Maundy Thursday, 2025
EX. 12:1-4, 11-14; PSALM 116:1, 10-17; 1 COR. 11:23-26; JOHN 13:1-17, 31b-35

Just as I have loved you,
you also should love one another

I don’t think it’s just me, but maybe it is? But the fact that there’s a thing we all call a “bucket list” means that I’m not the only one. And sometimes I wonder what I would do if I knew I only had so much time to live.

Sometimes I imagine all the people I would want to see from the different parts of my life. Old friends from high school … maybe? Surely friends from seminary and other academic sojourns. Family for sure. Mostly I think of all the places I’d like to visit again—Winnipeg, reluctantly; California, to be sure; the UK, too. But then there’s the experiences. I still really want to go sky-diving. And my very last day would probably be about food. The sort of food I wouldn’t ever have to worry about having eaten it. In many ways, though, they are things about me. The people I’d like to see; the things I’d like to do; the food I’d like to eat.

But to read John’s Gospel as we’ve done, and to hear of what Jesus wanted to do on his last day, it’s a bit humbling. Sure, Jesus too has a last meal with his friends. But this is no ordinary dinner—it was a dinner about suffering, and about the future God has in mind for his people, and his creation, the future God is working towards in good time. And the topmost item on Jesus’s bucket list, an item symbolizing suffering service and God’s future, and something I can’t imagine is on many other people’s bucket list, was to wash feet.

There’s a question that we entertained a number of times during the sacraments course this Lent: why isn’t the washing of feet considered a sacrament? It does appear to have the right ingredients to be a sacrament: like in the Eucharist and like in baptism we have an outward symbol: in this case we have water. We have a dominical command, too. “Do this in remembrance of me,” says Jesus about communion; “go and baptize,” Jesus says of baptism. And here, too, we have a dominical command:

“I, your Lord and Teacher,” says Jesus, “have washed your feet,  you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

In a way, perhaps we should celebrate the fact that the washing of feet never landed on any official ecclesiastical lists of sacraments, dominical or otherwise. It’s lack of official sanction means that it can be something shared in a sacramental way in ecumenical communities. Most famously it’s been something shared in l’Arche, where church division has meant that even though catholics, protestants, and others wouldn’t be able to share communion, or sometimes even recognize one another’s baptisms according to church teaching, the sacramental non-sacrament of washing one another’s feet has become very important to finding a way to share faithfully with one another and according to the Lord’s command.

So perhaps we can celebrate the fact that the washing of feet never made it onto any ecclesiastical lists of what really “counts.” Perhaps amongst all sacramental non-sacraments it opens us in a special way to the way a sacramental life can be lived. When Jesus says “you also ought to wash one another’s feet[,] … [f]or I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you,” it’s so clearly not about just feet and the washing of them. It’s about the example set in Christ—that washing feet is a sign of love, but no ordinary love, but rather a Jesus-shaped sort of love.

And this probably does make for a better bucket list than mine: a Jesus shaped one that has, at its centre, acts of love for the sake of others, seen in his own laying down of his life for his friends, and symbolized in the washing of their feet. So there’s less sky-diving on his list, though probably more food, not less, and food shared with others, both friends and strangers; it’s a list marked by acts of service, acts of kindness, and acts of solidarity—acts of love for the sake of the well-being and thriving of others, taking root in the washing of the feet of his friends at the table, but flowering in a life of service in and for the world in the laying down his life for them, for us, and for others: on the cross, but in the small gestures of love, too.

The Revd Canon Preston DS Parsons, PhD