In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
“Little children, I am with you only a little longer. Where I am going, you cannot come,” Jesus says to the disciples. This Holy Week, the sermons have all been focusing on the emotions of this week. When it comes to Maundy Thursday, one of the overriding emotions is anxiety, which is encapsulated in Jesus’ words to his disciples – I’m about to leave you.
Primarily it is Peter who manifests this anxiety, which is ironic. Peter’s given name was Simon, but Jesus gave him the nickname of Peter, which means “rock.” It shows us just how seismic the events of the Passion are – even the disciple who was known for being solid is full of anxiety this week.
I wonder, what are you anxious about right now? I know several people who have recently lost jobs due to the economic downtown in the last few weeks. Many others are dealing with health issues. Some are anxious about the challenges their children are facing. Others have marriages that are struggling. And then there’s reality that there is a culture of meanness that is running through our politics right now. Uncertainty is the only thing that is certain, it seems; so, it’s understandable that there is so much anxiety in the air.
Anxiety first shows up when Peter would prohibit Jesus from washing his feet. In my four decades as a Christian, I’ve attended services on Maundy Thursday before that featured foot-washing. We’ve even done it a few times here at St. Luke’s in recent memory. But it’s always done as a ritual, a symbolic act; never as a true act of practical servanthood. When I was in Kenya in March though, I repeatedly experienced something like foot-washing that gave me a greater appreciation for what was going between Jesus and his disciples.
In Kenya, utensils are rarely used, so you eat with your hands, which makes hand washing absolutely essential. In most homes, churches, and schools where we ate, the hosts would bring out a bowl, a bottle of soap, a pitcher of water, and napkins. They would squeeze the soap into our palms and then pour water over our hands as we washed them over the bowl that someone else was often holding. And there was a clear expectation about how this handwashing was done – it was always the host, or one of their helpers, who helped us in washing our hands. As the guests, we were not expected, or even allowed, to reciprocate and wash our host’s hands, and if there were other guests of honor, they never took up the task of pouring the water or holding the bowel. To do so would have undermined cultural norms around status and respect.
It was the same in Jesus’ culture. The job of washing the feet of the guests was done by the household servants, never the master of the house. When Jesus goes to wash their feet, he’s not showing laudable humility or being what we might lift up today as servant-leadership. No, he is radically upending cultural norms in a very uncomfortable way.
Jesus is destabilizing their relationship and calling into question what could be taken for granted. The one with power is acting as one with none. The direction of service has been reversed, which introduces that sense of uncertainty that I mentioned earlier. It’s not so much that Peter was closedminded about this; he may have well understood Jesus if it had all been explained to him. But, in the absence of understanding, he fell into anxiety. If this master-discipleship dynamic is no longer predictable, what else might become unstable?
It’s worth pausing here to consider how it is that Jesus does the same for us – when does Jesus make us feel anxious? Is it when he tells us to forgive our enemies, or to give away our possessions, or to take up our cross and follow him? Does Jesus make us anxious when he points out that how we treat the least in our society is how we treat him? The truth of the matter is that, if we’re paying attention, Jesus upends all of our lives and makes us anxious as he disturbs and interrupts the status quo. It’s worth paying attention to this anxiety, lest it catch us off guard and we become reactive instead of responsive in our faith.
One of the problems that comes with anxiety is that we start making up the meaning of things and telling ourselves stories instead of remaining curious. The translation we heard this evening was “Peter said to him, ‘You will never wash my feet.’” But that’s a weak translation – what Peter really said was “In all eternity, you will not wash my feet.” Of course, that’s exactly what Peter, and we, long for – to be in relationship with Jesus for all eternity. When we are anxious, so often we go to the extremes and say things that are more definitive than they ought to be. In Peter’s case, the words weren’t terribly offensive. But how many times do we say something that we immediately wish we could take back? It can take years to build trust, but anxious hyperbole can erase that trust in a matter of seconds.
