Washing the Disciples' Feet

Introduction

Illustration: Pretention is an unattractive character trait. The kind of person who acts like they’re too good for you, or that certain things are below them or whatever. They’re not really the kind of people you think about having fun with.

Now before reading the gospels if you knew that God was going to come to earth as a man, you might expect a certain level of pretention. Well, I guess it wouldn’t be pretention if it was God, because He actually is above us, but you know what I mean. You would expect Him to act above us and better than us because that is who He is. Yet when you read the gospels, I don’t think anybody gets that feeling from Jesus.

In every interaction He was kind and humble, and the impression I get from reading the gospels is that He was enjoyable to be around. I mean the guy was always surrounded by people and the only ones who didn’t like Him were the stuffy religious elites. He never acted like He was too good for people, even for the people who society rejected like tax collectors, sinners, and samaritans. And He did things like our story for today.

We’ve been reading through John’s gospel, taking a closer look at the story of Jesus’ ministry on earth and what it can teach us about who Jesus is and who we should be in following His example. Jesus just wrapped up His public ministry and He knows the cross is coming. So He sits down to a meal with His disciples, and is about to teach them a lot about what it means to be a Christian. But Jesus starts first with an object lesson. Let’s look at John 13:1-20

John 13:1–20 CSB

Before the Passover Festival, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. Now when it was time for supper, the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas, Simon Iscariot’s son, to betray him. Jesus knew that the Father had given everything into his hands, that he had come from God, and that he was going back to God. So he got up from supper, laid aside his outer clothing, took a towel, and tied it around himself. Next, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet and to dry them with the towel tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who asked him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered him, “What I’m doing you don’t realize now, but afterward you will understand.” “You will never wash my feet,” Peter said. Jesus replied, “If I don’t wash you, you have no part with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not only my feet, but also my hands and my head.” “One who has bathed,” Jesus told him, “doesn’t need to wash anything except his feet, but he is completely clean. You are clean, but not all of you.” For he knew who would betray him. This is why he said, “Not all of you are clean.” When Jesus had washed their feet and put on his outer clothing, he reclined again and said to them, “Do you know what I have done for you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are speaking rightly, since that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done for you. “Truly I tell you, a servant is not greater than his master, and a messenger is not greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. “I’m not speaking about all of you; I know those I have chosen. But the Scripture must be fulfilled: The one who eats my bread has raised his heel against me. I am telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe that I am he. Truly I tell you, whoever receives anyone I send receives me, and the one who receives me receives him who sent me.”

Now this story is fairly well known for a reason. Though the significance of footwashing is a little lost in translation in our current culture, we all know that it’s a moment of kindness and humility that Jesus is showing to His disciples, and that He is giving them an example to follow. Let’s look a little bit deeper this morning and see what we can find in this that helps us to understand Jesus better and follow His lead. I believe that in this passage we see an excellent example of Jesus demonstrating how we show love to those who are our enemies, serving and loving Judas even though He knew he would betray Him. We also see in this account Jesus demonstrating the need for His followers to keep themselves unstained from the world by maintaining their spiritual cleanliness. Finally we see that Jesus wants us to be as humble as He was in this moment, and serve our brothers and sisters in Christ with love.

Jesus Loves Even His Enemies

Illustration: Have you ever had to do a favor for someone that you didn’t really like? You don’t have to raise your hand or anything. It’s not super pleasant, is it? Now imagine doing a favor for someone who you not only dislike, but you know is plotting to have you murdered. I hope no one here has been there.

I think it’s fair to say that kindness is already pretty difficult, but kindness is extra difficult with people who we could call our enemies. Yet we as Christians know that the Bible calls us to love our enemies, and to pray for those who persecute us. That’s a tough sell. Remember, when Jesus said this in the first century we weren’t talking about “love the people who say things you dislike on Facebook.” It was more like “love the people who are going to torture and kill you for following me.” Let’s not undersell what Jesus is asking for.

They say that one of the greatest marks of good leadership is never asking someone to do something you aren’t willing to do yourself. Well we should expect Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, to be the model of perfect leadership. So then He is never going to ask us to do something that He isn’t willing to do Himself. And in fact Jesus models pretty much everything He asks us to do, even perfect submission to the Father. Loving your enemies is no exception. Jesus modelled loving His enemies, and washing the feet of the disciples was one example of just this.

That’s because not everyone sitting around that table was a faithful disciple of Jesus. Though eleven of the twelve were sincere believers, we know the most famous of traitors was sitting at the table. John makes that very clear in His description of this event. Let’s look at the first five verses of our passage for this morning.

