Kakistocrat

Robert Latimer was denied day parole this past week. For those unfamiliar with Robert Latimer he is newsworthy because on October 24, 1993 he placed his daughter Tracy in his truck, and connected a hose from the exhaust pipe to the inside of the truck where Tracy sat. An autopsy found high levels of carbon monoxide in Tracy’s blood.

All this happened while the rest of the Latimer family was at church. It was Latimer’s wife Laura who found Tracy dead in her bed. Latimer originally maintained that she had died in her sleep.

After a lengthy period of trials and appeals, Robert Latimer began spending his second-degree murder sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for 10 years on January 18, 2001.

All of this seems very uncontroversial, perhaps even black and white, and yet in 1999, 3 out of every 4 Canadians believed Latimer should have been treated more leniently. This interpretation seems bizarre, until we consider that Tracy had a severe form of cerebral palsy, and yet the Law which says that one person must not take the life of another, just as much applies to the mentally or physically ill like Tracy as it does to healthy girls of her age. If it doesn’t, if the state of a person’s health is seen as the factor determining whether such a person has a right to live or not, then Tracy will not be the only victim, and fearing this, appropriately, because Latimer has shown no remorse for his act, he remains imprisoned.

K.

I have been reading Jean Vanier’s The Scandal of Service: Jesus Washes our Feet. He notes the initial strangeness that the Gospel bearing John’s name does not have an account of the Eucharist even though it has an account of the Last Supper, and an earlier account (which no other Gospel contains) wherein attention is given to Jesus’ teaching about the bread of life and the gift of his body and blood (John 6).

While it lacks the Eucharist, John’s Last Supper does have the washing of the disciples feet, and after such a washing we hear Jesus say something quite similar to ‘Do this in memory of me,’ which we only hear him say after the Institution of the Eucharist in the Synoptics. This call to model Jesus links the Eucharist and the foot washing together.

It is these two acts that take place right before Jesus’ death, and in these final moments, Jesus is not teaching something new to his followers, but rather, as Vanier suggests, he is giving them something. Specifically, he is giving himself, and calling on those who follow him to give of themselves in a similar manner.

There is great gentleness and tenderness in these two gestures. Jesus wants to be with his followers, for he loves them and wants to live in them. He does not want to dominate or control them. On the contrary, he makes himself little and humble. He lets himself be eaten by the in them Eucharist and he takes the place of a slave or of a child in the foot-washing. In doing so he reveals to us a God hidden in littleness.

Vanier, The Scandal of Service (Toronto: Novalis, 1998), 30.

Vanier suggests that a reason why John might only mention the foot-washing is because though the foot-washing and Eucharist are so interlinked, thus far it has received scant attention. Vanier suggests that in order to wash the feet of others (not necessarily literally, but rather in order to be as humble and as loving as Jesus) we need the presence of Jesus within us, which the Eucharist allows for. "Without the presence of Jesus in us, it is impossible to live out such poverty and such humility; without the Eucharist we cannot live out such a deep presence and communion of the heart with others." (Vanier does not here diminish the possibility that Jesus makes himself available to those that do not consume the Eucharist).

Regarding the foot-washing and the Eucharist, Vanier writes that "you cannot understand the one without the other [and that] one necessarily leads to the other and that one without the other would be a distortion of what Jesus envisioned." Receiving the Eucharist and receiving no transformation as a result of it, is an example of such a distortion.

St. John Chrysostom long ago preached: "You have tasted the Blood of the Lord, yet you do not recognize your brother… You dishonour this table when you do not judge worthy of sharing your food someone judged worthy to take part in this meal. God freed you from all your sins and invited you here, but you have not become more merciful."

Different traditions attach different significances to the Eucharist, and yet if the implications of those beliefs are not lived out (by the washing of the feet of others, or less-literally, if one is not willing to become as humble and as loving as Jesus) then does the theological correctness of such beliefs surrounding the Eucharist really matter?

K.