Benedict XVI Holy Thursday: Mass of the Lord's Supper
Dear brothers and sisters,
Saint John begins his account of how Jesus washed the feet of his disciples with especially solemn, almost liturgical language: "Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end" (13:1). The "hour" of Jesus has arrived, toward which all of his activity was directed from the beginning. John describes what makes up the content of this hour with two terms: "to pass" (metabainein, metabasis) and "agape" – love. These two words explain each other; both describe together the Passover of Jesus: cross and resurrection, crucifixion as elevation, as "passage" to the glory of God, as a "passing" from the world to the Father. It is not as if Jesus, after a brief visit to the world, were now simply departing and returning to the Father. This passage is a transformation. He carries with him his flesh, his being man. On the Cross, in giving himself, He is fused and transformed, as it were, into a new mode of being, in which He is now forever with the Father, and at the same time with men. He transforms the Cross, the act of killing, into an act of self-donation, of love to the end. With this expression, "to the end," John refers in advance to the last words of Jesus on the Cross: all has been brought to conclusion, "it is finished" (19:30). Through his love, the Cross becomes "metabasis," the transformation of the human being into a participant in the glory of God. In this transformation, He involves all of us, drawing us into the transformative power of his love to such an extent that, in our being with Him, our lives become a "passage," a transformation. Thus we receive redemption – becoming participants in eternal love, a condition toward which all of our existence strives.
This essential process of the hour of Jesus is represented in the washing of the feet, in a sort of symbolic prophetic action. In it, Jesus displays through a concrete action precisely what the great Christological hymn of the letter to the Philippians describes as the content of the mystery of Christ. Jesus removes the garments of his glory, he girds himself with the "towel" of humanity, and becomes a slave. He washes the dirty feet of the disciples and thus makes them capable of participating in the divine meal to which He invites them. Exterior purifications for worship, which purify man ritually while nevertheless leaving him as he is, are replaced by the new bath: He makes us pure through his word and his love, through the gift of himself. "You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you," He will say to the disciples in his discourse on the vine (John 15:3). He continually washes us again with his word. Yes, if we welcome the words of Jesus in an attitude of meditation, of prayer and of faith, they develop their purifying power within us. Day after day, we are as it were covered with various forms of uncleanness, empty words, prejudice, partial and altered wisdom; a multifarious half-falsity or open falsity constantly infiltrates our depths. All of this obfuscates and contaminates our soul, it threatens to make us incapable of truth and goodness. If we welcome the words of Jesus with an attentive heart, these reveal themselves as genuine washings, purifications of the soul, of the inner man. This is what the Gospel of the washing of the feet invites us to: to allow ourselves continually to be washed again by this pure water, to allow ourselves to be made capable of convivial communion with God and with our brothers. Yet from the side of Jesus, after the blow of the lance from the soldier, there emerged not only water, but also blood (John 19:34; cf. 1 John 5:6,8). Jesus did not only speak, He did not leave us only words. He gives himself. He washes us with the sacred power of his blood, meaning his self-donation "to the end," to the Cross. His word is more than simple speech; it is flesh and blood "for the life of the world" (John 6:51). In the holy Sacraments, the Lord kneels down again and again before our feet, and washes us. Let us pray to Him that the sacred bath of his love may penetrate us more and more deeply, so that we may be truly purified!
If we listen attentively to the Gospel, we can discover two different aspects in the episode of the washing of the feet. The washing that Jesus performs for his disciples is above all simply his own action – the gift of purity, of the "capacity for God" offered to them. But the gift then becomes a model, the task of doing the same thing for each other. The Fathers described this twofold aspect of the washing of the feet with the words "sacramentum" and "exemplum." In this context, "sacramentum" does not refer to one of the seven sacraments, but to the mystery of Christ in its totality, from the incarnation to the cross and resurrection: this totality becomes the healing and sanctifying power, the transformative power for men, it becomes our "metabasis," our transformation into a new form of being, in openness toward God and in communion with Him. But this new being that He, without our merit, simply gives to us must then be transformed in us into the dynamic of a new life. The totality of gift and example that we find in the pericope of the washing of the feet is characteristic of the nature of Christianity in general. In comparison with moralism, Christianity is something more and something different. Our activity, our moral capacity is not placed at the beginning. Christianity is above all a gift: God gives himself to us – He does not give some thing, but himself. And this takes place not only at the beginning, at the moment of our conversion. He continually remains the One who gives. He always offers us his gifts anew. He always precedes us. For this reason, the central action of being Christians is the Eucharist: gratitude for having been gratified, the joy for the new life that He gives us.
