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by Tina Beattie
published in The Month, May
1997, pp171-175.
A theologian examines the account in
John’s Gospel of Christ washing the disciples’ feet through a lens
which seeks to focus on an image of women's ministry.
Women have always exercised a wide variety of ministries
in the church, teaching and preaching, leading religious communities,
campaigning for social justice, caring for the sick and the poor, attending to
the many tasks of parish life, and today serving as eucharistic ministers and
sometimes leading communion services. It is therefore important to bear in mind
that the ordained priesthood is only one of many forms of ministry, all of
which rnust work in harmonious interaction if the church is to fulfil her
vocation of love to the world. Very few of these ministries explicitly exclude
women.
In this article, however, I want to consider the washing
of feet as the most complete symbol of ministry, and one that has long been
associated with the ministry of the sacramental priesthood. I believe that a
careful reading of the footwashing narrative in John’s Gospel leads to a
new understanding of ministry, including women’s ministry, that we have
yet to discover and incorporate into our vision of what it means to exercise
the priestly ministry of Christ.
It has often been pointed out that Christ did not ordain
anyone as priest, and the idea of the sacramental priesthood (as opposed to the
priesthood of all believers) developed in the post-biblical era. Only with
hindsight, therefore, does Christ’s washing of the disciples’ feet in
John’s Gospel take on priestly significance, as church doctrine and
practice provide the lens through which the Scriptures are read and
interpreted. Today, the question of women in the church has changed the focus
of that lens and allowed us to view the Bible from a different angle. What
happens, then, if we look at the significance of the washing of feet through a
lens which seeks to focus on an image of women’s ministry.
Symbolic actions
John’s Gospel describes two footwashing scenes in
the days before Christ’s death. In John 12:1-8, Mary, sister of Martha and
Lazarus lavishly anoints Jesus’ feet with perfume, and wipes his feet with
her hair. In John 13: 1-16. Jesus washes the disciples’ feet and wipes
them with the towel he has tied round his waist. The symbolic meaning of
Christ’s footwashing provides an ongoing source of discussion among
biblical scholars. Some see eucharistic significance in the event, arguing that
it symbolises Jesus’ action over the bread and wine described in the
Synoptic Gospels.
In what follows. I want to explore ways in which the
writer of John’s Gospel seems to indicate a relationship between
Mary’s action and that of Christ, although this theme is not always
developed in works of biblical criticism. I am not a biblical scholar, and what
follows is, therefore, an amateur attempt to liberate the Gospel narrative, to
let it breathe new meaning and vision into our understanding of ministry, and
to open our eyes to particular gifts, and qualities that women might bring to
the priestly role. But perhaps inso far as the word ‘amateur’ has as
its root the Latin amator,meaning lover, we should all approach the
biblical text as amateurs, as lovers, prior to any scholarly expertise.
Matthew and Mark describe Jesus’ anointing by a woman at a meal,
but in their accounts the unnamed woman anoints Jesus’ head (cf. Matt
26:6-13: Mk14:3-9). Luke has the woman anointing Jesus’ feet, but the
location of his story is different from John’s, the event takes place in
the house of a pharisee), and Luke stresses the woman’s bad reputation.
She is a penitent sinner whose sins are forgiven by Jesus (cf. Lk 7:36-50);
Luke later describes Jesus’ meal at Martha’s house, where Martha
waits on table and Mary sits at his feet (cf. Lk 10:38-42).
John, however, possibly conflates these two occasions. It is Mary of
Bethany who anoints Jesus’ feet while he is at supper in the company of
Lazarus and others, and Martha waits on table. John introduces the anointing of
Jesus’ feet and the washing of the disciples’ feet with a reference
to the approaching Passover and he explicitly relates these two events to
Jesus’ death (cf. Jn 12:7 and 33:1). On both occasions Judas is identified
as a source of disruption and treachery. Given that John’s is the latest
and most theologically developed of the Gospels, might there be significance in
all this?
Immediately preceding Mary’s anointing of Jesus, John describes the
raising of Lazarus, and he clearly intends that we should make a connection
between the two occasions, pointing out that :
It was the same Mary, the sister of the sick man Lazarus, who anointed
the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair. (Jn
11:2).
