Holy Thursday – 14 April 2022
Throughout the 20th century worked the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. She was born in Philadelphia in 1901 and lived through until 1978. It is hard to imagine another anthropologist who has taught us as much about the nature of human community. Mead was once asked what sign we had about when civilisation began. The expectation was that her reply would concern the discovery of some ancient artefact such as a tool, or a weapon, or a segment of art. Instead, she simply replied, “a healed femur.”
A healed femur bone is the sign we have of the beginnings of civilisation.
Why did this famous anthropologist claim this? She claimed this because for the first time we had an indication that a community had cared for someone. Previously, there would be no evidence of a healed femur, for the person who had experienced a broken femur would be left to die.
There comes a point in human history, however, when someone with a broken femur is cared for. Since a broken femur takes many months to heal, the person whose healed bone was discovered would have been cared for consistently for a good length of time. Their every need would have required attention. And for Margaret Mead the indication of this attention was the sure sign of the beginning of human civilisation. Human civilisation begins as the culture of care is evidenced, a culture in which human beings give themselves over to one another in care for each other.
If this be so for human civilisation, then the divine civilisation, itself, becomes apparent on this evening. It does not begin on this evening, but it is given its transparency. It is given its truest indication. Divine civilisation becomes apparent in the simple gesture of Jesus own care of his friends. He washes their feet. In Jesus, God becomes absorbed in service of us and in his attention to the most humble part of ourselves.
The divine civilisation, revealed and enacted in Jesus, attends to us. God is attention without distraction, declared the great mystic of the 1930s, Simone Weil.[1] This divine attention is brought to bear on all that we consider all too-human for which God to become involved:
- The ambiguous ways in which we search for love in our life;
- The uncertainties we have about our identity and our future;
- The angst that consumes us about our children and that keeps us awake at night;
- Our fears about our partners and how we can maintain them in the bonds of relationship;
- In the helplessness we feel in the face of the demise of someone we love but feel powerless to assist;
- In the memories that haunt us;
- In the failures and mistakes of our life that continue to subvert our best aspirations;
- In our struggle to believe, to hope and to trust.
And especially the context of our own times:
- Our deep concern over the fragility of the world’s peace;
- Our bewilderment at the barbarity and the sheer non-sense of war;
- Our disenchantment with political designs and discourse;
- Our apparent powerlessness before the changing cycles of nature;
- Our tiredness with a pandemic that never seems to quite end.
If Jesus washes the feet of his friends, it is these all-too human experiences with which he involves himself. It is to these experiences of our life, and more, that he attends. As he says to Peter, he says to us, “If I do not find you there in those experiences in which you discover the weight of your humanity, you cannot understand me.”
As God washes our feet, we wash each others. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention,” wrote Simone Weil.[2] For her, attention was the key that opens the door to compassion for those suffering, Human attention means “giving to those who have been stripped of their humanity an existence apart from their affliction.”[3] It is an action requiring sensitivity, courage and sacrifice–a detachment from self and complete focus on the other person.
It is what was required millennia ago to heal a broken femur.
Human civilisation begins when we starts to mirror the divine civilisation as disclosed in the story of this evening. May the divine civilization of attention, care and involvement that we celebrate this evening as God in Jesus washes us and feeds us in the starkness of our humanity, become the model of what constructs our human civilisation. May it replace the civilisation of hate, of vengeance, of power, of expediency, of irresponsibility, and of self-reference into which we can become seduced in such subtle ways by our thinking, our words, and our gestures.
For in the story of this night divine civilisation and human civilisation have become united. Let us now re-enact this gesture of attention and celebrate the possibility that this exercise of divine care is for a new world.
[1] Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots,” (1943), published in Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, translated by Arthur Wills, (New York: Harper and Row, 1952).
[2] Simone Weil, “Reflections on the right Use of School Studies with a View to love of God,” (1941), from Simone Weil, Essays On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God, translated by Richard Rees, (London: Oxford University Press) in Panichas, G. A. (1977), The Simone Weil Reader, New York: David McKay Co., 1977), 44-52.
[3] Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction” (1942), in G. A. Panichas, The Simone Weil Reader, (New York: David McKay Co., 1977), 313-339.