The Eucharist of the Mass in Coena Domini makes us stop at the incredible gesture of the washing of the feet. We now would like to dwell on the feet to try to understand what God wanted to reveal to us. There are many myths of humanity which highlight a painful fact: man has wounded feet. Oedipus, for example, whose name means “swollen foot”, will come to kill his father to marry his mother. His punishment will be hanging from a tree by the heels. If we open the Scriptures we find instead Eve, the mother of the living, threatened by the serpent right at the heel (cf. Gen 3:15). What meaning does the foot have then? The foot allows man contact with the earth and is the starting point of its verticalization. The vertical posture thus becomes an image of human dignity. But humanity, as we said, is threatened by evil that always tries to compromise its stability and…throw it on the ground. The prophet Isaiah will see his people covered with a wound, due abuse, from head to toe (cf. Is 1:6). Hence the heartfelt invitation to conversion so that the Lord intervenes to heal his people (cf. Is 30:26). And God intervenes with the promise of a just shoot (cf. Zc 3,8), under whose feet everything will flourish again (cf. Zc 6,12). Matthew, who knew this prophecy well, closes the episode of the return from Egypt by stating that Jesus, according to prophets, was to be called a Nazarene (cf. Mt 2:22-23). Nazarene comes from the Hebrew nezer, which means
“Bud”. Everything becomes clearer: Jesus is the prophesied shoot that, Luke will write, will heal when he passes many under the power of evil (cf. Acts 10:38). From this hinterland briefly sketched, the washing of the feet comes to be placed as the last and definitive act with which God wants to re-establish man in his lost dignity. In the Son, he himself recreates, purifies and heals the mortal wound of sin and death.
John, in the Apocalypse, will then present, not surprisingly, a totally healed humanity in the figure of the woman, who rests her feet on the moon (cf. Rev 12,1; Ps 8,7). If Isaiah had mourned his people compromised from head to toe, now John sings of the grace of a God who washed humanity’s feet entire returning it to its innocence.

Commentary by b. Sandro Carotta, osb
Abbazia di Santa Maria – Praglia (Italy)

Translation by f. Mark Hargreaves, Prinknash Abbey