Unwanted

A Homily for Holy Thursday 2025

What do you do when you are embarrassed? Do you get angry at yourself? Do you feel ashamed of yourself? Do you immediately try to justify yourself? Do you wish you could just disappear? What about those times when you get embarrassed for someone else? What do you do then? Do you look away? Do you look down? Do you distance yourself from that person?

Judas was embarrassed by Jesus, so he betrayed him. Peter was embarrassed by Jesus, so he denied him. I mean can we really blame them? Who wants a Messiah, who wants a God, who denigrates himself, stripped to the waist and down on his knees handling the grimy, disfigured feet of disciples determined to deny him, feet poised to depart and run as fast as they can from such an Embarrassing God. Who really wants a God like this? A God who bends down and washes the very gritty feet of those who will walk away from him. Remember: Jesus washed Judas’ feet just as he washed Peter’s!

In the washing of the feet, as in the Crucifixion itself, Jesus points to one constant and consistent truth regarding the identity of the God of Israel, His Father: God is now and has always been an Unwanted God!

Just revisit the Hebrew Scriptures. Why do the people of Israel constantly turn away? Why are they consistently constant in their inconstancy? I propose it is not so much because they are limited human beings, which they are, but rather they are fundamentally embarrassed by their God. A God who would come down to them and free them from slavery, care for them as a mother for her child, etch them into the palms of his hand; keep taking them back every time they turned their backs on him. They would prefer the God of the Avenging Angel going door to door slaughtering the first born of their enemies.

Isn’t it the same for Judas and Peter? Peter, in front of everyone declared Jesus, Messiah and Son of the Living God! And here Jesus is on his knees washing the feet of his followers! Judas and Peter, and perhaps all the disciples, secretly longed for the Avenging Messiah who would slaughter the Romans! Destroy the oppressors, those small-minded men and women caught up in delusions of their own power and privilege. And really don’t we sometimes long for the same God too?

One thing has always been true about the God of Israel, the God who is Jesus… he has always been an Unwanted God!

A God who goes to the cross. A God who subjects himself to the small-minded, petty, jealous crowd and, then to make matters worse, forgives them for slaughtering him. Do I want this God? Do you want this God? Doesn’t he ask just a little too much from us? The first will be last and the last will be first; in order to find your life you must lose it; unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground and die it remains but a single grain?

Aren’t we all in some way embarrassed by this Unwanted God?

I think we need once again to follow Peter’s example. When he says to Jesus: “Master, you’re not going to wash my feet!” It isn’t a plea out of humility but rather a rejection born out of embarrassment. And when Jesus is arrested, mocked, and tortured by small-minded thugs, Peter three times denies him, not just to protect his own skin, but out of embarrassment for Jesus. And a deep need to not be associated with such a person.

But Peter does the one thing that Judas tragically cannot, Peter descends into the emptiness, he is caught up in the Trajectory of God in Christ, this Unwanted God… and immersed in his own deep, bone-deep, sense of his own fundamental Unwantedness… Peter meets the Unwanted God and finds how profoundly he has always been and will always be Wanted. He repents as his own Unwantedness connects him fiercely to the fundamental Unwantedness of all his brothers and sisters and he understands, as he couldn’t before, what the God of Israel is all about; what Jesus is all about: He is an Unwanted God because he has always been the God of the Unwanted!

Only if we are willing to descend into our own Unwantedness can we hope to discover our eternal Wantedness in Christ.

Jesus goes to the very depths of the human experience of Unwantedness and it is there where he waits to meet each of us so we can see how his going there has forever transformed our Unwantedness into a permanent and eternal Wantedness. And then we like Peter won’t be able to help ourselves as we will be driven to declare to everyone the truth and poignant beauty of our Unwanted God!