Feet
A detail of Mary Magdalene and a donor from the Deposition by Roger van der Weyden.
I've been thinking about feet in view of the foot washing ceremony on Maundy Thursday. Washing someone's feet and having feet washed is a humbling experience. Some years back I had a knee op just before Holy Week and a nurse washed my feet. That was an amazing week teaching me that I am not indispensable at church. "How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace" - Handel sets this so well in "The Messiah".
"Christ has no body now but yours .... yours are the feet with which he walks"
Let us all follow in the footsteps of Our Lord in this Holy Week.
"O let me see thy footmarks and in them plant my own; my hope to follow duly is in thy strength alone:
O guide me, call me, draw me, uphold me to the end;
and then in heaven receive me, my Saviour and my friend."
It is Mary who washes Christ's feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair. Here we see how tactile the story is - these are real human people touching each other in sacred love.
Phineas Fletcher
"Drop, drop, slow tears, and bathe those beauteous feet, which brought from heaven the news and Prince of Peace.
Cease not, wet eyes, his mercies to entreat; to cry for vengeance sin doth never cease.
In your deep floods drown all my faults and fears;
nor let his eye see sin, but through my tears."
As we approach the Cross to venerate on Good Friday, let us have hope in our hearts that we are forgiven.
Comments
I had just had an inta-occular implant ( cataract op) and was recovering in my room late in the evening when the Ward Sister arrived to bathe the eye. She put down her tray and opened the Bible and read the NT passage of Jesus bathing the man's eyes at the Pool of Siloam. She said she knew I was an Episcopalian and would understand the relevance. (She was a Baptist). After the reading she then bathed my eye and said a parting, evening prayer and then left. I was overwhelemed with a great sense of one-ness with that man all that time ago at the Pool of Siloam in the old walls of Jerusalem. Needless to say I recovered very quickly indeed, and gave thanks to God for his miraculous cure.
Graeme.
Graeme.