Think, for a moment, about something daunting that you are facing. Maybe you are struggling right now in one of your courses. Maybe you have a tough decision to make about your major or about life after college. Maybe there is a relationship with a friend or a family member that is on the rocks. Maybe a loved one faces a serious illness. Whether it is one of these things or something else, life provides all of us with difficult situations, realities that occupy a lot of our mental and emotional energy. It can be very easy and very understandable to focus on those things rather than on the present moment and on the people that we encounter. We may become distracted, maybe even irritable to those around us. We understand that they don’t know or understand what we’re going through, but still we can’t help but have to become a bit self-focused, needing to conserve our emotional and spiritual energy for what we face.
But while we all face daunting things, few if any of us have had to face our own imminent death. None of us have had to face death in a violent way at the hands of another. Imagine for a moment if you did face such a prospect. How terrible it would be! How helpless you would feel! How very understandable it would be if you were to just shut down, tune out, focus entirely on this horrific thing that awaited you.
Jesus, amazingly, did not do that. The mental and emotional anguish that he must have been going through in the days and hours leading up to his Passion must have been excruciating. We catch glimpses of it in the Gospel stories, when they tell us that his heart was troubled, or when we hear that he sweat blood in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus was not only aware of his coming physical suffering. Perhaps even more painful to him was the knowledge of the treachery of his friends, the betrayal of Judas and the abandonment of the other disciples.
Bearing the Cross (2015) by Anatoly Shumkin
Faced with all of this, we might expect Jesus to be agitated, distracted, beginning to pull away from his disciples, conserving his emotional and spiritual energy for what he is about to do. And yet, the exact opposite is true. In his last days, as he draws close to the Cross, Jesus’s compassion for those who surround him and those whom he encounters is all the more evident. For example: mere hours before his arrest, Jesus shares an intimate meal with his disciples, sharing with them his knowledge of the Father and calling them “friends” for the first time; he shares with them the Bread that is his Body and the Cup that holds his Blood, and makes it clear that they are connected to him as branches are to a Vine; when Jesus’s arrest occurs, he speaks to Judas as a friend, even as he is betrayed; he heals the wound inflicted by Peter on the servant of Caiaphas the high priest; he consoles the women of Jerusalem who mourn for him; he literally asks his Father to forgive those who crucify him; he has mercy on the penitent thief and assures him he will be with him in Paradise; he ensures those whom he loves the most will be cared for, entrusting his Mother to his best friend John and John to his Mother.
These are just a few examples. No doubt there are more. But it is clear that in his Passion – despite his own intense suffering, physical, mental, spiritual – Jesus was still focused entirely not upon himself but upon others. Jesus was not just gritting his teeth and gutting it out, begrudgingly facing what had to be done. No, he went to the Cross as he did everything else, caring for those whom he encountered, sharing with them to the last his love and his mercy. The Passion of Jesus is his public ministry par excellence.
In today’s Gospel, we hear the explanation for all of these actions and more. Washing another person can be viewed as something servile, as Simon Peter clearly sees it. But it can also be something profoundly compassionate: think of a mother gently washing her child, or a person carefully washing an elderly adult. Jesus’s act is an act of compassion and it is an act of explanation: it is a symbolic sign of the love and service for others with which he went to the Cross. Jesus’s act is a kind of manifestation of his interior being at that moment. It shows what is on his mind and heart in the mere hours before he would be arrested, tortured, and executed. It shows his love in the extreme.
As always, though, Jesus is also teaching. He washes the disciples’ feet not merely to elucidate to them his compassion but also to encourage and inspire them to the same. As we heard, “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.” What they should also do is not literally to wash others’ feet but to love to the extreme – to adopt the whole mindset and attitude of Christ that regards others always with care and compassion, no matter what difficulties we may be facing, no matter what we ourselves may be suffering, even if necessary to the point of death. That is the invitation Jesus shares with us, the model of love and service to which he calls all disciples, those at the Last Supper and us here present.
To love like Christ, though, we need the grace of Christ, and it is through the sacraments par excellence that we receive that grace. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the sacraments draw their power from Jesus’s Passion: through them we share in the love of his suffering and dying. By receiving the sacraments, we “put on Christ” in the words of St. Paul (Gal 3:27). The Church’s sacraments are always Jesus’s sacraments and so they communicate to us the state of his mind and heart, the actual love and compassion with which he went to the Cross. Through them, not only are we sanctified by his grace, but we receive his power and strength to love others in a radical way, despite distractions, despite inconveniences, despite the tragedies and sufferings that may tempt us to turn inward and shut others out.
Leonid Grigorashenko, Jesus Washing the Feet of Simon Peter (c. 1990)
Friends, in the next three days, we enter into the celebration of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. In a profound way, we have the opportunity to receive anew the compassion that Christ showed for us then, that he continues to show for us now each time we receive his sacramental grace. Life provides us with difficult situations: momentous decisions, personal tragedies, crises of faith or of trust in the Church, and more. How desperately we need the grace of Jesus! We need it not just for ourselves, but to share with others, through acts of love and service. The grace of Jesus helps us resist the temptation to turn inwards and focus just on ourselves, and instead allows us to love those present to us right now, to love in and through the suffering perhaps known only to us. By drawing strength from the sacraments, we ourselves become a model of our Master: to love as he loved, to offer ourselves as he offered himself, to redeem our corner of the world as he has redeemed all of it.
May the Eucharistic Christ whom we will receive in a few moments impart to us his very love and compassion, that as we now share in his sufferings, we may one day share in his glory!
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