The Last Bath
April 10, 2022 + Maundy Thursday + John 13:1-17, 31b-35 + Pr. Craig Mueller
Don’t touch me. Words said in the aftermath of a lover’s spat. Or an unwanted advance. Or in a time of pandemic—a cautious cue that invites a bow, or a wave, or smile rather than a hug or handshake. Now we are not so sure about touching someone.
Touch is central to Jesus’ ministry. He lays his hands on people to heal them. He takes children in his arms. And he washes his disciple’s feet.
Touch is at the core of our sacramental community as well. The laying on of hands. The greeting of peace. Baptizing in water. Marking a cross on the forehead. Eating and drinking. Washing feet.
Last Sunday someone asked me what “Maundy” means. Another person admitted that as a child she thought the day was called “Monday Thursday,” strange as it seemed. And it wasn’t until she was thirty that she finally realized it was Maundy Thursday!
Maundy is from the Latin mandatum which means “mandate” or “command.” Though most people think of Jesus’ last supper as the main ritual of this service, it is Jesus’ commandment to love one another in tonight’s gospel, that is primary. Maybe the washing of feet is a kind of “last bath,” if you will. We partake of the bodily ritual of footwashing, trusting that what we do with our bodies will form the attitudes and practices of our everyday lives.
Of course, Peter doesn’t want any part of it. Don’t touch me, he tells Jesus. I should be washing your feet. You have this all wrong. Remember that in John, Jesus is the Word made flesh, God among us. As one writer summarizes these three days: “Jesus removes the outer robe of his glory, wraps himself in the robe of human flesh, suffers and dies for the sake of the world, reclothes himself with glory and resumes his rightful place in bosom of the Creator.” (Jim Greene Sommerville)
Footwashing is a sign of Jesus’ self-emptying for the sake of the world. A self-emptying seen most fully in the cross.
We may have different reasons to say don’t touch me on Maundy Thursday. Footwashing is weird. I get it. “I don’t want anyone to see my feet or touch my feet.” Yet, I hope you will consider the spiritual practice of getting out of your comfort zone. At the very least to reflect on the gift of vulnerability.
To allow our feet to be washed puts us in a vulnerable position. For some of us, it is easier to be in control. The one who gives, the one who does, the one decides.
As another writer says:
“Just as baptism inaugurates us into Jesus’ ministry of tending and washing the wounds of a broken world, we too are in need of the ongoing washing of Jesus and the bathing of our own weary feet if we are to have the strength, compassion, and Spirit to continue that ministry in the world.” (Leonora Tubb Tisdale)
Throughout the Three Days we hold in tension both terror and beauty as we heard last Sunday. We hold together darkness and light. Sorrow and love. Death and life. Even in the face of impending death, Jesus shows us the paradox of our faith. The master becomes the servant. We find our lives by losing them. Strength comes from vulnerability.
We will mark Jesus’ death these three days. And we will also celebrate the new birth of baptism. Birth and death are two of life’s most intimate moments in which we experience touch and vulnerability.
In a book called “Honoring the Body,”1 there is a beautiful story of a woman named Kay giving her mother, Thelma, her last bath in a tub. Thelma is dying of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Kay remembers as a child sitting on the bathroom floor each night, talking with her mother as Thelma had her nighttime bath. They would converse about the events of the day in an unhurried fashion. Thelma would listen and comment as she would swish water over her arms, wring out her washcloth, close her eyes, and scrub her face until it was pink. Kay watched her mother carefully as Thelma dried herself off and smoothed on face cream. Later Kay would imitate her mother’s gestures as she washed her own body.
Now that Thelma is dying, Kay continues to study her mother’s body as it “were the most sacred of texts.” For now Thelma is teaching Kay how to die.
When it comes time for the last bath, Kay and her sister help Thelma sit up on the side of her bed. Then the vomiting begins, draining Thelma’s last bit of strength. But Thelma tells her daughter how to draw the bath, showing with her hands how deep the water should be. Thelma shuffles to the bathroom. Kay and her sister undress her and Thelma grips the bar her husband had installed, while Kay stands by, ready to catch her mother in case she falls.
And then with loving touch, Kay and her sister lower the precious body that Kay had “looked at and loved and memorized” into the bath water. They give her a plastic cup, as she had requested, so she could lift a cup of water and pour it over her back and then her neck and then her throat. Kay notices that the water sounds “like baptism \ holy, quiet, small splashes.” Thelma’s quiet sighs of pleasure are matched only by sobs rising from inside Kay, as tears fall into her mother’s last bath.
Kay gazes upon her mother’s dying body with eyes of love, honoring the holiness of the moment, honoring the holiness of the body itself.
This does not mean that Kay’s heart is not breaking. Or that it is unbearable to hold her mother as she vomits, or to watch helplessly as Thelma struggles to swallow even one sip of water. “This does not mean that Kay does not hate the death her mother is dying. It means that when her mother pours water over her throat and neck, Kay can hear the echoes of the waters of her mother’s baptism” and the dignity of each and every body created in the image of God.
As we wash each others’ feet. As we journey to the cross, and to the healing waters of resurrection, may God touch us. May God bathe us anew in a love that is stronger than death. Amen.
1Stephanie Paulsell, Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice, pp. 35-38.
