For the last several years we have tried to attend a few additional services during the week before Easter than the year before. There are so many beautiful traditions and experiences to explore that even after having been an Episcopalian for several years I still sometimes feel like a religious tourist, trying out new things for the first time. For perspective, our Parish typically hosts or participates in at least eight worship events between the Sunday before Easter and Easter day. One new event for us this year was attending Maundy Thursday church services.
Maundy Thursday is a unique worship service celebrating the last Supper, the institution of the sacrament of the Eucharist, Jesus washing the feet of the apostles, and looks forwards to the events at the Garden of Gethsemane. Probably the most meaningful part of the service for me was encountering the foot washing ceremony. As a Mormon, I had always been taught to view Jesus’s washing of the disciples feet as being a part of the LDS temple ceremonies. Jesus’s statement that the apostles didn’t know what He had done to them but would understand it in the future was supposed to mean that Jesus had performed a special priesthood cleansing ceremony on the Apostles without explaining it to them. The ceremony in essence becomes a sort of supplemental or elite baptism, washing away the sins missed the first time around and blessing many parts of the body in preparation for a glorified resurrection. The LDS temple ceremony itself identifies the washing ceremony as being a reinterpretation of the consecration of priests in Exodus 29-4-7 and fails to mention Jesus’s teachings at all.
It is not uncommon to meet Mormon’s (or ex Mormon’s who are often more willing to talk about it) who found the LDS washing ceremony to be a traumatic or disturbing experience, especially if they went through the temple like I did before 2005 when the LDS church changed the ceremony to be less disturbing. Being repeatedly and somewhat intimately touched by strangers who don’t ask permission or give warning first while you are inadequately dressed just doesn’t always come across as a sacred experience. While I sympathize with these concerns I did not personally find the LDS washing ceremony to be personally disturbing, perhaps because someone (in violation of Mormon social taboos) told me partially what to expect and the officiator didn’t accidentally touch or see more than they meant to. However, even without that sense of trauma the washing was a bit of an empty place for me because the temple ceremony had lost its sense of meaning. I could hardly even think about the last supper and Jesus washing the disciples without thinking about the temple. It feels sad when a scripture passage is only associated with memories that no longer have a sense of purpose.
So it was a special occasion for me to hear the story again of Jesus acting as a humble servant or perhaps even in the role of a slave, washing the feet of his disciples to put an end to their arguments about which disciple was more important by showing them with his own example that leading in the church is about serving those underneath you, not by being served. This is what the apostles hadn’t realized but would realize afterwards, that Jesus had taken their expectation of what it meant to be important and turned it upside down. The very greatest of all was insisting on taking on the role of a servant to prove to them that they needed to be servants as well. Being important in the church should be about serving others, not yourself. After recounting the story the priest proclaimed that in their position of as priesthood leaders they needed a special reminder to live the kind of humility that Jesus taught and so invited us to allow them as our priests to wash our feet. There was no command, no mandatory participation, no surprises. I joined the line and had the intimate and consent governed experience of having a priest wash my foot, with its surgery scars still clearly visible, and tell me God be with you as she dried me. Another of the priests told everyone he washed to go and serve everyone as Christ served them. After the foot washing was over we were reminded that if the priests of God’s church served us in this way that we were to serve each other with humility just as we had been served. Just like the apostles we had submitted to being humbly served by our religious leaders, so like the Apostles we needed to learn to serve everyone else in our lives with humility.
While there is a powerful symbolism in letting Christ serve us by cleansing us from sin, foot washing was and is in itself an act of humbly offering hospitality that helps counteract the sin of pride. I didn’t come away from the foot washing feeling that I had experienced an elite cleansing from sin in a ceremony whose design (at least till 2005) didn’t fully take into account whether the cleansed felt violated. Instead, I felt humbled, having intimately experienced a priest humbly wash me and then tell me to serve and love those around me with the same kind of humility.
