On the night that Jesus was betrayed by his friends, he first had dinner with them. But before that, he tied the towel of a servant girl around his waist and he washed their feet. And to be clear, this wasn’t after they’d tidied up first. Jesus met them where they were: with dirty feet, literally and metaphorically. Hours before his disciples betrayed, denied, and abandoned him, Jesus washed their filthy feet. He knew what was about to go down. In the days and weeks prior, he had tried telling them that he would be betrayed and handed over to suffer and be killed, and they all thought he was crazy. But he knew. As he knelt before his friends and washed their feet, he knew that very night they would do the thing that would torture them for the rest of their lives. They would deny, betray, and hand over their own friend and teacher. They would not be the men and women they wanted to be.
In the end, we aren’t punished for our sins as much as we are punished by our sins.
--Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints:
Finding God in All the Wrong People
Image source: Caravaggio, Madonna of the Rosary (ca.1607), detail. For more information on the significance of dirty feet in Caravaggio's works, see https://claudiaviggiani.com/caravaggio-dirty-feet/?lang=en
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