Washing the feet of prisoners? It’s your turn!
Well, it was Jesus who started this whole business of foot-washing. Yes, that Jesus, whose death and resurrection we remember this week. In many churches around the country on Maundy or Holy Thursday, there’ll be foot-washing ceremonies. Remembering that unusual event in the Last Supper, people will wash the feet of fellow worshipers and pray for them while doing so. Polite, clean, beautiful. The original ritual with our Lord and his disciples, however, did not take place in a fancy church with running water, stained glass windows and padded pews, nor did it involve beautiful, clean, pedicured feet. In those days feet were filthy. People wore sandals in the dusty streets of Israel. The only people who washed feet were slaves. And in that hierarchical system, a slave was property, not entirely human, someone to whom one could do anything with impunity. So of course, it was the slave who washed feet. And this act was considered beneath the dignity, beneath the h...