I went to seminary for 4 years at Sacred
Heart School of Theology in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in preparation to be a priest.
Right before graduation, the school gathered at a sending ceremony to say
farewell to all of us who were being ordained for the priesthood and to send us
back to our home dioceses to serve as priests.
At that ceremony, each graduate spoke a few parting words and were presented
with gifts. The gifts included a Bible, to show us the importance of the Word
of God in our lives and in our ministry.
As priests, the Word of God is to be at the foundation of our faith
& our lives as priests. We also
received a towel, on which a portion of today's Gospel is printed: “Jesus
poured water into a basin & began to wash the disciples' feet & to dry
them with a towel that was tied around his waist.” What this towel and this Gospel passage tell
me is that first and foremost, as a priest, I am not to put myself on a
pedestal, but rather I am called to be a servant just as Jesus came to
serve. One day Sister Paulinus came into
my office at St Richard where I had the Bible and towel on my shelf, and she
asked me about them. I told her the
story behind them. She remarked how that towel said a lot about the seminary
where I studied, how all of us, even priests, should aspire to servanthood. This
is important for us all to remember, since in our modern society, the message
is so often that we should get ahead, to succeed in our careers, to earn as
much money and material things as we can. The message of serving God and
serving our brothers and sisters gets pushed aside.
Servanthood is an important theme this evening
in Jesus washing the feet of the disciples.
We hear St. Paul tell us about Jesus offering his body and blood to his
disciples during his last supper with them – this is servanthood as well. In
his apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist, Pope Benedict explained how the
Eucharist we celebrate as a community of faith draws us into Jesus' act of
self-oblation and self-offering. Receiving Christ in the Eucharist is more than
entering into the fixed condition of Jesus as the incarnate Word of God. In the
Eucharist, we enter into the very dynamic of Jesus' self-giving., we enter into
Jesus' servanthood. During our Eucharistic celebration, the bread & wine is
radically changed into the body and blood of Christ, into Christ’s real presence.
It is a change that is to penetrate the heart of our being, that sets off a
process that is meant to transform the reality of our lives and our world. Jesus,
the model of servanthood, gives us the Eucharist to transform our lives into
servanthood.
This
evening, during the foot washing ceremony, we will be washing the feet of
members of our community. Our faith cannot truly penetrate our lives without
understanding servanthood as an essential part of that faith. In our Gospel reading, Peter first objected to
Jesus’ desire to wash his feet, but then consented to it, showing that he truly
began to understand what was happening, that he wanted to be commissioned fully
as a servant of Christ himself. As we
witness the foot washing into this evening’s liturgy, may we let Christ’s
servanthood guide us and mold us as we serve others. The towel that wipes our dirty feet will be a
symbol of our servanthood to the Lord, of our servanthood to our brothers and
sisters.
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