You are Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and you’re dying.
The pain—not just from the nails in your hands and feet, but also in your shoulders, your back, your legs—is indescribable. The noonday sun is unmercifully hot. All around you, the soldiers, the religious leaders, the crowds, shout and laugh and chatter. Everything is heat, noise, confusion. . .and pain.
What are you feeling? Fear? Shock? Betrayal?
One thing you’re not feeling is surprise. Somehow, you knew your life would come to this moment.
You had come into the world to save it, to save us. You came to show us God’s overwhelming, everlasting love for us. You came to tell us that eternal life awaits us—that all we must do is follow what you said and did, by loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves.
But to get your message across, you had to oppose what faith had become. Over the centuries, we had misunderstood God. We had turned God into a strictly partisan convenience, someone who loved only the people we loved and hated the people we hated.
Our faith had become a worship of power, desperate for signs of earthly authority and approval. Our faith kept the privileged in their high places and let the powerless and vulnerable fend for themselves. Our faith had become addicted to rules for their own sake, rules to maintain the status quo rather than to overturn systems of injustice and oppression.
You knew that when you opposed our faith, it would lead to trouble. You think back now on what was virtually your first act as a public minister: you went to the Temple in Jerusalem, the central headquarters of our faith life, and you created a disturbance. You made a whip of cords to drive out the moneychangers and the people selling sacrificial animals. “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” you cried.
Right from the start, the religious leaders were indignant. You offered them love, and of course you love them still. But you could see how they felt in their faces: how dare you, they thought. Who do you think you are? We are the ones in charge here.
There were so many clashes between you and them. You brought sight to a man born blind, and they criticized you. You extended understanding to a woman in an adulterous relationship, and they wanted to you condemn her. You tried to tell them you are the Messiah, and they picked up stones to hurl at you. Then, when you confronted them with their desire to harm you—when you asked flat-out, “Why do you want to kill me?”—they acted like you were crazy.
You are a man slow to anger, but thinking of those battles with the authorities angers you still. It angers you not because of pride, not because they wouldn’t listen to the words you spoke. But because their, and our, mistaken understanding of faith was leading people astray: it was creating guilt and despair rather than reconciliation and love. At times our faith was like a bizarre mirror-image of God’s Truth—we got things backwards and brought suffering rather than hope. You even told your disciples, there will come a time when people will kill you, and they’ll be convinced they’re serving God.
Of course, there were some who tried to understand and follow you. You think now of Nicodemus, a leader among the religious authorities, sneaking under cover of night to see you so he wouldn’t be found out. You can picture him, so frightened, so troubled, but with a thirst for knowledge of God that was beautiful.
Despite the pain you’re feeling now, you almost smile as you think of Nicodemus. Poor man, you didn’t make it easy for him. You talked to him in poetic language of heavenly things, of being born in the Spirit, and he blinked and stared and was confused. So finally you summed up for him your entire message: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”
People always were misunderstanding your words, it seems. Even your closest disciples. You would urge them to strive for spiritual nourishment, and they would think you were talking about bread. Sometimes, you would see the vacant looks on their faces and think, what language do you hear when I speak?
Peter was like that. Always so bold, so impulsive, but then he would stumble and make mistakes and get things wrong.
You think back to your final supper with your followers—was it really just last night?—and Peter’s rash proclamation that he would lay down his life if ever you were threatened. You had to set him straight; you foresaw that not only would he not defend you, but he would say he didn’t even know you, not just once but three times.
As you remember that moment, there is love in your heart for Peter. You recall the hardships he and your other followers have been through: the long, dusty days walking from town to town; the times there was not enough to eat; the moments when the pull of the crowds would make everyone anxious and overwhelmed.
You recognize that Peter betrayed you because his courage failed him, so you cannot condemn him. Instead, your love for him continues.
Still, where is he? As you struggle against each brutal wave of pain and endure the mocking and angry crowds around you, you feel very alone. Where is Peter? Where is Andrew, Philip? Where are Mary, Martha and Lazarus?
These last three are perhaps your dearest friends, the ones closest to your heart. Mary, the passionate young woman who showed her devotion to you by washing your tired, well-traveled feet and drying them with her hair. Martha, so industrious, so blessed with a sense of hospitality, but also so anxious about everyday worries and concerns. You recall the times you had to calm her, to reassure her that she is loved in heaven and so it doesn’t matter if the floor isn’t swept or the stew turned out badly.