The story of Lazarus is a wonderful vignette of the nature of the
friendship between Jesus and the sisters, Martha and Mary, leaving us in no
doubt about the mutual affection that marked their relationship. John tells us
that “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (Jn 11:5). In
the grief and darkness to come this special love provides a contrast to the
incomprehension, betrayal and abandonment of Jesus by his other disciples. Some
feminist scholars have pointed out that while Luke attributes the recognition
of Christ’s messianic mission to Peter, (cf. Lk 9:18-21) John in this text
attributes it to Martha (cf. Jn: 11:27).
There are then, several interweaving themes that relate to women’s
ministry in these passages, but in what follows I concentrate on the
relationship between Mary’s action and Christ’s in the washing of
feet. In particular I want to suggest that Mary performs a prophetic gesture,
an example which Jesus emulates as the perfect expression of the mutual love
between himself and his faithful disciples. He tells his disciples, “I
have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you”
(Jn 13:15) but implicit in this is the inference that Mary provides the model
of discipleship, for is not Jesus himself copying what she did to him?
Then, as now, perhaps the men who followed Jesus were blind to the
significance of women’s apostolate. In order for Mary of Bethany to be
taken seriously, Christ had to repeat her gesture, to draw attention to it, to
explain explicitly that this is the true meaning of loving discipleship
Re-interpretation
It is interesting to contrast Mary’s intuitive
extravagance with Peter’s incomprehension at the Last Supper. Between Mary
and Jesus, there is a mutual and unspoken understanding of the meaning of her
action. When Lazarus died, Mary flung herself at Jesus’ feet and wept, and
Martha fretted about the stench of the tomb. Now, with profound insight Mary
gathers up and reinterprets the significance of those moments, kneeling at
Jesus’ feet and filling the house with the scent of his anointing. Where
the burial of Lazarus suggests misery, decay and corruption, Mary pours out
upon Christ the fragrant promise of love, resurrection and new life, and Jesus
explains to a scornful Judas the meaning of what she has done. “Leave her
alone; she had to keep this scent for the day of my burial.” (Jn
12:7).
There is also a lavish sensuality to Mary’s action.
Matthew, Mark and Luke’s description of the unnamed woman as a sinner
might indicate how the male disciples felt when confronted by the loving
embodiment of women’s discipleship. Perhaps they were shocked that she
appeared in the company of men with her hair loose, in defiance of social
convention. (Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 11:5-15 that women should
wear veils as a sign of respect in worship indicates how quickly the Christian
community lost sight of the loving spontaneity of Mary’s
discipleship.)
In John’s Gospel there is no suggestion that Mary
is a sinner or a prostitute. Woman’s sexual embodiment is not associated
with sin, as is so often the case in Christian writings, but with loving
discipleship that is not afraid to express itself as touch and caress. Thomas
Aquinas (1) suggests that one argument against women teaching publicly in
church is “lest men’s sexual desires be aroused”. To what extent
might the resistance to women’s ordination still mask men’s inability
to deal with their sexuality, and to relate to women in loving relationships?
Between Mary and Jesus, we see an expression of love that celebrates rather
than denies the expressive power of the body, a sensual sharing of affection
that implies mutual respect rather than exploitation and lust.
Mary intuitively knows what is required to mark the
significance of Christ’s last Passover. Not so Peter, whose first concern
is for propriety and hierarchy. Jesus comes to him in the role of a servant,
and Peter is outraged, “You shall never wash my feet” (Jn 13:8).
Then, when Jesus says, “If I do not wash you, you can have nothing in
common with me”, (Jn 13:8) Peter goes to the opposite extreme and wants
Jesus to wash his hands and his head as well. He dreads loss of status in
relation to Christ. In his preoccupation with outward appearances, he fails to
recognise that an inner transformation is required. We know the events of that
night, and we know the disgrace and humiliation that will at last bring Peter
to a true understanding of discipleship. Peter’s desire for approval and
public esteem will ultimately lead to his denial of Christ, and only through
that experience of abjection will he discover life in common with Christ.
