Our journey thus far through Lent has led us to this ‘Thursday of Mysteries’, the term used in the Maronite and Syriac Orthodox churches, officially beginning the Paschal Triduum at the Mass of the Last Supper and the end of Lent.  Also known in English as ‘Shere Lent’ meaning clean or bright, when it was customary to clean the altars and indeed one’s soul and one’s self to the extent of shearing the beard on that day!  We are given a new commandment – Mandatum, to love another as Christ has loved us. We really witness Jesus giving his Body and Blood, his beautiful and poignant act of humility in removing his outer garments and washing his disciples’ feet – an act usually reserved to a slave. We see here roles reversed, the old order shaken, the beginning of something we can hardly put into words.

But paradoxically, it is all so simple. Let us begin with clothes…

CLOTHING is often of great symbolic significance in the scriptures beginning with Genesis and Adam and Eve who didn’t have any at all, at least to begin with.  It can signify status, positions of authority and a way of life, like a nun’s habit. In his book, ‘Sacred Fire’, Ronald Rolheiser describes the image of Christ removing his outer garment, ‘…as a symbol of humility and vulnerability.  Jesus modelled that for his apprentices.  Unlike Jesus, our outer garments are pride, judgments and our sense of superiority over others.  We can’t truly serve others unless we remove our “outer garments”’.  This is of course beautifully enacted by the priest removing his ‘outer garment’ or chasuble and wrapping a cloth around his waist before washing the feet of twelve people at Mass.

The apostle Peter objected initially before going the whole hog and asking to be washed all over.  Perhaps in some deeply mysterious way, he needed to be washed before he denied Jesus three times. Why, didn’t Jesus say, ‘You too are clean?’  Jesus could see into the heart of Peter who nevertheless needed this retrospective cleansing, preparing him for his deep remorse when he heard the cock crow and he knew he had denied knowing  Jesus three times.  Peter was deeply ashamed, did his mind flash back to this washing…did he, in the depths of his remorse, understand that Jesus had already washed him clean of his sin? 

Now is the chance to experience a KAIROS moment…on this day and the days to come: heaven and earth and the underworld would collide – darkness prevail,  the veil of the curtain be torn in two, the world shaken to its depths and foundations of hell itself rendered speechless.  At the centre of all this, ECCE HOMO, BEHOLD, THE MAN presaging the stripping of his own garments, his dignity, the tearing of his beard, his life, all that he could call human.  BUT, peeling off the layers of his humanity revealed the new garment of salvation, the garment of light and everlasting life, his wedding garment if you like, joining together and redeeming in the sacrifice of his body, the fractured world of sin and death with the light of everlasting life.

No artist has come anywhere near approaching this mystery of the resurrection.  It can perhaps only be experienced in the act of removing our own outer garments of distrust which can conceal,  ‘…our inner garment, the image and likeness of God inside us and when we are in touch with this, we can find strength to wash one another’s feet across any divide…and begin to  feel sympathy for one another beyond our words and differences.’ (Rolheiser).  We must allow Jesus to wash us or, as he said to Peter, ‘You can have no place with me. (John 13:8).

Can we wash each other’s feet?  I remember decades ago a sister in our community who felt moved to do just that. And she did. It was all very ad hoc and simple but what it meant for those on the receiving end was impossible to describe.  We all have an ‘inner garment’ if we have the courage to discover it by removing our ‘outer garment’ which can hide us from ourselves.

In this jubilee year of Hope, (cf Heb 3:1-19) we have here every incentive to cast aside our old and worn garments for that of Christ himself. We are to ‘put on Christ’ (Rom 13:14) so moving forward from darkness to light.  It is a Kairos moment, NOW, time is blurring, the 3 HODIES of Christmas meld with this time appointed by God, seizing this opportunity given us TODAY – HODIE. This is the right moment, the critical moment. ‘The time has come’ says Paul, ‘awake O sleeper and rise from the dead and Christ will give you light’ (Rom 13:11).

‘And though the divine nature could not admit the sting of death, by being born from us, he took what he could offer for us…so all shall live in Christ.’  (Leo the Great Sermon 8).

Sr Julian