ON OUR KNEES
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
April 01, 2021
It’s not
possible to wash the feet of another human being without first getting down on
your knees. It requires a physical act
of humility and self-sacrifice before such a healing gesture can happen.
And yet we
come together this evening around this table in the midst of a very traumatic
week in which we have been reminded that even being on ones’ knees does not
ensure that grace or compassion will happen.
Because evil
has a way of seeping into even out most carefully planned attempts to cover it
up. Nobody is justified for being on ones’ knees, if that’s all it is…whether
its inside a church, or on the streets of Minneapolis. It’s what happens before, during and after the
kneeling that determines whether it is just an empty gesture, or whether it is
God erupting. And it is Jesus himself who shows us the difference.
At the Last
Supper, Jesus feel to his knees in order to serve. In fact, it was a service so
radical and humble that the guests found it scandalous, most notably Peter: “No
Lord, you will never wash my feet?” Everybody knows that masters and lords
don’t kneel at the feet of servants and outcasts, right? It’s unthinkable; it’s contrary to proper
order.
But it is Jesus
who dares to point out that that so-called proper social order isn’t
necessarily working out very well, especially for the marginalized, and for the
objects of hatred and intolerance. And
for that reason, it’s an obstacle to God’s wishes.
Jesus’ gesture
in an invitation for the rest of us to consider the unthinkable as new way of
life, not because we can if we wish, but because we must if we are to be
numbered among the true disciples. “Unless I wash you,” Jesus tells Peter, “you will have no inheritance
with me.”
Police
Officers are here to service, right? It
says so right on their cars. But that pledge is tested by what actually happens
when the servants leave their cars and get on their knees. In a similar way, although
we don’t wear badges like that on our cars or on clothing our Christian
baptismal pledge is tested every time we rise from our knees and engage one
another.
Jesus’
washing of his disciples’ feet – including, we presume, the feet of Judas Iscariot
in a scandalous demonstration of what life looks like when proper social order
ceases to become out ultimate concern, and we begin seriously to think about
the unthinkable as our path to freedom and light in Christ.
Jesus had
the strength to do that because the Last Supper was neither the first nor the
last time in the gospel that had been on his knees. He was about to be marched off to his own humiliating
death as the victim of an alleged proper social order.
And he was
able to do that because he was a completely free man – fearing neither death
nor the ultimate power of evil. For us
that is nearly unthinkable, but we are assured that it is possible if our
prayer and our service are genuinely related to one another and rooted in God
rather than conventional patterns of expressing power and authority: “If I,
your master and teacher have washed your feet, you must wash one another,”
Jesus said “not you may wash one another,” but “you must”. “There is no other way, what I have done for
you, you should also do.”
This
evening, as the old song says it, “Let us break bread together on our knees” in
the very most rich, deep and almost unthinkable way that that work speaks to
us.
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