying about all of our sins. We have to move from worrying about sin to then worrying about love of God and love of neighbor, and so that's the progression of the Spirit, which is sins important to get rid of, obviously, and to cast away from ourselves, but that's healed in the love of neighbor and love of God.
Speaker 1:
So when you're confessing your sins, you know you're not expected. You're saying, you're not expected to remember every sin that you've made, just the fact of you want to repair.
Speaker 3:
No, I mean you have to confess your sins by kind and number, but oftentimes the scrupulous person if they would forget something. We would believe that if you forget something unintentionally, that sin that you intended to confess, of course, is forgiven in the sacrament. But if you purposely hide a sin or conceal a sin or talk around a sin, then you're not being honest with God.
Speaker 1:
Okay, yeah, that's what I was trying to get at is you're forgetting. You're not intentionally saying I'm not going to tell him that?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so like the scrupulous person might receive absolution, leave the confessional, get back in line, come back in. Father, I forgot to tell you. Well, it wasn't intentional forgetting.
Speaker 1:
Because I'll admit I did that the last time I went is I was like oh, wait, one more thing.
Speaker 2:
And you know, because I remembered it as I was like getting out of here.
Speaker 1:
All right, you're done.
Speaker 2:
You're still taking up all my time.
Speaker 3:
Jordan, Jordan, you can have all the time I have a dirty, dirty sinner you need Jesus to wash your feet, so how does that tie in?
Speaker 1:
then you were talking about confession.
Speaker 2:
Just Peter saying like you have to wash all these other parts of me, not just my feet maybe being scrupulous, Remember, Peter has seen the Lord be baptized himself. He's been brought into the great life of Christ and that's the beauty of our redemption, which is through our baptism we are washed clean of our sins and we take on the very life of Christ, and so we're changed in that way for the better. But we don't have to keep always going back to dwelling upon our past sins and everything else. And that's where Peter maybe would struggle is right, because he is always getting like quasi-rebuke sometimes, Like he says something good and then he makes a mistake, and then something good and then a mistake, and that seems to plague him. But the Lord is trying to bring him out of that.
Speaker 3:
And this whole scene plays into the whole typology of baptism. Because when Peter says to him, you'll never wash my feet, jesus responds unless I wash you, you have no inheritance with me. And that's what we believe about baptism. Unless we are baptized to receive that sacramental grace, the true life of God within us through the sacrament of baptism, and have our original sin washed away, we have no inheritance with God. We cannot enter the kingdom of God.
Speaker 1:
So what would your reaction have been if Jesus said he wanted to wash your feet, but also for you to go out and wash other feet? We'll get to you, father Chris, because you, I witnessed washing feet.
Speaker 2:
What about you, father Andrew, yeah, I probably wouldn't enjoy it with my like socks and loafers on Now.
Speaker 3:
I don't really like exposing my feet to the world.
Speaker 2:
I don't think I have very pretty feet now. So from all these years of soccer and everything else, so you haven't washed feet yet. I have not. I've assisted in washing feet as a deacon, but not as a priest.
Speaker 3:
Well, maybe share when we do it liturgically.
Speaker 2:
Sure. So washing of the feet happens at the mass of the Last Supper, the Feast of the Last Supper, the institution of the Eucharist, that's Thursday of Holy Week. And so you see, during the liturgy itself, during the mass, that the priest will kind of take off his chasable, the outer garment, and he'll just be down to his robe and then he'll go around and he'll wash the feet of normally 12 people throughout the church. And it's a sign then, of Jesus' own washing of the feet that we hear of here in the Gospel of John.
Speaker 1:
Now, we here know why 12 people, but why don't you also explain?
Speaker 2:
Yes, 12, of course. So a significant number of 12, which you can go back to the Old Testament 12 tribes of Israel that were scattered because of different powers that be, and disagreements and so forth. But Christ seeks to bring the unity of the nations as the Messiah, and so he chooses 12 men representative of those 12 tribes of Israel that all come back together and from there that's the way that he establishes the Magisterium, the bishops of the church that continue to keep us unified together, mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:
Now we had an event here at the diocese of Greensburg where we had maybe roughly 1,000 people come through. Now we asked Father Chris to be in a room to wash people's feet and I think at first he was like am I going to have to wash 1,000 people's feet?
Speaker 2:
over the course of— We'd be there for years. He was okay with 500 when it got up. We wouldn't need a lot of water.
Speaker 1:
So what was your reaction when we asked you to wash strangers' feet, like they weren't just your parishioners, they were just— oh no there were people from across the diocese and that was what our first know-him experiential evangelization event.
Speaker 3:
But I think the whole purpose of that event was to show the love of God but also that when we take on acts of charity towards others, a change happens, and so that washing is a sign of that change which happens both our own purification but also our passive receptivity into God's love for us, because when someone's washing your feet, there's really nothing you can do. They're washing and drawing it, and it's an awkward reality whether you're the washer or the recipient Right.