And Lazarus. Lazarus occupies such a special place in your heart. When his sisters got word to you that he was ill, there was a moment when you pictured those bright eyes dimmed, that strong young body still and cold; the thought was intolerable. Then, when you and your followers finally arrived in Judea only to find Lazarus was gone and had been laid in the tomb, you were overcome. You had to weep, and you heard those around you say, “See how he loved him!”
You had to raise him to life again, even though you knew to do so would incite the crowds and cause the authorities to call for your death. You had to raise him to life, not only to ease the suffering of Mary and Martha, your beloved friends. You had to raise him because you love him and wanted to see him alive again.
After that, you no longer could walk openly, for fear of being arrested. Yet there still was so much you wanted to do, so many people you wanted to touch with love and healing.
Their faces, the faces of those you healed, come to you now. The man at the pool of the porticoes in Jerusalem, the man whose life had been an agony of illness and pain. You didn’t even wait to see if he would ask for your help. Instead, your heart so moved with compassion, you asked him, “Do you want to be made well?”
And the woman at the well, that dear woman of Samaria. Heedless of society’s rules about a woman’s proper place, not to mention the prejudices against the people of her region, she spoke to you boldly, frankly, in the brightness of the noonday sun. You teased her about her unorthodox relationships (five marriages and a current lover outside of marriage) and admired her thirst for God’s truth. Finally, you told her what your disciples did not yet grasp: “I am Christ the Messiah,” you said, and she believed you.
This man, this woman—these were the people you came to serve, the ones the religious authorities considered lost or beside the point. And again, even your closest followers failed to understand your mission. As the outcasts and ungodly came to you for healing, you could see the embarrassed looks on your disciples’ faces, see them try to hold back the crowds and push people away. “Why do you want to associate with those people, Lord?” your disciples seemed to say. “They are dirty, they smell, they are covered with sores. It distresses us to look at them.”
But you, Jesus, saw the people in need not with human eyes but with God’s eyes. You saw how beautiful they are.
It’s getting harder to concentrate. The memories in your mind become not whole scenes but just quick flashes: the torchlight reflecting off the swords of the soldiers who came to arrest you, the ache of standing with your wrists bound as Caiaphas and other authorities hurled accusations at you, the steely and arrogant glance of Pilate, the crushing weight of the cross as you carried it each weary step.
Your mind reels. It’s getting harder to hear. You open your eyes, the sweat and blood stinging them, and look around you. There, at the foot of the cross, are the small group of women who have followed your ministry faithfully: your mother’s sister, the wife of a court official, Mary Magdalene. They are not afraid; they knew they had to be here. Mary Magdalene, your beloved Mary, is weeping; you can’t bear to look at her.
And your mother. Your dear, dear mother. Her face is a mask of pain—how you wish you could spare her this suffering!
She has grown older, but as your vision dims you see her as she looked when you were a child: her dark eyes shining, the grave beauty of her features, her gentle and quiet smile. She didn’t always understand you, but her love and her encouragement have been unwavering.
Even before you were ready to begin your public ministry, she was there with you at that wedding in Cana. The wine had run out, and the bride and groom would have been publicly shamed. Your mother caught your gaze and pointed out the lack of wine. You put her off at first; you were having too good a time, and besides you were not yet ready to show yourself as divine. But without a word from you, she went to the servants and said simply, “Do whatever he tells you.” What faith, what quiet, perfect understanding.
You look down on her now once more and see that standing beside her is the disciple whom you love. In your final public act, you once again think not of yourself but of them. You give them into each other’s care.
It’s getting harder to breathe. You feel the weight on your collapsing lungs. A sudden wave of panic sets in: No, not yet! There is still so much to do, so many lives to touch, so much love to share.
Still so much to do, but there’s no time now. You ask for something to drink. A sponge with spoiled, bitter wine is lifted to your lips. You drink—the bitterness brings no relief.
You bow your head. You sense your breath and then your spirit leaving you.
But it’s not the end.
It’s not the end.
Brother, sister, let me serve you;
let me be as Christ to you;
pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.
“Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” I think that throughout the time of his ministry, Jesus expressed that love most by teaching his own about the kingdom. Time is short now; just enough for one last lesson.
