We like our feet. Down the ages we have contrived a variety of ways of protecting them – sandals, jack-boots, hush-puppies – and even more of equipping them for football, skating and running. We seem at last to have discovered the all-round comfortable solution – trainers. These, it seems, are regarded as suitable for shoppers, teachers and vicars.
Buts feet get worn out. They are afflicted with bunions, in-growing toe-nails and fallen arches. They also get sweaty. In the days before tarmac came into the world, feet got dusty. And it was this that prompted an exchange between Jesus and his disciples.
It started with Mary anointing Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair. Judas Iscariot protested. He thought the money spent on purchasing oil could have been better used to help the poor. (Being the treasurer of the Jesus company, he had charge of the money and, says the writer, went in for a bit of embezzlement. Later, in chapter 13, we find an unexpected turn of events. Jesus took a basin of water and began to wash the disciples’ feet. Like Judas before him, Peter protested. With complete equanimity, it seems, Jesus enlightened his disciple and explained that if he their lord and teacher had washed their feet, they should be prepared to wash each other’s feet. ‘I have set you an example.’
Few of us have entirely escaped from the need on occasion to feel important, superior to the other person. It may take the form of the insolence of office, to quote a phrase of Shakespeare. That may mean deliberately keeping somebody waiting, or patronising another person. Implicit in our behaviour is a sense that we know better than that other person. It may be our unconscious observance of a class difference. The other person finds it objectionable.
Nowadays we don’t generally wash other people’s feet. But the two incidents from John’s Gospel draw us into an examination of the way we treat other people. When we remember that we are all sinners, we all have shortcomings, we are very much the same as everybody else under the skin, we are careful about such things. And having a sense of humour helps. Charlie Chaplin knew all about that.
PILGRIM COURSE
‘Not through persuasion but through contemplation and discussion.’ This is the watchword of the Pilgrim Course, initiated by St Paul’s church, Finchley, north London. It assumes nothing on the part of those keen to understand the Christian faith. The building received a thorough-going refurbishment in and a new centre in 2008. Leading the ministry team is Nicholas Pye.
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