Jesus washed feet. Can we do otherwise? Can we participate in the Eucharist and not work to bring justice to society? Can we receive the Eucharist and be unconcerned about the people of Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel and Africa? Can we take God’s life into our lives and shut anyone out? Whenever we receive the Eucharist, we are in the place where feet are washed because we are willing to wash them; a place where trespassers are forgiven because we forgive them and where all, who are willing to come home to God, truly find a home because we welcome them.

Unlike those who believe that God was to be found only at a distance, Jesus taught that God was immediately approachable and easily recognizable – to be found in practically anything and anyone---in bread and wine certainly, but also in feet to be washed.

Jesus did not engage in complex explanations of divinity. He simply involved the Father in all that He said and did in the company of His friends: the sinners, the lepers, the prostitutes, the beggars, tax collectors, the diseased, the crippled, the widowed and the orphaned. Those who were cast to the edges, those with the lowest social status, were the ones Jesus named as the greatest in Heaven.

Holy Thursday invites us into the world of Jesus, the world of improbabilities. In the world of Jesus, the last are first, the least are numbered among the wisest and the sinner is the beloved friend of God.

If we are truly open to the mystery of this night, then our world must change. If we can accept that God is uncalculating in goodness, then we must be uncalculating as well: forgiving seventy times seven times; loving enemies; turning the other cheek, and leaving all judgment to the ultimate mercy of God.

The Eucharist gives us not only a gift, but also an obligation: timely demands and eternal implications lived in the memory of Jesus. We must imagine the world as Jesus imagined it, feel for the world as He felt for it, and change the world as He sought to change it.

Towards the end of the Passover meal when Jesus washed their feet, the apostles were bewildered and uncomfortable, so much so that Peter objected. Yet Jesus rebuked Peter and said, “unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.”

To be washed by God is to be cleansed of all things that keep God at a distance.

Keeping either God or neighbor at a safe distance means that we cannot follow Jesus. Tonight, through the Eucharist, we simply cannot help but try to catch up, move closer, move into loving and forgiving.

One possible reason for the incredible success of the movie, The Passion of the Christ, may be that for us, the reality of the suffering of Jesus is both comforting and astounding. The one who washed feet suffered and was crucified. The one who washed feet was finally lifted up through the resurrection. The one who washed feet has simply changed everything.

This is why we pay such close attention to the presence of Jesus tonight in this liturgy: first in the telling the story of God’s love, then in the washing the feet, then in the bread and wine and then, from this liturgy onward, in each other.

The true Passion of the Christ is how much God loves us. Despite everything we do Jesus washes our feet, loves us without condition, forgives us and asks us to do the same in memory of him.

This is Holy Thursday’s life-giving legacy!

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