The Wrong Thing, The Wrong Time, The Wrong People

If you were to ask me to describe Jesus’ ministry in one sentence, I would put it this way: "Jesus’ ministry was largely a matter of doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people." Even the most ordinary actions: picking grain, touching a woman, going fishing, sharing a meal, washing someone’s feet, became strange and amazing events because of the way, and the time, and with whom Jesus did them. Jesus had a knack for seeing extraordinary possibilities in ordinary life, in ways that were both liberating and threatening, depending upon your point of view.

Now most of us probably experience doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people as a recipe for disaster. I have to confess that I’ve had more than my share of such experiences, from the girl I took to my senior prom (need I say more?) to getting into a power struggle with my ten-year old about making his bed. Guess who won that battle? Most of the time, such events are harmless enough and we manage to survive. But sometimes, we are called to do the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people to bear witness to God’s love for each and all.

That is what Jesus did so often, and so well, that it got him killed. In Jesus’ time, much as in ours, there were powerful forces at work to make sure that people didn’t do the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people. The guardians of social propriety are vigorous in their enforcement of the rules, making sure that people know their place and that public order is maintained. The forces of social convention are so powerful, so well internalized, that we often fail to even notice how they operate. So much the better for those who benefit from them.

In the midst of such a world, Jesus continually does the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong people. This rather curious business of washing the disciples’ feet recorded in the Gospel of John is a good case in point. In fact, in John’s Gospel it takes the place of the Passover meal, the institution of what would become Holy Communion, as the symbolic action that reveals the whole meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. However obscure it may seem to us, this action of washing the disciple’s feet is crucial to our understanding of Jesus.

Washing his disciples’ feet was definitely the wrong thing to do, primarily, I would suggest, because it was an act of gender role subversion. Jesus’ humiliation consisted in his doing “women’s work.” Generally, commentators have interpreted the meaning of this action in terms of Jesus taking on the role of a servant or slave. That is true, as far is it goes. More to the point, however, is that Jesus takes on a female role. In all of the extant biblical and rabbinical references to the action of foot washing, it was done always by a woman as a practical act of hospitality for guests who entered a home after walking along dusty roads in sandals.

The English translation of Jesus’ action in the Gospel of John actually betrays a certain prudish reserve. The Greek text literally states that during dinner, Jesus took off his clothes, wrapped a towel around him self, poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet. This is a scene of tremendous intimacy and physical vulnerability. No wonder Peter responds initially by saying, “You will never wash my feet.” “Uh uh, I’m not going there!”

The physical vulnerability and humiliation of the Cross is prefigured here in the physical vulnerability and humiliation of a half-naked, gender-bending rabbi washing his disciples feet. For the community from which the Gospel of John came, it was this strange and disconcerting act of gender nonconformity that became the symbolic action par excellence of self-giving love. Jesus says to his (male) disciples in effect, “If you want to know what it means to love, you need to act more like women.”

My point here is not to promote traditional gender stereotypes about compassionate women and unfeeling men, nor am I suggesting that what it means to be a man or woman in 21st Century America is the same as what it meant in 1st Century Palestine. My point, rather, is that the liberation that Jesus offers in his death and resurrection entails freedom from bondage to the social constructions of “male” and “female,” as well as those of “slave” and “master” already transcended by the Hebrew slaves’ exodus from Egypt celebrated in the Passover meal. Our freedom to love and serve one another must not be constrained by social conventions of propriety. These conventions far too often serve to trap us in structures of sin such as racism
and patriarchy.

We need to hear the good news that God’s love shatters the bounds of social propriety to embrace the whole of humanity. Acts of humble service and hospitality to guests and strangers, even when such acts make us vulnerable to the chastisement of the guardians of social propriety, are part and parcel of what it means to love one another as Jesus loved us. This means defying gender roles or any other social expectations contrary to the New Commandment, that we love one another. Nothing is more important than the self-giving love that Jesus exemplifies for us and calls us to offer to each other.

Not only does Jesus’ love for his disciples entail vulnerability to charges of impropriety; it even embraces his enemies. Imagine what it must have felt like for Jesus to gently bathe the feet of Judas. How his heart must have ached to know that the love he offered so freely would not only be rejected; it would be betrayed. Now, perhaps we can imagine loving our enemies; at least enemies are known entities; sometimes, they are even honorable. But to love someone who betrays our trust, that is another thing altogether. And yet, we are commanded to love. Love is not a sentimental feeling, but an act of the will directed toward the good of the beloved regardless of whether or not the beloved “deserves” it. There is not one of us who is too good to wash another's feet. There is not one us who is so evil as to be denied such washing; not even Judas.

