A Basin and Towel
We might find it curious that on Holy Thursday, when we are celebrating the institution of the Eucharist, the Gospel is taken from John’s version of the Last Supper. Where the other Gospels have Jesus taking bread and wine and consecrating it, John has him taking a basin and towel and washing his disciples’ feet. What has this to do with Eucharist?
Everything! Scholars estimate that John’s Gospel was written somewhere between AD 90–100, seventy some years after Jesus’ death. John (if he himself actually did the writing) would be a man well into his nineties, and he would have been a man who had now seen more than seventy years of church life. Seventy years of church life then were like seventy years of church life now. They fought about almost everything! Not least, about the Eucharist. How often should it be celebrated? To what aspect of Jesus’ life and teaching should it be most attached? Who presides? By the time John wrote his Gospel, there were already different and competing theologies about the Eucharist in the early church.
Hence, rather than highlighting the bread and wine at the Last Supper, John highlights instead the basin and towel. By doing this, the ninety-something beloved disciple, in substance, is saying: This is what the Eucharist means. It asks us to move beyond our divisions and reach across our differences by this kind of humility.
As a priest, I have always found the actual ritual of washing feet during the Holy Thursday liturgy to be awkward. There is no aesthetic way of doing this. For years, I hated the ritual until one day I realized that awkwardness was an essential part of it. It is meant to be awkward because it is awkward and uncomfortable to reach across to others when there are differences. We do it anyway, because it has everything to do with Eucharist.
Fr. Ronald Rolheiser
Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, teaches at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas, where he served as president for fifteen years. His books are popular throughout the English-speaking world, and his weekly column is carried by more than seventy newspapers worldwide.
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