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Just Another Jim
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Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy

The Men Who Were Not There

Essay on the Holy Thursday Foot Washing Service
April 28, 2005

Holy Thursday evening in the Orthodox Church is quite unlike the western Christian Maundy Thursday. The primary service of the night is the Reading of the Twelve Gospels. It is a two and half hour affair in which all the Gospel texts dealing with Christ's passion are read. The primary focus of this service is hearing the Gospel story of the passion. It's not hearing about the Gospel story, nor talking about the effects of it, nor celebrating it—It is simply about hearing the story from beginning to end.

Since the twelve readings are interspersed with prayers and many hymns, it is long, and it is therefore appropriate that one of the segments of the evening focuses on Jesus asking the disciples to watch and pray with him—something they do not do well. In that context, an amusing, but enlightening, incident occurred at about the fourth or fifth reading. A family who is joining the church on Easter has a developmentally disabled child of about ten or twelve. Every time the Gospel is read, two acolytes carrying candlesticks come out and stand on either side of the Royal Doors, from where the Gospel is read. In almost all services this, of course, only happens once. But on Thursday, when the acolytes came out yet one more time for another Gospel reading, this boy said (loud enough for all to hear), “Oh no, not again!” Of course he spoke much more than he knew. The very nature of the latter half of Holy Week is that it is a marathon of watching and waiting. Time has been ripening for several thousand years. Now the time is at hand and the events of human salvation happen quickly (in the context of time) but in a marathon of momentous event after momentous event (in the context of a typical 24 hour day). “Oh no, not again!” gets to the heart of watching and waiting as it carries on hour after hour, service after service.

While it is a service focused on the readings, it is not a service without drama. The music is set in mournful tones. After each Gospel is read a candle is lit. About half way through the readings, after the reading about Simon being taken from the crowd and made to carry the cross, a procession occurs. In one sense it's like the processions at every Divine Liturgy, when the clergy and acolytes carry the holy gifts around the church and back to the altar. But in this procession the priest carries the cross around the church. After the procession, Christ is put upon it and the cross is set up in front of the iconostasis. From there to the end of the service, Christ hanging on the cross becomes the visual focal point of everything that happens.

So it is that this service of readings that tells the story of the crucifixion, from beginning to end, in words and through actions, is one of the most dramatic services of all of Holy Week. There are not many dry eyes at the end of the evening, when the crucified Christ is reverenced by the congregation before departing for home.

But there's another service on Thursday night, and in spite of the power of the main service, it was the small first service that captivated my imagination on this Holy or Maundy Thursday. "Maundy" comes from the Latin "mundatim," meaning "command." It refers to the command of Christ, after he washed the disciples feet, that they do likewise and love one another. One half hour prior to the start of the primary service, the priest washes the feet of twelve men, in memory of Christ washing the disciples' feet on the night before he was crucified. (Because of the symbolism involved and, no doubt, historically for reasons of propriety, only men are allowed.) The prior Sunday the priest said he was still looking for twelve men to have their feet washed. He implied that it was always difficult to find the necessary people. When the service began I couldn't help but notice that there were not even twelve men in the building, although there were quite a number of married women, conspicuously single, sitting in the pews. But the priest began, and during the half hour a couple more men came in and were recruited. After eleven pairs of feet had been washed there was an awkward pause. The priest then began to set the bowl aside and return to the preparation of the main service. But at the last moment the greeter rushed forward and whispered something in the priest's ear; the priest came back with the basin, and one more man came forward to have his feet washed. As the service came to a close, suddenly, men arrived at church (barely in time for the main service! Or in some cases, a few minutes late.) to join their wives who had already staked out a place to sit.

I am not privy to the requirements of who is eligible to have their feet washed, nor to the process of finding them in the days prior to Holy Thursday; neither have I talked to anyone about the service since then, but I was left with the distinct impression that no one wanted their feet washed. I guess my perspective must be rather skewed, but I would consider it a great honor to be one of the twelve, but that was clearly not the case at St. Thomas. I'm guessing the men were too embarrassed by such an intimate act. (Having the priest wash, and then kiss your feet is indeed an embarrasingly intimate event.)

The contrast of the two services stand as an illustration of the true nature of divine grace. When we can watch God's grace in action from a bit of distance it's dramatic, lovely, moving, and utterly incomprehensible in its magnitude (as in the main service). And for most of us, that's exactly where we like to keep God's grace, at a bit of distance, because there is another side to divine grace as expressed in the living Jesus Christ as well as in the church, the Body of Christ: grace is embarrassingly intimate. When we talk about grace we talk about “For God so loved the world,” and the cross, and Mary weeping for the loss of her son. When we talk about grace we talk about big things. Furthermore, when God offers grace, we think that this is the sort of stuff he is offering—big stuff. But when God does grace, he does embarrassingly intimate things, like wash feet, mend broken hearts and broken lives, and enter into the innermost secrets of those who receive that grace.

Grace is intimate . . . Much more embarrassingly intimate than we are comfortable dealing with. And that's why, after reverencing the crucified Christ on the cross, after hearing the mournful hymns and the Gospel story, I left, not thinking about all the drama, but about the priest, the basin of water, and all the men who were not there.