On Washing Feet–Liturgical Stepchild

I look forward to Maunday Thursday more than any other part of Holy Week except Easter Sunday.   Yes, Good Friday services, either as a “service of shadows” or built around meditations on “The Seven Last Words” of Jesus are deeply moving.  And I am all in favor, even as a low-church Baptist, of having such services.  Otherwise we skip straight from the triumph of Palm Sunday to the triumph of the Resurrection without experiencing the Cross. A Catholic friend, Fr. Simon Harak, S.J., tells me that the chief Protestant liturgical sin is the sin of “raising Jesus too soon.” I understand. I have seen far too much of this in Baptist life–leading to what Luther called “theologies of glory” rather than “theologies of the cross.”  Thomas Müntzer, that semi-baptist leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, was terribly wrong about many things, but he was right in saying that we need the “bitter Christ,” the rejected and despised Crucified One, and not the “sweet Christ” of so many triumphalist churches.  So, I am big on every service of Holy Week. The Cross looms on Maunday Thursday as well.

But the reason I love Maunday Thursday services so much is because this is when we wash feet as Jesus, according to the Gospel of John, washed the disciples’ feet.  Footwashing has a very mixed record among those of us who are Baptists.  I have never seen it listed as an ordinance/sacrament in any of our confessions of faith, going back to John Smyth’s first Confession in 1609.  But it was frequently practiced among early Baptists, in General (Arminian), Particular (Calvinistic), and Seventh Day Baptist circles, all three of the branches that arose in the 17th C.  In the U.S. footwashing had mostly died out among Baptists by the 19th C., except for the “Primitive” and “Old Regular” Baptists groups of the Appalachian sub-culture, who include footwashing every time they celebrate the Lord’s Supper. But, since many of these Appalachian Baptists are also into “picking up serpents” (and in very foolish ways, like the late Steve Irwin, rather than sensibly holding these venomous reptiles behind the head so that they cannot strike!), few other Baptist groups take them as liturgical role models!!

However, beginning in the late 20th C., scattered congregations in major Baptist denominations (American Baptist, Southern Baptist, Alliance of Baptists, Cooperative Baptists, Progressive National Baptists) began to recover the practice of footwashing and include it in Maunday Thursday celebrations. I first encountered this in the 1980s at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, often led by professors like the church historian Bill Leonard (now Dean of Wake Forest University Divinity School), New Testament professor R. Alan Culpepper (now Dean of McAfee School of Theology, Mercer University), Old Testament professor Pamela J. Scalise (now teaching at Fuller Theological Seminary’s Seattle extension), and theology professor, Molly T. Marshall (now President of Central Baptist Theological Seminary). I do not know if this footwashing on Maunday Thursday has continued at SBTS after Al Mohler and the fundamentalists took over.  At any rate, I soon fell in love with this practice.

I am not certain why the Church through the ages has never considered footwashing an ordinance/sacrament.  Orthodoxy and Catholicism both include other ceremonies as sacraments which have little or no roots in the New Testament.  The Reformers reduced the number of sacraments  to 2 (baptism and that meal known variously as the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, or Holy Eucharist), but it is hard to see why footwashing was not included. The command of the Johannine Christ (”If I your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, so also you should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” John 13:13-14) is at least as strong as that given by Jesus in the Synoptics for the Lord’s Supper.  Critical scholarship has cast much doubt on the historicity of John’s Gospel (with some justification even if some critics take this much too far), but the Reformers were not historical critics in the modern sense. And if we were to use standard critical doubts about the historicity of Dominical commands as our standard for ordinances/sacraments, then it should be noted that the only command to baptize is given by the Risen Christ as part of Matthew’s Great Commission passage and in the longer ending of Mark, which all textual critics agree was a later scribal addition.

But whether or not we call the practice of footwashing a sacrament/ordinance or not (and whatever reasons we give for including or excluding it from such a list), I think recovery of this powerful practice would be good for the whole church.  There is nothing that teaches humble servanthood quite like washing another’s feet and having one’s own feet washed.  My first time, I walked into the service my first year in seminary straight from my part-time job and not knowing that footwashing was a part of the service. I had been working hard and was wearing leather boots. When I realized what was about to happen, I started to panic because I knew my feet probably stank. We were instructed as basins and towels were distributed  to wash the feet of the person on our right. I turned to my left and, to my horror, found that I was sitting next to a woman–and letting her debase herself like this was against everything in my Southern upbringing. (Yes, my mother was an early feminist, but STILL.) So, I had far more problems having my feet washed than washing another’s. Even though I did not confuse the woman in question (a figure of authority, too) with Christ, I still had new understanding of Peter’s objections.

Since that time, I have washed the feet of homeless persons, and of people in church with whom I was at odds.  How much reconciliation in church feuds could be solved with footwashing?  Here is a practice that forms us to be compassionate servants of the One Servant. I know of no other ceremonial practice in Christianity that so thoroughly teaches us that part of discipleship. Several authors have written about the connections between Holy Communion and the Church’s work for social justice, but I think this connection is even stronger in footwashing.

In our Maunday Thursday service, the footwashing usually comes before the Lord’s Supper. I find that I am in so much better frame of mind for eucharistic participation after washing feet and having my feet washed than before hand.

It is also fitting that this take place on the eve of Christ’s execution. Could there be better preparation for Christians living a cruciform life?

So, controversial though the practice is, I am glad to be a footwashing Baptist.  I look forward to that part of tonight’s Maunday Thursday service the most.