Tonight, as we fill these bowls with water and wash each other’s weary feet, we defy all kinds of notions of propriety. In so doing, we may feel uncomfortable, exposed, even a bit silly. Given the many messages we have internalized about what it means to be divine or human, male or female, young or old, gay or straight, rich or poor, undocumented or legal, stepping outside the bounds of what is considered “normal” can feel threatening.

We don’t normally wash the feet of people we know very well, much less those of strangers. Jesus calls us to go even one step further and wash the feet of those who have hurt and betrayed us. The lesson in this is that our willingness to love others through compassionate service must continually transcend the bounds of our safety zone. Jesus’ entire ministry was marked by the courage to challenge social norms that served as barriers to the expression of God’s love. His was not a juvenile flouting of the rules for the sake of self-expression, but a creative and challenging transvaluation of values for the sake of self-giving love. Jesus broke the rules for the sake of those oppressed by the rules.

This ritual of foot washing is an opportunity to examine the many rules, norms, and identities that we have internalized. Whom do they serve? Do they help or hinder me in following Jesus in the way of the Cross? Are they rooted in love, or in fear? As followers of Jesus, we are not called to be nice, or pure, or even politically correct. We are called to be holy, completely open to receiving and sharing God’s love; however foolish, vulnerable, and risky it may seem.

“Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the religious authorities so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ I give you a new commandment that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Amen.

Whose Desire Are You?

What are we to make of Lent? There is a part of us, more or less strong, that is resistant to this season of self-examination and penitence. We suspect that it is designed to make us feel bad about ourselves. And I would be lying if I promised that such feelings would not be a byproduct of our Lenten observance, arising as we grow in self-awareness.

Feelings of sorrow and regret, however, are transient. We are not meant to remain stuck in them, for they are not the point of Lent. Lent is an opportunity to reorient ourselves toward freedom; freedom for the sake of giving ourselves over to our most passionate desire. Perhaps our real fear is not that we will feel bad, but rather that we will feel really, really good. It may be that what we really resist is being given our desire from God, discovering that there is so much more to life than we dared hope, forever preventing us from settling for anything less.

Lent is about getting in touch with our desires, and Jesus is teaching us something very important about desire in his discourse on almsgiving, prayer, and fasting in Matthew chapter six. Typically, we think of our desires as self-generated, something that we possess. We operate, as James Alison describes, as if

There is a blob located somewhere within each one of us and normally referred to as a “self.” This more or less bloated entity is pretty stable, and there come forth from it arrows which aim at objects. So, “I” desire a car, a mate, a house, a holiday, some particular clothes and so on and so forth. The desire for the object comes from the “I” which originates it, and thus the desire is truly and authentically “mine” . . . Since my desiring self, my “I”, is basically rational, it follows that my desires are basically rational, and thus that I am unlike those people who I observe to have a clearly pathological pattern of desire – constantly falling for an unsuitable type of potential mate and banging their head against the consequences, or hooked on substances or patterns of behaviour that do them no good. Those people are in some way sick, and their desires escape the possibilities of rational discourse. Unlike me and my desires. (James Alison, Prayer: a case study in mimetic anthropology, pp 1-2)

Now, this view of ourselves may seem reassuring, providing a sense of control, balance, and security. In truth, however, when it comes to desire we know that the difference between us and those people is much smaller than we’d like to admit. Our desires are far less rational, manageable, and serene than we assume. It is not that “I” generate and control my desires, so much it is that my desires make “me” into the person “I” am. But if “I” am not the source and arbiter of my desires, than who is?

Jesus provides us a clue when he warns, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 6:1) The danger here is that we allow our actions to be dictated by the social other. We are driven by the approval or disapproval of others in such a way as to constitute our identity as we internalize and imitate their desires. Again, to quote Alison,

“We desire according to the desire of the other”. It is the social other, the social world which surrounds us, which moves us to desire, to want, and to act . . . gesture, language, and memory are not only things which “we” learn, as though there were an “I” that was doing the learning. Rather it is the case that, through this body being imitatively drawn into the life of the social other, gesture, language and memory form the “I” that is in fact one of the symptoms, one of the epiphenomena, of that social other. This “I” is much more malleable than it is comfortable to admit. And even more difficult: it is not the “I” that has desires, it is desire that forms and sustains the “I”. The “I” is something like a snapshot in time of the relationships which preexist it and one of whose symptoms it is. (Alison, pp. 3-4.)

