Holy Thursday Foot Washing

I welcome our Holy Father’s change in the Holy Thursday that allows the priest to wash the feet of laypeople, not only priests. The foot washing is not itself a sacrament but a liturgical gesture, a meaningful part of a most important event, a kind of a sacramental. It is not essential or foundational for our faith but is an important dimension. It has to be located within the sacramental life and I would place it, not so much in relation to Orders, as to the more universal and foundational sacraments of baptism, confirmation, Eucharist and penance/anointing. In all of these, all of us are cleansed, washed, served, caressed by Christ and thereby anointed to do the same to others. We are, all of us, immersed in His Mercy and propelled to express the same to others. Orders is, for me, a subordinate or subservient sacrament in that it serves the others: it is important, not in itself so much, but because without it we do not have Eucharist, confirmation, confession or anointing of the sick. It is a servant sacrament, instrumental and inferior in that it serves the more primary events of encounter and communion with Christ. So, a Holy Thursday sermon on priesthood is a clerical distraction from Christ’s gift of Himself in the Eucharist. The priest, as servant of this Mystery, takes a humble, discrete back seat. The greatness of the priesthood is entirely derivative: it is great because it brings the Sacraments! Therefore, its greatness must lie in humility, anonymity, and quietness. Like John the Baptist, the priesthood must decrease, that Christ may increase. With this in mind, we can see a bright side to the profound blow against the status of the clergy delivered by the sex scandal and other developments. When I was growing up, the parish priest was the very most respected man we knew. The priesthood has lost that reputation. But a humbled, lower-status priesthood may be a blessing as it is seen for what it is: a humble servant of the Word and the sacred mysteries, nothing more and nothing less! By this logic, one might conceivably expand even further: allow the laity themselves to do the foot-washing while the priest-president watches peacefully. Imagine: husbands foot-washing their wives and vice-versa; politicians washing the feet of the homeless; doctors washing the ill; rich washing the poor; grandparents and grandchildren; Democrats/Republicans and Libertarians/Socialists; and so forth. Importantly, this must not reduce the mystery to social service, but anchor the slightest act of mercy in the sacramental economy of Mercy. And as the flow of Mercy, out of the Mysteries, into all of human life, expands and flourishes, the humble cleric, unworthy instrument of God’s grace, can only rejoice!