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Whenever I spend time talking with people who are homeless and sleeping rough, I’ll ask them what they need. I might imagine what the person in front of me needs most is food. And sometimes it is. But it’s also very much about washing. Women who can’t find sanitary products, or men who are desperate for toilet paper or soap. It’s toiletries, underwear and kindness not just a peremptory cup of tea that is the real need I often hear when people have nothing but the clothes they stand in. It speaks to something we all know but don’t often talk about; which is the dignity of being clean. And the indignity - not to mention in the middle of a pandemic - the danger - of being dirty. Today is Maundy Thursday, so named as the night Jesus gave a new mandatum – commandment – to his friends that they were to love one another. And he showed them how they were to do this by kneeling down and washing their feet. One of them – Peter – objected. And his objections ring true, not only for the reasons he said at the time, which were to do with his relationship with Jesus. Because we know it’s fine for us to wash ourselves; indeed, it’s been incredibly important that we’ve done so in the past year. But to have someone else wash us is another thing altogether. It’s exposing, reveals your body to another in an unusual and sometimes confronting exchange. But as many have discovered in this pandemic, if you are suffering, if you are ill, if you can’t wash yourself, you can keep clean no other way. Jesus’s action was political with a small p – in the sense that he was overturning the expected social order of servant and master. But whether the context is political, medical or ritual, the act of being washed is allowing another to see you and serve you, which many of us, if we have the choice, find harder than the opposite. Washing and being washed isn’t just a question of hygiene; it’s a statement of the intrinsic worth of human beings and our bodies. It’s a costly practice too. The sore hands of nurses and carers testify to the relentlessness of washing themselves and others day after day. The way of life that Jesus was teaching was one not of unequal servant and master but of mutual care, interdependence and relationship. A few days before, he’d had his own feet washed by a woman from the city. Maundy Thursday demonstrates a way of living that is not only about serving others, but also letting ourselves be taken care of, looked after. For them then, and for us now, this meant knowing that they were worth the washing, and as the days ahead unfolded, that they too were worth the cost.