Something like this account of desire is implicit in Jesus’ teaching. He assumes that we are imitative creatures run by the desires of others, who are continually seeking approval in order to know who we are and what we should do. This is neither good nor bad in itself. It just is.

This description moves into judgment when the question arises: Whose desire are you imitating? For Jesus, the issue is whether or not you are seeking your reward from the social other, or from the One whom he calls “Father.” Jesus does not question the truth that we are given to our selves, that we discover our identity, as it is reflected back to us in the eyes of another.

Yes, but which other? We know there is a social other which gives us our desires and moves us this way and that. But is there Another Other, who is not part of the social other, and who has an entirely different pattern of desire into which it is seeking to induct us? That of course is the great Hebrew question, the discovery of God who is not-one-of-the-gods . . . (Alison, p. 4.)

Jesus reveals the pattern of desire of the social other, what is often referred to in the New Testament as “the world,” to be driven by fear, rivalry, greed, and violence. It gives rise to an identity, an “I”, that is defined “over-and-against” some other through a process of scapegoating. The crucifixion of Jesus is testament to the reality of the violent lie upon which the world – and the self – is founded.

This is what is meant by the Church’s teaching regarding original sin. Original sin is simply our complicity, willy-nilly, with the pattern of desire that we internalize from the social other. Original sin is lodged at the level of culture, rather than biology, and is transmitted through socialization rather than sexual reproduction per se, but St. Augustine’s basic insight is correct. This sinful pattern of desire is massively prior to our birth and is simply “the way of the world” into which we are born.

Jesus asks us, “From whom are you seeking your reward – from the social other or from God?” The problem with seeking the social other’s reward is that we will receive it, and then cling to it. We will become evermore drawn into the pattern of desire established by the violent lie. We will seek the world’s approval and we will get it; or not, but either way we will be defined in relationship to it.

Jesus seeks to free us from bondage to the world’s pattern of desire, by giving us to learn God’s pattern of desire, and to be willing to have that desire shape our identity. This is what it means to receive our reward from the Father who sees in secret, the Creator who is not in any way in rivalry with us or defined over-and-against anything at all, but rather in relationship to Whom all things are meant to be an expression of life-giving love.

Jesus invites us to detach ourselves from the world’s reward system long enough to get a taste of the desire given to us by God; to practice justice, generosity, and self-denial authentically, in the service of others, and not as a religious veneer to the violent lie. Prayer is the key to realizing this freedom.

It is through prayer that we become aware of our desires and can begin to discern the internalized voices of the social other that drive us. This is a practice of radical vulnerability, in which we allow God to gently sift through this pattern of desire and become willing to have it transformed into a pattern that conforms to God’s intention for Creation. Rather than living in denial about our desires, or struggling to renounce them, the invitation is to simply share them with God.

Over time, such prayer reveals to us the source of the inner voices that drive us, and as we begin to discover the extent to which these sources are rooted in fear and violence, as we begin to acknowledge reality, their power drops away of their own accord. We don’t have to renounce or resist anything. They simply lose their appeal.

We can trust this process because at the same time we are being given to know that “Another Other,” God, is holding us in unending and unrestricted love and that what we really, really desire is to be given our identity by this Love. We discover a depth of passion we never knew we had, a passionate love for God and for all things in God in comparison to which the world’s pattern of desire seems pale indeed.

All this is the reward from the “Father” who sees in secret, operating surreptitiously to undermine from within the world’s pattern of desire. The instruction to go into our room and shut the door when we pray is Jesus’ way of saying, “Detach from the world’s reward system, give yourself some space to detox from the addictive and destructive pattern of desire into which you’ve been socialized. Share your desires openly with God so that they can be transformed, and receive a reward far greater than you could ask for or imagine.”

Lent is a time to detox from the world’s pattern of desire. It is painful to discover the extent to which we have been run by a reward system that is actually killing us, spiritually and even physically. But this realization is the first step in letting go of this old way of being; a way of being for which we already have been forgiven so that we can become free to receive the pattern of desire that only God can satisfy.

This is the “treasure in heaven” about which Jesus speaks, which, unlike the rewards of the world, is incorruptible. When we are passionately in love with God, completely given to the pattern of desire shaped by this love, then we will have found treasure indeed, and will no longer be willing to settle for anything less.

During this season of Lent, we are invited to courageously explore with God the question: “Whose desire am I? Am I an expression of God’s loving desire, or am I an expression of the world’s fear-based desire?”

Whose desire are you?