Thus, the evangelist wants to bring up-to-date the Eucharistic message remembering that if it is not a mutual service, the gift of one’s life for the brothers, an extreme love, it becomes just a rite belonging to “the scene” of this world. We could say that John’s purpose is to make the altar’s sacrament always read and lived as the brother’s sacrament. Eucharistic celebration with the broken bread and the offered wine and the concrete daily service to the brother attract each other mutually as two faces of the participation to Christ’s Easter mystery. Here is then Jesus’ gesture narrated slowly, almost in slow- motion, so that it may be well impressed in the mind of the disciple of every time: Jesus takes off his clothes, takes a towel, puts it round his hips, pours the water in the basin, washes the disciples’ feet, dries them, takes his clothes again… These are action verbs which plastically convey the event of the Maundy. It is a gesture made by Jesus in complete awareness: Jesus, the Kyrios, the Lord, washes his disciples’ feet. That’s an anomalous, paradoxical, roles inverter gesture; a scandalous gesture, as Peter’s reaction shows! And yet, it’s exactly in this way that Jesus tells, “evangelize” God, in the sense of making Him “Gospel” for us.

Two different actions, two sacramental mimes, two signs narrating the same reality: Jesus offers his life and, freely and because of love, goes towards his death turning himself into a slave. Because of this, the same command follows the Eucharistic gesture and the Maundy: “I washed your feet, do as I did”. And that’s what the Church has to do if it wants to be the Lord’s Church and wants to obey its mandate: it has to break the bread, offer the wine, wash the feet in the assembly of the believers and in the history of the man.

Translated from:

ENZO BIANCHI
{link_prodotto:id=320}. Le feste cristiane
Edizioni Qiqajon, 2003, pp. 73-76.