The washing of the feet

Earlier this year when you were discussing novels by Alfred Sant and Oliver Friggieri, with particular reference to the priest characters who appear in them, you had anticipated further discussions of real-life priestly experience, since this year has been declared the Year of the Priest. Does Maundy Thursday provoke any reactions to recent media publicity given to clerical paedophilia and homosexuality?

A guess was aired on television to the effect that there was a not-often noticed reason for the decline in the number of vocations to the priesthood (a trend that, however, seems to be in the process of reversal). This reason was that gays formerly found it easier to pass through the seminary sieve and get ordained. However, like much of the related talk, it is hard to believe that this factor is really very significant.

The change in family demography, for instance, is likely to have been much more significant, since there would appear to be a much higher probability of a child in a family with nine siblings, such as mine, to feel called to the priesthood than in a family of two siblings.

Moreover, although there has undoubtedly been much media attention to the relevance of homosexuality to priesthood and celibacy, the numbers involved are not statistically mind-boggling.

The symbolic meaning of feet highlighted in the Maundy Thursday liturgy has often fascinated me, and not because of Freudian sexual connotations. A main reason why I have always regarded Pasolini's Gospel According to Matthew as by far the best film on Jesus, is that Jesus is shown almost always briskly walking.

Michel de Certeau has famously written that to walk is to signify that one is not feeling in one's place. Walking is a process by which one makes oneself absent from somewhere and sets oneself in the impossible search of a locus that he can deem to be his own.

It is an expression of the human search for rootedness, in spite of humans having evolved beyond the merely vegetal scope of plant life. Certeau continues to develop a theory about how the criss-crossing of a multitude of walking-paths gives birth to the city.

The theory is complex and I am only referring to it here because it brings out very clearly the social dimension of walking which is essential to understand its Christian significance.

Today, walking is seen to have a religious meaning mostly in the case of pilgrimage, but in spite of the importance of pilgrimages in the Bible, walking is associated even more evidently with apostleship.

The Church Fathers often pictured St Paul, because of his worldwide apostleship, as an ultra-marathon runner. They were enthralled by his enthusiastic quotation in the Letter to the Romans (10,15) of the prophet Isaiah's poetic exclamation: "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news".

Actually, the feet of messengers were more likely to be bloody and blistered. Since the apostles would have walked barefoot or at best in sandals on very dusty roads, the fittingness of their being washed on crossing the threshold of a place of celebration is manifest.

Is that all the meaning that Christ's washing of the feet of the apostles has?

At my age, with my feet constantly numb because of neuropathy induced by diabetes, I can easily imagine the psychological state of Jesus at the Last Supper. Although probably he was not yet 40 years of age, he must have felt like someone afflicted with terminal cancer. He knew that his life was implacably nearing its end, but his thoughts were almost wholly fixed on his friends.

He rose from the table like the Greeks who sought to depart from life as though from a banquet. He laid aside his garments like the Jews who knew that one leaves the world as undressed as one enters it. But He girded himself with a towel and focused his attention on those feet that are our means of walking towards God Himself.

Feet were washed by someone else only on two kinds of occasions. If you had a slave, you would get him to wash them for you. If you were celebrating a betrothal, one of the partners would wash the other's feet as a sign that they had become one person.

Jesus washes the disciples' feet for both these reasons. In the first place, he explicitly wanted to characterise the priesthood he was establishing as consisting in service humbly rendered to the people. Secondly, the service had to be rendered lovingly and as a seal of solidarity and unity.

By washing the feet of Judas, Jesus was showing that the loving service had to be extended even to those planning one's betrayal.

John does not mention the Institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, but only the washing of the feet. Don't you think this is quite surprising since John gives such prominence to Jesus' words about the bread of life and the gift of his body and blood?

To eat His body and to drink His blood means to live out of His own life and behaviour, to pattern one's own on His. The meaning of sharing in the Eucharist, participating in the sacrament par excellence, is practically the same as living one's life in loving service of the others, of the community. Both the metaphorical significance of the washing of the feet and that of actively sharing in the Mass are factors of communion, of bringing about unity with one's fellow beings and with God Himself.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.