Speaker 1:
And— Like me at home, I'd be like all right, I know I'm getting my feet washed, I got to clean— Like I got to get everything off.
Speaker 3:
Oh and so many people said that. And then, towards the end of the day, we started picking random people who didn't know they were going to have their feet washed. But they had to humble themselves, right, and it ties back to Peter And—. But what's interesting is, even with the washing of the feet, in this scene of Scripture, jesus reminds us that one of you is not clean, the one who will betray me, which points right to Judas. So even though he could do these outward signs right, he washed Judas's feet too, knowing that he would betray him. He may be clean on the outside, but inside we knew that he was filled with malice and betrayal. So just because we have an outward cleanliness doesn't mean that inwardly, we're or pure.
Speaker 2:
One thing I remember too about the liturgy in which this is done on Holy Thursday. I remember my childhood pastor, father Brian Summers. He would go around and wash all the feet of the people, but at the end of washing each person's feet, he would actually kiss their feet as well, which is always just really a great sign of humility for me growing up, and it kind of reminds me even of the woman who comes in, anoints Christ's feet, you know, with the oil, and then even uses her hair to wipe his feet, dry his feet. There's just a great humility in that. One thing I want to mention as well is how are they seated right during this time?
Speaker 2:
It's interesting, contextually, whenever I was in Jerusalem, my guide talked about what's called a triclinium big word but it's basically just a U-shaped table. It says they recline a table, meaning that they didn't sit upright as we are now, but they kind of leaned back, and then they would eat with their right hand, dipping into the dishes together. And so from if you take all of the scriptural evidence, we could start to get an understanding of who's where and why. And so at that triclinium in the middle would be the guest, of course, jesus himself, and then, beyond that, you would have the person to the right of the guest, would kind of give their back to Jesus as they would eat on their elbow, and so we hear that John is the one that reclines upon his breast. So we think that that person would have been John the beloved disciple, and normally in that context the person that you most beloved would be next to the right hand side of the guest, and then the person behind you was the person that you most trusted to protect.
Speaker 3:
They got your back.
Speaker 2:
They have your back right, and so the interesting part of that is we hear the Jesus that Jesus and Judas dip into the same dish. So if John's to the right side of Jesus, judas has to be to the left side, because there would be a dish in between the person's table.
Speaker 3:
And Peter probably would have had his back.
Speaker 2:
Well, no, peter. Actually, I believe and this is what my guide said the person that would be at the complete end of the table would most likely be the servant of everybody. There'd be somebody that would normally be standing and getting up a lot, which is a sign of being a servant or a slave, and so Peter, of course, is the one who Jesus directly tells wash the feet. Basically, you're going to be the servant of the servants of God, which is a title that we actually still give to the Pope, the Peter of the modern day, pope Francis, and so it's interesting whenever you put all that into context, where everybody lines up, and how meaningful it becomes when you could actually see it for yourself.
Speaker 1:
So you mentioned John and the washing of the feet story in the gospel John replaces the story of the institution of the Eucharist and other Gospels. Why does he?
Speaker 2:
do that. He seems to highlight here the importance of service, that the Eucharist itself, of course, is a great gift, is the fountain from all the other graces flow within the life of the church, but that those gifts are then to be propelling us into mission to serve others. And so he's not saying that the institution of the Eucharist didn't happen within his narrative, but he's highlighting this sense of service that Jesus has, and he tells his closest band of apostles, there together, that they're supposed to then go out and give this love to others in their service.
Speaker 3:
Well, and in the Bread of Life discourse that he gives, that's really where he talks about the what we would say is the normal institution narrative. And so his bread of life discourse is what's propelling the reality of the sacrament of the Eucharist, of the body and blood of Christ, and the idea of service in the washing of the feet, as Father said, is what's putting the two together. Because we can't have the sacrifice without service, because even in the Old Testament it was called service to the temple. The priests were serving in the temple and offering sacrifice. And so all of us today, as Christians and our common priesthood through baptism, we have to serve the Lord in the church and in the world, and so that idea of service is pivotal, because you can't have one without the other.
Speaker 2:
In that Bread of Life Discourses in John 6, where Jesus specifically says that you must eat my flesh and drink my blood to have life within you, that the bread and the wine are becoming in that way the actual sacrament of the Eucharist and that we must receive that to have life within us. And even then people are like, wow, that's a tough teaching.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, and people leave him.
Speaker 2:
But these ones stay together. And Peter says actually at that time, whenever Jesus says to him, will you go as well? And he says, Lord, where shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life. So you can see how that connects with Peter there. Then to later on in the Gospel of John, at the actual Last Supper.
Speaker 3:
And then, following the washing of the feet, what's so important, too, is that we hear Jesus use the name of God again for himself, and he's speaking about the betrayal that's going to happen. And then he says but these things must happen so that you believe I am. And so, right then and there, any faithful Jew would have known immediately that he's referring to himself as God.