One of my earliest memories is not so much a single moment as a ritual whose repetition is ingrained in my mind. My toddler brother and I are in the bath. The bathroom in our Midlands South Carolina home had brown carpet. The carpet has a slight shag to it; not 70s shag but more than you normally see these days. Sometimes it is Dad bathing us and sometimes it is Mom. Sometimes they were both in there. They would kneel next to the tub.
They wash our hair with Johnson’s baby shampoo and rinse it off by pouring bathwater out of the old plastic cups that had been collected at Paladin Stadium over many falls. This was how our hair was rinsed off at my grandparents’ house too and I was probably six or seven years old before I realized that not every child in the Palmetto State was baptized in the reminder of Furman football’s 1980s dominance of the Southern Conference. We get out of the tub with fingers pruny. Mom or Dad dry us off and my bare feet settled in to the tickle of slightly shaggy brown carpet.
It’s this consistent memory of our parents caring for us by washing us. Which is what you do for a child when they can’t wash themselves. It can be a sloppy process. There’s usually a lot of splashing. Clothes get wet. If the kid knows that bed comes after bath time, it becomes a high stakes game of aquatic chicken. For a parent, it can be fun or it can be a chore. But it’s something my parents did out of love and something EA and I tried to do out of love for our own boys.
Despite the relative hassle, to kneel and wash a loved one—especially when they cannot wash themselves—is a fairly natural act of service. Then Maundy Thursday comes along and Jesus raises the degree of difficulty by example. He kneels down and washes the feet of his followers. And, yes, feet can be dirty and disgusting yet the thing that always gets me about that moment is that he knows these friends are going to use those feet to run away within hours. Even more, he kneels before Judas Iscariot and washes his feet as well. Knowing full well what Judas is going to do, Jesus still takes the role of the servant before his betrayer out of love.
Then Jesus tells his followers to love each other as he has loved them. To serve even those that are hard to love. At some churches, Maundy Thursday services are a chance to take this mandate and—no pun intended—do a dry run. Members of the community are invited to wash each other’s feet if they want to take part. It’s a symbolic act. We can and should love in ways beyond washing feet, but the act nudges us out of our comfort zones.
So I was standing in the aisle of an Episcopal church in Middle Tennessee; all of us waiting to have our feet washed and in turn wash someone else’s feet. And it struck me as a little funny that all of us were walking around the church in our bare feet. A person is stripped of ceremony in their bare feet. We typically have shoes on when we are among everybody; especially at church. You have bare feet when you are running through your house trying to get ready. Or when you prop your legs up after a long day. Or when you are splashing around in the pool. Or when you are a kid.
That is when I thought of Mom and Dad bathing us as children. That is when I remembered the love they had and have for us. The love we have for our children. The fact that Jesus told his followers that we must be like children to enter God’s community. Stripped of ceremony. Ready to receive and to give love.