John 13:1–5 CSB

Before the Passover Festival, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. Now when it was time for supper, the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas, Simon Iscariot’s son, to betray him. Jesus knew that the Father had given everything into his hands, that he had come from God, and that he was going back to God. So he got up from supper, laid aside his outer clothing, took a towel, and tied it around himself. Next, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet and to dry them with the towel tied around him.

Stop and think about this for a moment. Jesus was not surprised by Judas’ betrayal. We’ve already read in a few places in John’s gospel where He predicted that He would be betrayed by one of His close followers. He’s about to predict it again in order to show the disciples that it was part of the plan and not a failure on His part. Jesus has been aware from before He even called Judas to be a disciple that this man would be in part responsible for His death. Yet He washes His feet. He dresses and acts like a slave and washes the feet of the man who is about to betray Him.

And there is Jesus being our living example of what it means to love your enemies. Jesus’ act of love didn’t save Judas from judgment. It didn’t cause him to repent and change his ways. The point of loving our enemies isn’t to save them. The point is to be loving. To do the right thing. To be like Jesus, who knowing that Judas was damned still did this gracious act of kindness to him.

So we need to ask ourselves who the Judas in our life might be. Is there someone out there who is nasty to us? Who hates us? Who mistreats us? Is there zero hope in your heart that they will change. Wash their feet anyway. Not literally probably, because today that would be weird and they wouldn’t understand the point. But serve people. Be kind to people. No matter who they are and what they’ve done we treat everyone with love. That’s the bar that Jesus set for us by getting on His knees and washing Judas’ feet.

Getting Our Feet Washed

Illustration: I love going to the beach during the summer. What I don’t like about the beach is when you get sand stuck all over your foot. How many of us have been at the beach and gotten sand all over our feet and done that awkward thing where you try to rinse off your foot and then immediately put your sandals on, but then the sand is on your sandals too, so you have to rinse them off, and it’s just a mess.

That I’m sure is just a small taste of what it was like to live in first century Israel. Most people were walking around wearing sandals in a hot and dusty climate. So their feet were getting filthy. Now one thing about the Jewish people is that they were quite clean. The Law called for a lot of ritual cleaning, so they were taking baths more often than perhaps other cultures were during that time period. Yet they often used public baths and then still had to walk around afterward. So they would end up with dirty feet while the rest of them was still clean.

This is where foot washing came in. When you were sitting down to dinner it was expected that your host would provide for you to have clean feet for the meal. In most lower income homes this would mean giving someone a basin and water to clean their own feet with. If the host had a slave they would have the slave clean the feet of their guests. In any case, the feet were probably the only dirty part of them at that point, so the only thing they needed to clean. This was especially true at Passover, where the law specified that the Jewish people needed to be clean in order to share the meal.

Understanding this context I think sheds a little light on the interaction between Peter and Jesus when Jesus comes to wash Peter’s feet, and the lesson that Jesus is trying to teach through the washing of the disciples’ feet.

John 13:6–11 CSB

He came to Simon Peter, who asked him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered him, “What I’m doing you don’t realize now, but afterward you will understand.” “You will never wash my feet,” Peter said. Jesus replied, “If I don’t wash you, you have no part with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not only my feet, but also my hands and my head.” “One who has bathed,” Jesus told him, “doesn’t need to wash anything except his feet, but he is completely clean. You are clean, but not all of you.” For he knew who would betray him. This is why he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

There’s a bit of a layered situation going on here. When you understand the social dynamics at play it makes sense that Peter objects to this at first. His master should not be washing the feat of His students. That wasn’t done. But then Jesus makes it clear that if Peter rejects Jesus’ service than He will “have no part with [Him].” That’s pretty serious. Does that mean that Peter needed to have his feet washed to be saved? No, but He did need to accept Jesus’ humble service. This foot washing represented Jesus serving the disciples through His death on the cross, the thing which makes us clean. If we want to be followers of Jesus we need to accept Jesus’ service.

But then in classic Peter style when he hears this he swings to the opposite extreme. “Then wash me everywhere Jesus!” But Jesus reminds Him that He is already clean, and so are most of the other disciples. Their feet are just dirty.

The parrallel to the Christian life here is pretty clear, and many commentaries I read picked up on the same symbolic significance. Jesus pays the penalty of our sins one time. When we come to Jesus we are made new and clean, born again. We don’t ever need to pay for our sins. Yet we still walk in this dirty world. We still struggle and fail and fall. So our feet get dirty in the walking. This doesn’t mean we need to start over. We just need our feet cleaned. In the words of 1 John 1:9

1 John 1:9 CSB

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

When we start following Jesus we are what we call in fancy theological terms “Justified.” That means that we are made just in the eyes of God. We no longer live under the death sentence that we deserve. All of our sins are forgiven. Yet if we still live on this earth we still sin. So we need to continually confess our sins to Jesus to have our sinfulness cleansed.