Peter has followed Jesus throughout his public ministry.
He knows that this is the one who has come to subvert the social order, to make
the first last and the last first, to exalt the lowly and cast down the mighty.
He has seen Jesus touch the outcast and the leper, commune with women and bless
their children, ridicule the self-righteous and make merry with sinners. All
this Peter has witnessed, but still, he does not understand. In Peter’s
world, masters must be masters and servants must remain so.
Yet the world that Christ is about to initiate through
his death and resurrection will liberate his followers from the bondage of
worldly hierarchies. Jesus does not just reverse the social order, nor is this
a Marxist vision where workers triumph over the ruling classes. How often in
history have revolutions and liberation movements turned into new tyrannies
where the oppressed become oppressors and the vicious cycle domination and
exploitation continues unchanged, because one hierarchy has simply replaced
another?
Perfect discipleship
Jesus poses a more fundamental challenge to our
understanding of human relationships:
You call me Master and Lord, and rightly; so I am. If
I, then, the Lord and Master have washed your feet, you should wash each
other’s feet (Jn 13:13-14).
This is the nature of ‘lordship’, the nature
of ‘mastery’ in the Christian community. Political correctness, like
every ideology, is repressive because in forbidding certain forms of expression
and advocating others it seeks to change human behaviour through the
manipulation of language. Among the followers of Jesus, our understanding of
language is changed through the way we behave. The word ‘master’ is
not forbidden but transformed. To be master and Lord is to serve, to wash the
feet of those who seek to serve us. But the writer of John’s Gospel
suggests an even more subversive dimension to the story of the Last Supper
— because it is a woman who provides the example of perfect discipleship.
What Jesus does for his disciples, a woman has already done for him. John makes
her act of loving friendship intrinsic to the drama of the Last Supper, so that
she participates intimately in the eucharistic significance of that occasion.
Was Mary present when Jesus washed his disciples’
feet? Did he wash her feet that night, as she had anointed his feet a few
nights earlier? We are so often told that there were no women present at the
Last Supper, and some bishops still insist that women cannot participate in the
footwashing on Holy Thursday. John’s Gospel does not explicitly mention
women, but their presence seems implicit in the narrative. In the story of the
raising of Lazarus, John tells us of Jesus’ love for Martha, Mary and
Lazarus. At the beginning of the account of the Last Supper, he says that Jesus
“had always loved those who were his in the world, but now he showed how
perfect his love was” (Jn 13:1). A little later he says that “The
disciple Jesus loved was reclining next to Jesus” (Jn 13:23).
The identity of this beloved disciple perplexes biblical
scholars: is ‘he’ symbolic of the ideal disciple, or a historical
figure?(2) However, apart from Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s
tentative suggestion that the beloved disciple might be Martha,(3) the idea
that this person is one of Jesus’ women followers, or indeed several women
who symbolically represent ideal discipleship, receives little attention. Yet
the description of Mary of Bethany in John 12 fulfils the criteria that
scholars attribute to the beloved disciple. Given John’s emphasis on
Jesus’ love for Martha, Mary and Lazarus, it is hard to believe that the
sisters would have been excluded from the final gathering of Jesus with his
friends and followers. If the washing of feet was a sign of Jesus’ perfect
love for those who were his in the world, it would surely include the two women
whom John explicitly tells us were specially loved by him.
Raymond Brown points to the prominence of women in the
Johannine community.(4) Fiorenza suggests that although Luke’s Gospel also
appears to accord equal significance to women, in fact he is subtly undermining
women’s equality. She argues that Luke’s description of Mary sitting
at Jesus’ feet while Martha waits on table, is a post-resurrection account
of a eucharistic meal.(5) Martha’s service is described as
diakonia, a word which referred to serving at the eucharistic meal in
the early church. Martha is portrayed as active and outspoken, while Mary is
passive and silent in Luke’s account. Jesus rebukes Martha and endorses
Mary’s role (cf. Lk 10:41-2). Fiorenza suggests that Luke is holding Mary
up as an example to women. They should not be like Martha, serving at the
eucharistic table, but like Mary, learning in silent submission.
