Today the Queen of England will host the Royal Maundy Service at Blackburn Cathedral. She will be carrying out the annual tradition held each year on the Thursday before Easter, handing out 88 coins, to mark her age, to men and women in recognition of their service to their community and church.

For those who first experienced the events that would become the stuff of tradition, the day was indeed eventful.The word Maundy, derived from the Latin word “mandatum,” meaning commandment, hastens the words of Jesus Christ at the Last Supper:

“And now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”(1)

It was the day the disciples received the command to love and had their feet washed by Jesus. Though perhaps in hindsight, it was the day they first saw the connection between the Passover sacrifice, their beloved teacher, and the Lamb of God. It was a day their eyes were particularly roused by the uniqueness of the humanity before them, their minds filled with history, prophecy, tradition—and mystery.

As author Annie Dillard once observed, “We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery.”(2)

In fact, Jesus is a mystery that has unarguably shaped all of history. A 1936 Life magazine article on the life of Jesus noted, “Jesus gave history a new beginning. In every land he is at home: everywhere people think his face is like their best face—and like God’s face. His birthday is kept across the world. His death-day has set a gallows across every city skyline. Who is he?”(3) The mystery of Christ, his life, death, and influence is both unmatched and unsearchable. Even Napoleon, in a conversation while imprisoned at St. Helena, acknowledged in Jesus “a mystery which subsists”: “He exhibited in himself the perfect example of his precepts… Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires, but upon what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ alone founded his empire upon love and at this hour millions of men would die for him.”(4)

But who is this vicariously human, divine mystery behind these concentrated words? I can think of no better question to ask on Maundy Thursday. And yet, as Ravi Zacharias states, the precursor to the answer is the intent of the questioner. Magazine articles and television programming and new books by popular antagonists may reflect curiosity in the man the world remembers this week, but do we want to know who Jesus was, who he is, beyond the philosophical exercise?

Perhaps that first Maundy Thursday, just before the Passover Feast, just a day before Jesus was betrayed, is a revealing scene for the honest inquirer of his identity. The story is recounted in the Gospel of John.(5) Jesus looks at his disciples, his friends, those who would soon deny even knowing him, those who even so, he would love to the end. And standing with those men, knowing the weight of the darkness before him, he took a towel and a basin and began to wash their feet.

It was a lowly job—and an oft-recurring job due to sandals and dusty streets. It was a job for a servant. But here, the menial task was instead performed by the master, their teacher, the Messiah they hoped would save them with force but instead would die on a Roman cross.

The mysterious truth of Christ’s identity is this jarring humanity of an Incarnate Son who still does what is analogous to washing soiled feet: with our deepest sorrows, our sorriest actions, our small attempts at being human.  Might we wake again and again to the enormity of Christ, human and divine—royalty stooping down to serve.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) John 13:34.

(2) Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, (New York:  HarperPerennial, 1998), 4.

(3) George Buttrick, “The Life of Jesus Christ,” Life, December 28, 1936, 49.

(4) Napoleon I, “Napoleon’s Argument for the Divinity of Christ,” Evans & Cogswell, No. 3, Charleston, 1861.

(5) John 13:1-17.