Holy Thursday Reflection with Fr Robin Gibbons - 28 March 2013

Orthodox icon of Christ washing feet of the Apostles 16th C. Pskov School - Wiki

It is interesting that of all the direct gospel commands of the Lord, the one found in John’s Gospel about the foot washing is more ignored than not by many of our Churches, and yet John records Jesus as saying, ‘you should wash each others feet. I have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you’. It is an insistent command.

The act of footwashing seems to me to be intimately connected with the Eucharist itself, for it comes after the last supper and focuses our attention, not on the gift of the Lord’s Eucharistic presence to come, completed in the death on the cross and resurrection of the Saviour and handed to us in form of bread and wine, but on a richer and deeper understanding of what the Holy Eucharist is all about.

Instinctively we know what is going on, we reach an understanding that the gift of Christ is about people and God, it is about that love we sing of in one of the chants that accompanies the feet washing: ‘ Faith, hope and love, let these endure among you - and the greatest of these is love’.

Bound up with our mission as the People of God is an understanding that we walk by faith, but it is a faith lived and sustained by our community, that family of God.

Whilst we celebrate the institution of the Eucharist in the evening mass of Holy Thursday we need this gospel to remind us that the tradition that Paul says has been handed down, is not about rites and observances so much as the proclamation of a living faith in the abiding presence of the Lord who comes to us in many different ways.

The Eucharist is a gift for us, it nourishes us for the proclamation of the Lord’s death and resurrection, it sustains us in our weakness and draws us in to communion with the Lord and the community of his body. The hope implicit in this feast, is that Christ knows our needs and weakness and will always love those who are his in the world, but that we in our turn must go out and in that symbolism of the footwashing , in humility, serve in love each other.

Fr Robin Gibbons is an Eastern Rite Chaplain for the Melkite Greek Catholics in Britain.