Most years during Lent I spend some time listening to music about Jesus’ passion; music that became important to me when I was young. So thinking about the disciples at the Last Supper brought to my mind the song from Jesus Christ Superstar where the disciples, a little drunk maybe, are reflecting on what must have been a difficult and bewildering trip to Jerusalem. Jesus has been dropping troubling hints along the way about how their world is about to get permanently upended, hints it seems they aren’t ready to hear. In the version of the last supper told in Luke, the disciples have even been arguing among themselves about which of them was greatest. In Tim Rice’s lyrics, they know something is going on, but maybe don’t quite want to face up to it yet:
Look at all my trials and tribulations
Sinking in a gentle pool of wine
Don’t disturb me now I can see the answers
Till this evening is this morning life is fine
But of course, Jesus does disturb them now. He doesn’t leave them muse alone in their differences. Instead, He gets up from the table, ties a towel around himself, and begins to wash the disciple’s feet, and blow their minds.
When I started preparing for this sermon about a month ago, I started Googling about foot washing, reading passages in the scriptures that mention foot washing, and references to foot washing in other writings from the first century. What I wanted to understand was the different kinds of things that foot washing might mean to the disciples and to the writer of John’s Gospel. Much of what I found was what I expected, pages about hygiene, hospitality, and humble service. But as I read about the practice of foot washing, who did this, how and when it was done, I found myself getting drawn deeper and deeper into the story, and finding many layers of meaning I didn’t expect to find at first.
On one basic level, foot washing is an act of hospitality of a host towards guests. Most people in ancient Palestine wore open footwear, and after walking over dusty roads fouled with the waste of animals and maybe even household garbage, it’s easy to imagine on arriving at someone’s home, one’s feet would benefit from washing. This need increases if we consider that people in ancient Palestine didn’t dine sitting on chairs at a table like we do. Now, the writer of John wrote in Greek, and had the disciples at the last supper eating in Hellenistic style: reclining on cushions, rugs, or mats on a couch or the floor next to a low table, making really dirty feet potentially very awkward. And then too, anyone who does a lot of walking or hiking knows how tired your feet can get, and how a good soak can feel just heavenly. So, offering water to visitors so that they could wash their feet was an act of hospitality, a way to welcome someone and make them comfortable.
Closely connected to hospitality is the layer of deeply humble service. In wealthy households with servants or slaves, it’s possible that one of these might have washed the feet of visitors. Servants and slaves were common in the ancient world, but of course, most people didn’t have them. I imagine that for the disciples, the more common experience in visiting a friend’s home would have been that someone, probably one of the women in the household, or perhaps one of the children, would have brought water, and the guests would have washed their own feet.
A lot of the references to foot washing I found at first talked about how washing another person’s feet was something assigned to the lowest ranking person in a household, the lowest servant or slave, or the youngest person in the household if there weren’t servants. Surely this image was what seems to have shocked Peter into saying “You will never wash my feet.” But of course, this is exactly what Jesus was getting at, to set the example that greatness is to be found not in lording it over others, but in being the servant of all. For the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. I could easily pause here, and dwell a while longer on the glory of humble service and the importance of making another welcome; maybe not a bad idea in a world half crazed with hubris and prone to ignore the comfort even of loved ones, much less the needs of strangers and outcasts. But as I kept searching, I found hints of yet more levels of meaning that helped me think in new ways about what kind of service this was that Jesus was performing.
The first reference to foot washing in the Hebrew Scriptures, reading in narrative order, is the story where angels visit Abraham at the oaks of Mamre to tell him that he will have a son. Genesis 18:4 reads “Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree.” This is the familiar pattern of hospitality, someone brings water, and the visitors can wash their own feet. But the version of the story in the Testament of Abraham, a first century AD Jewish pseudepigraphic book, goes further. “Then Abraham went forward and washed the feet of the commander-in-chief, Michael. Abraham’s heart was moved and he wept over the stranger” (T. Abr. 2.9). Later in the book, when God sends angels to prepare Abraham for his death, Abraham tells his son Isaac to wash their feet. Recognizing that the visitors aren’t mortal, Isaac bursts into tears, which turn to gemstones as they fall. Tears in humble, heartfelt welcoming of holy visitors reminds me of the woman in Luke’s Gospel, who perceiving who Jesus was, washes his feet with her hair and tears. We’ve moved on from a simple act of humble hospitality into deeper waters.
I feel like the stories of Abraham and Isaac washing the feet of angels, bring us onto Holy ground, and connections to much more than physical cleanliness or worldly hospitality. God commands Moses from the burning bush to take off his sandals because he is standing on Holy Ground. In the Book of Exodus, when God is giving instructions on maintaining the tent of meeting where the ark of the covenant was kept, He tells Moses: “You shall make a bronze basin with a bronze stand for washing. You shall put it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and you shall put water in it; with the water Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet. When they go into the tent of meeting, or when they come near the altar to minister, to make an offering by fire to the Lord, they shall wash with water, so that they may not die.” Take heed; one has to prepare when approaching Holy places.