In spite of all this, we do not remain passive recipients of the divine goodness. God gratifies us as personal and living partners. The love that is given is the dynamic of "loving together," it is intended to be a new life within us, beginning from God. We thus understand the words that, at the end of the account of the washing of the feet, Jesus speaks to his disciples and to all of us: "I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another" (John 13:34). The "new commandment" does not consist in a new and difficult norm, one that did not exist before. The new commandment consists in a loving together with Him who loved us first. This is also how we must understand the Sermon on the Mount. This does not mean that Jesus gave us new precepts at that time, which represented the demands of a more sublime humanism than the previous one. The Sermon on the Mount is a journey of training in conforming ourselves to the sentiments of Christ (cf. Philippians 2:5), a journey of interior purification that leads us to living together with Him. The new reality is the gift that introduces us into the mentality of Christ. If we consider this, we perceive how far we often are in our lives from this new reality of the New Testament; how slight an example we give to humanity of loving in communion with his love. We thus owe humanity a proof of the credibility of Christian truth, which is demonstrated in love. Precisely for this reason, we desire all the more to pray to the Lord to make us, through his purification, ripe for the new commandment.
In the Gospel of the washing of the feet, the conversation between Jesus and Peter presents yet another detail of the praxis of Christian life, to which we finally want to turn our attention. At an earlier point, Peter had not wanted to allow the Lord to wash his feet: this reversal of order, that the master – Jesus – should wash feet, that the master should perform the service of a slave, is completely in contrast with his reverential fear of Jesus, with his concept of the relationship between teacher and disciple. "You will never wash my feet," he tells Jesus in his usual passionate manner (John 13:8). This is the same mentality that, after the profession of faith in Jesus as Son of God, in Caesarea Philippi, had urged Peter to oppose Jesus when he had predicted his affliction and cross: "No such thing shall ever happen to you," Peter had declared categorically (Mt. 16:22). His concept of the Messiah involved an image of majesty, of divine greatness. He had to learn over and over again that the greatness of God is different from our idea of greatness; that it consists precisely in descending, in the humility of service, in the radicalness of love to the point of total self-abandonment. And we, too, must learn this over and over again, because we systematically desire a God of success, and not of the Passion; because we are not capable of realizing that the Shepherd comes as a Lamb who gives himself, and in this way leads us to the right pasture.
When the Lord tells Peter that without the washing of his feet he would never be able to have any part in Him, Peter immediately and impetuously asks to have his head and hands washed as well. This is followed by the mysterious words of Jesus: "Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed" (John 13:10). Jesus alludes to a bath that the disciples, according to ritual prescriptions, had already taken; in order to participate in the meal, they now needed only to have their feet washed. But naturally, a deeper meaning is hidden in this. To what does it allude? We do not know for sure. In any case, we should keep in mind that the washing of the feet, according to the meaning of the entire chapter, does not indicate a single specific Sacrament, but the "sacramentum Christi" in its entirety – his service of salvation, his descent even to the cross, his love to the end, which purifies us and makes us capable of God. Here, with the distinction between the bath and the washing of feet, nevertheless, there also appears an allusion to life in the community of the disciples, to life in the community of the Church – an allusion that John may have intentionally transmitted to the community of his time. It then seems clear that the bath that purifies us definitively and does not need to be repeated is Baptism – immersion in the death and resurrection of Christ, a fact that changes our lives profoundly, giving us something like a new a identity that endures, if we do not throw it away as Judas did. But even in the endurance of this new identity, for convivial communion with Jesus we need the "washing of the feet." What does this mean? It seems to me that the first letter of Saint John gives us the key for understanding this. There we read: "If we say, 'We are without sin,' we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing" (1:8ff.). We need the "washing of the feet," the washing of our everyday sins, and for this we need the confession of sins. We do not know exactly how this was carried out in the Johannine community. But the direction indicated by the words of Jesus to Peter is obvious: in order to be capable of participating in the convivial community with Jesus Christ, we must be sincere. One must recognize that even in our own identity as baptized persons, we sin. We need confession as this has taken form in the Sacrament of reconciliation. In it, the Lord continually rewashes our dirty feet, and we are able to sit at table with Him.
But in this way, the word takes on yet another meaning, in which the Lord extends the "sacramentum" by making it the "exemplum," a gift, a service for our brother: "If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet" (John 13:14). We must wash each other's feet in the daily mutual service of love. But we must also wash our feet in the sense of constantly forgiving one another. The debt that the Lord has forgiven us is always infinitely greater than all of the debts that others could owe to us (cf. Mt. 18:21-35). It is to this that Holy Thursday exhorts us: not to allow rancor toward others to become, in its depths, a poisoning of the soul. It exhorts us to constantly purify our memory, forgiving one another from the heart, washing each other's feet, thus being able to join together in the banquet of God.
Holy Thursday is a day of gratitude and of joy for the great gift of love to the end that the Lord has given to us. We want to pray to the Lord at this time, so that gratitude and joy may become in us the power of loving together with his love. Amen.
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