If Fiorenza’s interpretation is correct then
John’s Gospel suggests the opposite situation, and perhaps these are two
descriptions of the same meal at Bethany. Martha waits on table and Mary
anoints Christ’s feet in a way which prefigures his priestly example. Both
women perform eucharistic roles, and John seems to be at pains to ensure that
we make such connections, that we understand Mary’s anointing Jesus in
terms of the Passover and his death an resurrection.
Mutual service
The stories of the anointing of Jesus’ feet and the
washing of the disciples’ feet illuminate one another. Peter must learn
through bitter personal experience the true nature of discipleship, which is
concerned not with worldly hierarchy and status but with loving relationships
of mutual service to one another. In the encyclical Redemptoris Mater,
John Paul II writes:(6)
In the light of Mary, the Church sees in the face of
woman the reflection of a beauty which mirrors the loftiest sentiments of which
the human heart is capable: the self-offering totality of love; the strength
that is capable of bearing the greatest sorrows; limitless fidelity and
tireless devotion to work: the ability to combine penetrating intuition with
words of support and encouragement.
The Pope is referring to the Virgin Mary, but these
words might equally be applied to Mary of Bethany. In the anointing of
Jesus’ feet, she manifests all these qualities, but surely the example she
provides is not that of perfect womanhood but of perfect discipleship?
Mary’s intuitive and generous outpouring of love is juxtaposed in
John’s Gospel against Peter’s inappropriate concern for the status
quo, his desire to protect hierarchical relationships of dominance and
servitude, his exaggerated display of commitment to Christ which masks his
failure to understand the true meaning of discipleship. Peter’s concern is
not for Christ but for himself. Mary, on the other hand, manifests a forgetting
of self and profound sensitivity to another. She makes connections and has an
awareness of the hidden meanings in the events around her. Sensing the darkness
to come, she reaches out to Christ and wordlessly demonstrates her compassion
and her understanding.
Some psychological studies suggest that women’s
privilege relationality and care over autonomy are individualism, while for men
it is the other way round. Maybe we see echoes of such patterns of behaviour in
the contrast between Mary of Bethany and Peter in John’s Gospel. To say
this is not to make Peter’s role redundant, but to suggest that without
Mary’s example, Peter’s discipleship lacks certain essential human
qualities. Human institutions need structures of authority and some form of
hierarchy but without the compensating qualities of relationship and care, they
risk becoming excessively authoritarian and hierarchical.
Perhaps the future flourishing of the church requires an
act of repentance and remembrance of a woman’s anointing of Christ. So
often, the Catholic hierarchy behaves like Peter at the Last Supper, and
forgets the woman whose example Christ imitates in order to teach his followers
the nature of discipleship. If the washing of feet is a symbol of priesthood,
then maybe Christ is inviting us to consider again the example of Mary of
Bethany, his beloved disciple and friend
Notes
1. St ThomasAquinas, Summa Theologiae — AConcise
Translation, ed. Timothy McDermott, Ilallae, 177-2. London: Methuen, 1992,
p.450
2. For a discussion of these possibilities, see Oscar
Cultmann,The Johannine Circle, London: SCM Press Ltd., 1975,
pp.71-85.
3. Cf. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of
Her — A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins:
London: SCM Press, 2nd ed., 1994, p.330.
4. Cf. Raymond E, Brown, The Community of the Beloved
Disciple, Appendix II, ’Roles of Women in the Fourth
Gospel’, London; Geoffrey Chapman, 1979, pp. 183-98
5. Cf. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She
Said— Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation, Boston
Beacon Press,1992, pp.52-76.
6. John Paul II, ReJemptoris Mater —
Encyclical Letter of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II on the Blessed Virgin
Mary in the Life of the Pilgrim Church, London: Catholic Truth Society,
1987, p.l0l.
7. Cf. Chodorow, Nancy, The Reproduction of
Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978, and Carol Gilligan, In a Different
Voice — Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge
MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2nd ed., 1993.
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