The cleanliness that God desires is of course purity of heart; and this is what Jesus had on his mind in washing the disciples’ feet, in addition to hospitality and humble service. And Peter, once he gets over the shock of Jesus humbling himself, picks up on the need to be spiritually clean. Peter with his usual eagerness wants to go one step further than the priests who wash their hands and feet, and asks Jesus to bathe his head too.
I find Jesus’ reply a little enigmatic: “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean.” That puzzled me a bit. But, I wonder if it’s that Peter has been too enthusiastic by half, and is betraying a hidden fear that at some basic level, he is spiritually deficient, as if somehow his baptism didn’t take. I think that maybe Jesus is saying to Peter, no, you really have changed, you don’t need to be baptized again. But the road is hard and full of grime; here let me wash the dirt away from your feet and renew your soul.
We’re all only ever baptized once, but we do renew our vows every year. And we renew them together. In fact, when we make our Baptismal vows the first time, whether on our own as adults, or our parents do so for us as infants, we don’t do it alone. In the liturgy for baptism in the Book of Common Prayer, the celebrant asks the congregation: “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” And the congregation answers, “we will.” At the end, we welcome the newly baptized saying “We receive you into the household of God.”
Once Jesus has finished washing the disciples’ feet, he returns to the table and finishes his lesson: “if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” And he adds “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” By washing his disciple’s feet, Jesus has welcomed them into his household. Now it’s up to us to do the same.
Wandering through all these layers of hospitality, humble service, welcoming angels and Christ, spiritual cleanliness and renewal, I feel like I arrive at a place where Jesus is telling his disciples that from here on, they must be family for each other. Not just companions, or even friends, much less rivals, they are to be family. They’re going to need each other, because their world is about to get completely upended, and their lives are going to get a whole lot harder. They’re going to need each other’s help to wash off the dirt of the road from feet and hearts. Maybe they’ll have days so dark they forget their own goodness, and need their family who can still see and welcome the Christ in them.
Just as Jesus told the disciples to be family, we need to be family for each other, too. Just like our feet get dirty every time we step outside, our hearts get sullied in the stress of day-to-day living. We live in a world that is competitive, unkind, ungracious, shabby, even cruel. It’s easy to feel like we get the grime of contempt or the dust of despair all over us. It can be hard to remember that there is anything good in us at all. I think there are days when I have so much gunk from the road on me that I forget who I really am, and need my brothers and sisters to see and greet the Christ in me, even if I can’t. The road is hard, but we’re not supposed to walk it alone.
Godspell is another of my favorite albums to listen to at this time of year, and one of my favorite songs since my high school days is By my Side. The singer asks Jesus where he is going, and can he take her with him.
Oh, please take me with you.
Let me skip the road with you,
I can dare myself
I’ll put a pebble in my shoe, and watch me walk.
I shall call the pebble dare.
We will talk together, about walking.
Dare shall be carried
And when we both have had enough,
I will take him from my shoe singing,
“Meet your new road.”
Though I loved this song the most, as a kid, I puzzled over the words. I struggled with why anyone would put a pebble in their shoe, and what that meant. I know that on one hand, it’s a metaphor for the walk of faith. But it also reminds me of traveling with another person in a relationship. It isn’t always easy! It can be hard, awkward, frustrating, even painful sometimes. It’s a challenge to keep it up, and if you know that, if maybe you’ve been hurt a few times too many, it might seem easier not to; like something you really have to dare yourself to do. Certainly it takes work and commitment, and maybe some risk. But I know if I don’t dare to take that risk, I’m left walking the road alone, with no one to help me wash off the dust and remember who I am.
I hope that as we wash each other’s feet tonight, we can affirm that we are family, greet the Christ in each other, and renew the essential goodness in each of us.
We are pilgrims on a journey, and companions on the road; we are here to help each other walk the mile and bear the load.
I will hold the Christlight for you in the nighttime of your fear;
I will hold my hand out to you, speak the peace you long to hear.
I will weep when you are weeping; when you laugh I’ll laugh with you; I will share your joy and sorrow, till we’ve seen this journey through.
Brother, sister, let me serve you; let me be as Christ to you;
pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.
I dare you.
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