Arma Christi (IV): Maundy Thursday

Lantern, Omne Bonum MS, 14th cent.

This evening and every time the Eucharist is celebrated, we hear what St Paul also retells in the Epistle tonight, of Jesus' actions with bread and wine which become for us as we repeat them his body and blood, a communion with him and with each other in him.

Yet we also heard that other story associated with the same evening, from the Gospel of John, where Jesus washes the feet of his friends with jug and bowl and towel.

There is among the Arma Christi or traditional instruments of the Passion often a bowl and jug or ewer - here at St Thomas' in the great reredos in the East end of the Church they are on the left side of the frame surrounding the central Cross, about half way down. This seems apt to the part of the story we have read tonight in the Gospel.

This bowl and jug on the reredos however are not usually identified as the ones with which Jesus washed the feet of his friends. When depicted among the Arma Christi the jug and bowl refer, typically and traditionally at least, to the one other act of washing undertaken during the Passion story.

This episode is told only in Matthew's Gospel, during Jesus' trial. As in all the versions there is a kind of struggle between the Roman governor Pontius Pilate under whose authority Jesus was ultimately to be crucified - since this was a distinctively Roman form of execution - and the local vested interests who seem to have been threatened by the Galilean upstart.

While Pilate succumbs to pressure, he also seeks to dissociate himself from responsibility for the fate of Jesus, not just with words but with actions and with these objects.

There is an inscription on a scroll that winds down the frame on the reredos here offering scriptural identifications for some of these things that inhabit the story of the passion, and under the bowl and jug it says "I wash my hands."

While the bowl represents Pilate's act of failure to take responsibility, this text “I will wash” does not quite equate to what Pilate says at the trial. In Matthew we read this: "When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it."

Yet the St Thomas’ reredos scroll seems instead to be quoting from Ps 26 which, depending on the translation reads "I wash" or "I will wash" "my hands in innocence O Lord" - in that verse the Psalmist goes on "and so will I go to thine altar; That I may show the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works."

This text is often said quietly as a prayer by the priest at the ceremony of hand washing called the lavabo undertaken just prior to beginning the Great Thanksgiving - lavabo is the Latin "I will wash," the same phrase from the Psalm and on our reredos scroll.

Pilate of course is claiming innocence by washing, but actually condemning himself in the act of doing so; his action only serves to underline his hypocrisy.

Thus the artists and commissioners of the reredos were doing something like what is called in contemporary social media "trolling" by adding this Psalm text to the carving of the bowl - they have parodied Pilate by juxtaposing his attempt at denying responsibility with the Psalmist's solemn prayer for worthiness that only God can confer on the one coming to offer true and acceptable worship.

Pilate's claim, however inauthentic, is certainly a political one and not just something in the realm of conscience. He falsely claims that the decision to condemn Jesus has been made elsewhere, but it has not; he has just made it passively, by exercising a lack of authority.

Pilate is the representative of the Emperor, and he has almost unbridled power in Judea. The Gospels present him as vacillating, not so much a good person bullied by others but a weak person unable to accept responsibility that is clearly his. Attempting to wash his hands of the matter - and of course it is also from this story that we have that expression used today - he proves only his lack of understanding and failure to grasp what true leadership necessitated.

Jesus' action with his own bowl, and jug, and towel, is the opposite of Pilate's. It is not just that he is kind where Pilate is cynical; he is strong where Pilate is weak. His own demonstration of loving service with hands and water and towel is not just an act of love but an act of power, and of responsibility.

"Do you know what I have done to you?" he says in this Gospel. "You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet."

While this example is given to us all, it is offered to those who were to become the next set of leaders in this movement, not merely as a sign of care or concern but as an act of responsibility. This he says is what it means for him to be Lord and Teacher; this is what it means to exercise power; this is what it means to be truly great.

As his hands address their grime and calluses he accepts in his body full responsibility for the disciples; the dirt must be eased off the feet caked with Judaean dust, and the sore parts eased too in their own way by his authoritative touch that has healed many with worse things than sore feet. Yet in this act just as in his signs and wonders he is not merely pampering. His act of washing signals, as does his offering of himself in bread and wine, the gift of himself, his body, for the sake of the world, his complete acceptance of our needs and our wounds, his bowl the sign not of an ablution but of an immersion.

These two bowls then present us not just with two stories of washing, and not just with a model of care, but with two forms of responsibility and leadership, two forms of commitment. To wash in both cases is to position oneself relative to the power of God and the justice of God. We say with Pilate that we wash our hands of one another and keep ourselves at the distance of a false innocence; with Jesus we wash each other's feet and are joined with him in the act of washing too.

He will not declare himself at arm's length from the need of the world and neither can we, if we eat at his table. For in receiving him in bread and wine in the Eucharist we commemorate and celebrate this evening, we make ourselves his body, and so accept his call to responsibility in and for a world which needs both the healing and the power that only the giving of his body can bring.