All four gospels have the Last Supper scene. It goes on and on in John, for four very long chapters. But he doesn't have anything to say about taking bread and taking the cup, as all the other gospels do. Even Paul talks about the Eucharist as a tradition in the early church. John does have, very early in the gospel, this business of the feeding of the five thousand. And his Jesus ends up saying "I am the bread of life and unless you eat of the bread of life, you will not have life."

But it is interesting that he doesn't have what we call the "institution scene" in the gospel. Rather there is this extraordinary gesture of the washing of feet.

I think it is not totally farfetched to say that the washing of the feet is illuminating for the Eucharist. It is illuminating for the Christian life, for what Jesus was all about and for what we are to become. Footwashing was a normal thing in a country where the streets were open sewers, and you didn't wear shoes. So people's feet smelled and were dirty. It was a standard thing to have one's feet washed, especially at large parties. But, who did it? It was the most menial job in the house. Feet were washed by the youngest child or, if it was a wealthier family, by the lowest of the slaves. But here we have this extraordinary gesture of this man, who was not just the friend of these people but was seen as the leader, taking that position: making himself absolutely available in the most menial way, in an absolutely unintimidating way, to everyone else.

That, I think, is consonant with this business of Jesus taking bread and breaking it. Because if you look back into Jesus' life, one of the extraordinary things about him was he ate with everybody. Jesus ate with everybody. This is an enormous scandal. It got him into trouble, got him into trouble so that, as we will see tomorrow, he was killed for it, because we need, we exist on these social divisions, these categories. "I belong here, you belong there. We certainly don't belong together." What we believe Jesus is saying, of course, is that we all belong together. That's the way we only belong.

There is yet another aspect of this is too. Jesus is illuminating something else. There's a wonderful line in the book of Zechariah. (Zechariah, apparently which Jesus knew very well, has all kinds of Messianic text. We heard it last Sunday. It's the Zechariah text which says "Look Israel, your messiah is coming to bring you out of exile. He comes to you riding not on a war horse, but on a donkey.") Later on, in the book of Zechariah, there is this extraordinary thing: in the Messianic Age, even the cooking pots and the bells on the horse's bridles will be sacred to the Lord. What he's getting at is that, with the Messianic Age, we have a radical redefinition of what is sacred, of what is holy.

Now we think we know what is holy. This chapel is a holy place. We have holy fathers and holy mothers and holy objects. Of course the whole meaning of "holiness", anthropologically, is that we distinguish that from the profane. We make divisions. We make separations. But in the Messianic Age, what for Zecharial is supposed to be illuminated is that everything in our life is holy. We cannot make this facile distinction between what is holy and what is not. Our holiness will consist in precisely that open table fellowship. The bread is holy. The table is holy and it is holy insofar as it includes everybody. Everybody.

Patty McLaughlin gave me something that someone in her office had put out. It's kind of an imaginary picture as if the world consisted of one hundred people, but half of the world's population would be malnourished. And 80% would be ill-housed and 70% would be illiterate. And so Lent is a time when we redefine holiness. Those are holy statistics. Those are holy statistics. They have to become holy statistics for us. Holy numbers. The bread that is not broken is not holy bread. Only the bread that is broken and shared is holy bread. And bread is supposed to be holy.

The difficult thing is, of course, to discover how we open our eyes, how we open our hearts to see all of these people who go to bed hungry tonight as somehow connected to us? Not in some idealistic way but in some very concrete way. So that, yes, we rest uneasily to some extent. We rest uneasily because of that. Because this is a holy fact. These three billion people who are hungry tonight is a holy fact. And our holiness, of course, consists in precisely coming to a point that we see that as a holy fact and those hungry people.

As I have been thinking of this the last few days and it all sounds so safely abstract. Is the person who lit fire to this room holy? Yeah. That person is holy too. And there is something wrong with me to the extent that I don't understand that or want to dissolve it into pity or some kind of sadness that my property was destroyed. Only someone who would go around washing everybody's feet, doing this grubby job, can bring us, can move us, to recognize that everybody and everything is holy. That's why this is Holy Thursday and we are going to Holy Communion or we should be. But we will try to imitate Jesus and the foot washing.

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Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
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