Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Glory to you, O Lord.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: 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.
The devil had already induced Judas Simon, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over.
So during supper, fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God, he rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples feet and dry them with a towel around his waist.
He came to Simon Peter who said to him, master, are you going to wash my feet?
Jesus answered and said to him, what I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later.
Peter said to him, you will never wash my feet.
Jesus answered him, unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.
Simon Peter said to him, master, then not only my feet, but my hands and my head as well.
Jesus said to him, whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over.
So you are clean but not all.
For he knew who would betray him. For this reason, he said, not all of you are clean.
So when he had washed their feet and put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, do you realize what I have done for you?
You call me teacher and master, and rightly so, for indeed I am.
If I, therefore the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another's feet. I have given you a model to follow so that as I have done for you, you should also do the Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
It doesn't take a scripture scholar to understand that the symbolism of the washing of the feet is meant to be a call that we are to serve one another. That's really obvious, but I've never fully understood it, just like Peter didn't understand until February.
Now I'm going to give you a little secret about myself before I get into the main point. And that is I'm just a little bit, but not off the wall, a germaphobe.
And I really hate being dirty.
So in the summer, more often than not, I take two showers a day, one when I get up and one when I go to bed.
So cleanliness is always something that is kind of I worry about. It's good not to have hair. It's a lot easier, by the way.
But here's where it goes to. I finally understood this because most people over the years, in fact, I think of two exceptions have come up here with clean feet. And the two exceptions were kids, I'm sure were playing in their sandbox an hour before they came to church and their parents were trying to get at me a little bit.
But the worst I see is, you know, a bunion and some sock fuzz. That's it. People's feet are clean.
Fast forward to February in the mountains of Guatemala, where the poorest of the poor live.
Most of them have simple flip flops they're wearing.
Their feet are calloused and filthy because they have to live that way. They don't have fancy shoes or big showers with hot water heaters or any of that other stuff.
And it dawned on me there in the mountains that these were the feet that Jesus was washing.
People that had toiled and worked and suffered, people who didn't have the nicest place to live, didn't have the opportunity to bathe sumptuously twice a day.
And he cleaned their feet.
And that call to service that comes to us is to care for, most importantly, the least among us, the ones that might make us a bit uncomfortable, the ones we try to walk away from before they see us, the ones that might not smell all that great, those are the people we're called upon most of all to reach out to in compassionate and generous love.
And if we think it is beneath us, we are so off the mark.
Because if our God can go to a point where he washes dirty, dusty, calloused feet to show us an example of how much he loves us, and the only thing, the only thing he asks of return is that we're willing to do those things for one another. If we think we're above that, we need to change.
Our call as Christian is to always serve the least among us, to lift them up and to offer them love.