Peter has previously referred to Jesus as his teacher, but he doesn’t ask any questions here. He puts himself in control by telling Jesus how this is going to go instead of asking a curious question like, “Tell me, Master, why are you washing our feet?” Beloved, because of the stories we tell ourselves when things are uncertain or anxious we end up living a lie. We falsely believe that we aren’t good enough or loveable, or we follow idols that make promises they can never deliver on. Things are rarely as bad as we make them out to be. As the author Anne Lamont put it, “The worst thing is never the last thing because grace always bats last.” But anxiety narrows our vision, closes our imaginations, and often leads to catastrophizing thoughts.
But then Peter overcorrects in his anxiety. We can become frenetic in our anxiety, racing from one thought to another without much mindfulness. In May and June, we’ve contracted to bring two workshops to St. Luke’s hosted by the Second Breath Center in Greensboro. About a dozen years ago, my spiritual director introduced me to that term – “second breath.” She said that when we encounter moments of anxiety, crisis, or challenge, the difference between losing control and keeping our cool is often a second breath, a space for the Holy Spirit to breathe in us. Can we take just one extra breath to pay attention the Spirit’s call in us instead of our anxiety’s alarm?
This isn’t about chastising Peter because we are all Peter – we all do this. But Peter doesn’t take a second breath. Jesus says, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Peter hadn’t caught his breath and panics. It seems that he forgot that Jesus isn’t threatening the relationship, he’s already offered to wash his feet. But Peter isn’t following, he’s trying to lead. So, again, he grabs control and says “Not my feet only but also my hands and head.” A second breath could have led to a fuller and more faithful response.
I can’t tell you how much I’d encourage you to try daily mediation as a way of strengthening your second-breath muscles. A few months ago, I started meditating daily. I started with 5 minutes at a time and have worked up to 8 minutes. Often, I focus on a lit candle as a reminder of the Holy Spirit’s presence, or I use the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, or I sit in front of an icon of Jesus and sit in his gaze. Each week, I take a look at my calendar and schedule it in daily. Our lives have so much anxiety, if we don’t have practices to share that anxiety with Jesus and let him take the yoke with us, the anxiety will absolutely absorb us and lead from going from one extreme to the next, as we see Peter doing.
And it really is this relationship with Jesus that makes all the difference in anxiety. Martin Buber was a 20th-century Jewish philosopher who wrote a book called I and Thou. The short summary is that our world consists of two types of relationships: I-It and I-Thou. I-It relationships are when we relate to things and people as objects, whereas I-Thou relationships are marked by a sense of mutual encounter.
What anxiety does is to thrust us into a scary and uncertain world of control, competition, commodification, and categorization. We end up treating people through a transactional lens – what am I getting out of this relationship? How can I maximize my return while protecting my investment? This is how Peter is initially relating to Jesus. He’s thinking in terms of status and respect. It leads to his initial rejection to be washed by Jesus – it doesn’t fit with the categories of master and disciple.
And his over-correction remains in the I-It category – “Oh, I have to be washed by you, then let’s go all the way.” It’s on the other end of the spectrum, but still chasing the same goal – being in control and having things be predictable. He’s thinking in terms of what he will get from the relationship.
Jesus though, invites Peter, and us all, into an I-Thou relationship – a relationship of mutuality, of surrender, of connection. The I-Thou relationship is one in which it isn’t about what we give or receive; it’s not an economic relationship in that sense. Instead, I-Thou is about encountering the fullness of one another and being with one another not for any purpose other than being together. Sure, there is usually transformation and grace that comes from that presence and fellowship, but it comes as a gift, not the goal.
Through his Passion, Jesus opens the way for us to be in a relationship with the Eternal Thou, which we call “God,” the Thou in whom we discover the fullness of what it means to be an “I.” Jesus, in fully giving himself for us, enables us to have an I-Thou relationship with God who loves, accepts, and welcomes us, despite our anxieties, sins, and even deaths. It’s what Jesus offers to us in the Eucharist – “This is my body that is for you.”
Jesus, for us and for our salvation, gives all of himself to us to draw us into the abundance of his love which is what makes all things well. Peter, like us, shows us just how difficult it can be to allow ourselves to be embraced by this radical and subversive love. The work of faith is to move us from the I-It view of religion in which we anxiously focus on rules and rewards, into the gracious and redeemed I-Thou in which we are welcomed into a love that transcends every boundary and meets every anxiety with the peace of our Good Shepherd who lays down his life for us, his flock.
