One of the techniques of Ignatian prayer is to use the powers of your imagination to place yourself within a biblical scene.  Placing yourself, for example, in one of the many banquets in the Gospels, you try to taste the food, to see the crowd reclining at table, to hear the laughter and conversation even—if you are particularly bold—to smell the odor of so many sweaty bodies in a confined space!  It can be a powerful experience.

Last night I attended Holy Thursday mass at my parish with my family.  The Gospel reading, of course, was the story of the washing of the feet from John.  After the Gospel, our pastor washed the feet of 12 people who had been selected for the occasion and then the entire congregation was invited to come up and have their feet washed and to wash the feet of others.  This, too, is always a powerful moment.

The interpretive focus last night—in the preaching, the music, and our practice—was the imitation of Christ. It was Christ as teacher and exemplar.  As He has washed our feet, we are called to wash the feet of others.

For whatever reason, I wasn’t quite connecting to that narrative last night.  After I came home—and got the kids to bed—I spent some time using the Ignatian technique described above to place myself into the Last Supper.  I really tried to taste the bread and wine, to hear Jesus’ words, and to smell the roasted lamb.  When Jesus began to wash the feet of the other disciples, I watched as he slowly worked his way down the table, coming closer and closer to me.

The moment that Jesus’ hands touched my feet, I was overwhelmed with one thought: Jesus Christ is washing my feet!  The hands of Jesus Christ were running over my feet, spreading out the toes to remove the sweat and dirt, washing them gently, drying them with a towel.

Perhaps you have to have feet like mine to appreciate this.  I have ugly feet.  Both have large bunions that cause the big toes to angle in toward the rest, compressing them.  I also suffer from something called Morton’s Toe, which means the second toe is longer than the big toe, which can make hiking downhill particularly uncomfortable.  If that weren’t bad enough, I also have a relatively common toenail infection that thickens and discolors the nails. To top it off, the skin on the soles is dry and cracked.  My feet are so bad my children joke about them.

And yet, there was Jesus Christ, washing these feet.  God, the creator of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen, wanted to wash my feet, to touch this unattractive and problematic part of me.   I was overcome with both a feeling of unworthiness and an equally strong conviction that this feeling was beside the point.  It was God who had acted, who done something completely unexpected and unlooked for, who had given something that was pure gift.

It occurred to me later that the imitation of Christ flows from a prior encounter with Christ.  We do not imitate Christ because he is some kind of abstract model for our behavior, but because our encounter with Christ overwhelms us with the plenitude of divine love, a love that we want everyone to experience, a love that we are called to share with a world desperately in need of it.