Today,
as with those movies that, at the beginning, take us back in time,
our liturgy remembers a passage that belongs to the Holy Thursday:
Jesus washes the feet of his disciples (cf. Jn 13:12). Thus,
this gesture —read from the Easter perspective— recovers
a perennial validity. Let us consider only three ideas.
In
the first place, the centrality of the person. In our society it
seems that to do is the thermometer to measure a person's worth.
Within this dynamic it is easy for people to be considered as
tools; we use each other extremely easy. Today, the Gospel urges
us to transform this dynamic into service dynamics: the other
party will never be just a tool. It would rather be a matter of
living a spirituality of communion, where the other one
—quoting John Paul II— becomes “someone that
belongs to me” and a “gift to me”, whom we have “to
give room” to. In our language we could translate it as “to
care about other people's feelings”. Do we care about other
people's feelings? Do we listen to them when they speak to us?
In
our world of image and communications, this is not a message to
transmit, but a job to be done, to live up to every day: «and
blessed are you if you put it into practice!» (Jn
13:17). Maybe, this is why the Master does not limit himself to an
explanation: He imprints into his disciples' memory his gesture of
service, to pass it immediately on to the Church's memory; a memory
that we demand to become a gesture, time and again: in the lives of
so many families, of so many people.
Finally,
a warning signal: «The one who shared my table has risen
against me» (Jn 13:18). In the Eucharist, Jesus
resurrected becomes our servant, He washes our foods. But the
physical presence is not enough. We have to learn in the Eucharist
and get the necessary strength from so that it may become a reality
that «having received the gift of love, we die to sin and we
live for God» (Saint Fulgence, Bishop of Ruspe).