It’s not that if we leave sin unconfessed too long we lose our salvation. Remember my favorite Romans verse that says nothing can seperate us from the love of Christ? But we can hurt our relationship with Jesus in the hear and now. We can do damage to our reputation and therefore make people less likely to hear the gospel in what we say and do. So we need to get our feet washed.

So in our daily prays let us remember to make confession a regular part of our relationship with Jesus. Pray like David did for God to search your heart and show you your sin so that you can tell Him honestly where you’ve failed and ask for His forgiveness and help. Right before that verse about confessing our sins to be forgiven John calls us liars if we say we don’t have sin, so let’s be honest with God. He knows it all anyway. We can’t hide it from Him.

Humble Service

Illustration: One summer when I was a student at Kingswood University I worked on campus as the Assistant to the Operations Manager. I remember on one of my first days in the role the Dean and the Operations manager sat me down in the Deans office and carefully explained that they needed me to help unclog some sewage pipes. They sounded so dead serious when they described it to me, and it sounded like the worst day imaginable doing that job. But I agreed to do it. Then they laughed and told me it was a joke, much to my relief. It would have been a dirty job.

It also would have been a humbling job. Hard to think really highly of yourself if you’re elbow deep in sewage, am I right? Many of us don’t want to do menial jobs like these. In older days when slavery was in fashion those were the kind of jobs you would make a slave do. Because people thought of slaves as lesser than other people. In Jewish society there were some who had a bad habit of not only viewing slaves as lesser, but foreign slaves as even lesser than that. There were some jobs that people considered below even their slaves and would only ask foreign slaves to do them. Principally anything to do with other people’s feet.

We talked about how dirty people’s feet would get, which is in part why this was a thing. This is why it’s such a big deal for John the Baptist to say he’s not worthy of even untieing Jesus’ sandal. It’s also why Jesus washing the feet of the disciples was such a big deal. He was doing something that was not only a kindness or a curtusy, but also an extreme act of humility. The King of Kings taking the role of the most looked down on group in the world, a job too demeaning for the average slave.

So what is Jesus trying to teach the disciples by doing this? Well let’s see what He says to them once He’s finished washing their feet.

John 13:12–20 CSB

When Jesus had washed their feet and put on his outer clothing, he reclined again and said to them, “Do you know what I have done for you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are speaking rightly, since that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done for you. “Truly I tell you, a servant is not greater than his master, and a messenger is not greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. “I’m not speaking about all of you; I know those I have chosen. But the Scripture must be fulfilled: The one who eats my bread has raised his heel against me. I am telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe that I am he. Truly I tell you, whoever receives anyone I send receives me, and the one who receives me receives him who sent me.”

Jesus wasn’t just making a statement about His own humility here, although He was also doing that. Jesus was giving the disciples an example. Now unlike Baptism and Communion this isn’t a case where Jesus is literally telling them to wash each other’s feet as a ritual. That’s why we never wash each other’s feet here. Which is probably a relief to those of you who really dislike feet. The point is not the act itself but the attitude it represents. Selfless service to others.

What does selfless service mean? It means not viewing yourself as too good to do something for someone else. It means valuing your brothers and sisters and going out of your way to help them. This very moment is part of what led Christians to abolish slavery, out of the realization that if Jesus was willing to put Himself on an equal level with slaves than they must have equal dignity in God’s eyes.

We as Christians are called to love each other, not just in feeling and in word but in deed. We are called to back up our words with actions. Let’s look around at everybody in this room and ask ourselves, am I serving my Christian brothers and sisters? And am I allowing myself to be served by my Christian brothers and sisters, because sometimes we have trouble being humble enough even for that. As Christians we should be able to say that we rely on each other to help take care of each other’s needs. That’s the community that Jesus was building among us, which I think will become even more clear as we continue through John’s account of the Last Supper.

Conclusion

The story of Jesus washing the disciples feet is a famous one for a reason. It was a profound moment that taught the disciples a lot about the character of Jesus and what He expects from His disciples. Each time we read it we’re reminded of the amazing love of Jesus, even for those that were trying to literally have Him killed. We learn about the need we have as disciples to “wash our feet” by confessing our sin as we walk this earth and struggle and fail. We also learn the importance of humbling serving one another just like Jesus did, since the servant is not better than his master afterall.

Remember we are called “Christians” for a reason. It means “little Christs.” We are supposed to follow after the example of Jesus, whether that be when He boldly speaks the truth, or when He humbly bows down and washes the feet of His disciples. So my friends let us every day remember who Jesus is and remember who He wants us to be, and look to His example and continue to metaphorically wash one another’s feet.

Let us pray.