“So, let us take off our shoes and roll up our sleeves.” — Brother Ron Fender
My memory of the footwashing ceremony is patchy. Like rubbing out a transparent circle in a fogged window, I can see glimpses from more than two decades ago. I remember it as a regular part of the monthly Communion service at the church I attended during my teens. I remember an older man’s foot with a black dress sock. A small plastic tub of warm water. The strange intimacy of touching the toes, heel, ankle and arch of someone I barely know. Despite the squeamishness I felt as a teenager taking part in this bodily ritual, I am beginning to sense its spiritual wisdom.
Only hours before he would be handed over to the religious and political authorities of his day and subsequently executed, Jesus sought a way to show his friends the deep love he had for them and to offer a final, crucial teaching to accompany them after his death. Rather than deliver another of his mind-bending parables, whose authority and insight regularly wowed the religious elite, or perform another stunning miracle to demonstrate his spiritual power, Jesus picked up a towel and took a knee in front of a pair of dusty feet. His followers were baffled, especially Peter (arguably the most ardent and knuckleheaded of the apostles), who initially resisted his teacher’s unexpected display of servanthood. Jesus was unfazed. He told them, “You do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand.”
It is a deep teaching, one we should approach with humility and openness. I think of Naomi Shihab Nye’s excellent poem, “I Feel Sorry For Jesus,” in which she writes, “It’s dangerous talking for Jesus. / You get carried away almost immediately.” So I step gingerly when I suggest that footwashing might have been a last-ditch attempt by Jesus to show his followers, before his death, that the kingdom of heaven they so desperately sought would not be a kingdom of power, whether religious or political. The path to the kingdom, the way of heaven, he seemed to say as he scrubbed their calloused heels, is one of humble service. The spiritual ascent is really a descent.
Brother Ron Fender, the “Saint of Chattanooga,” whose primary ministry until his death in 2015 was footcare for our city’s unsheltered residents, understood the challenge of Jesus’s example. “There is something so intimate and so terrifying in these mandates,” he wrote. “I am to wash the naked feet of one of you as a sign of my servitude and humility. Really? Or possibly even more horrifying, I am to allow one of you to wash my feet and to accept your love for me in the name of Christ.” Yet, to journey into this “wild, primitive, and holy territory,” he concluded, “is the beginning of true communion.”