It has been one of my major goals at our youth group over the past few years to get the kids to be more respectful and selfless in the way they treat other people, particularly their fellow group members. I remember vividly a discussion I had with one particularly guy. He was telling me about this large sum of money (well, a large sum of money to a kid) he had just got for selling his old bike. He was thinking about what he was going to spend the money. I suggested that maybe he might like to spend some of it on other people, or maybe even given some to some sort of charitable work. The look he gave me was priceless. Sometimes he could be rude or obnoxious, but this time he seemed genuinely confused: “Why would I do that?” he asked me, as if the whole concept of doing something for someone else was foreign to him – which it may well have been. “Well, maybe to help someone else, “ I said. Again the quizzical look – “but it’s my money, why would I want to spend it on anyone else?” The conversation left me fairly dejected – and I can’t say that that boy is now a Christian, he’s not. But it did tell me how most people think, and what a revolutionary statement Jesus is making in this passage, and, even more importantly, what a revolutionary action he is taking.
This passage marks the beginning of the end of the book of John, and the beginning of the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Vs 1 tells us that Jesus knew the time had come to leave this world. You might remember back in chapter 3 at the wedding in Cana, that Jesus told Mary that his time had not yet come – but now, some three years later, it has. Now, we as readers expect, is the time when Jesus will go out with a bang, when he will proclaim himself to be the great king, the mighty God who will reign forever. Our expectation grows as we read in vs. 3 that Jesus knows that the Father has given all authority to him: “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God” – so, what does he do? He got up and declared in a thunderous voice that all must kneel before him? He stared down at the Jewish leaders who opposed him and were plotting to kill him, and smote them all? No – he knew that God had given him power over everything, so he changed his clothes: vs. 4 - “so, he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing and wrapped a towel around his waist”. Maybe this towel was some sort of kingly garment, but no – “after that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet.” It is not the act of a king, not what we expect of a king, anyway, but the act of a servant. It’s the act of someone who is so humble as to consider others better than himself, the act of someone who is prepared to lower and debase himself so that others might be raised up and exalted.
It’s not a particularly pleasant task, washing someone else’s feet. The feet would have been caked with the grime of the day’s travelling, the dust of the road. He takes off his clothes and puts on the simple towel of a slave. He was dressed for the sort of menial service that was despised by proper self-respecting Jews. Yet, in humility, the God of the whole universe gets down on his knees and washes feet. It’s an incredibly powerful picture of what is means to be a true servant. And as the passage goes on to say, it’s an example we, as disciples of Christ, are to follow.
But this washing is symbolic of something far greater and far more profound than just getting rid of a bit of dust.
Vs. 6 – He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus replied, “You do not realise now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” “Then Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”
Peter felt uncomfortable with the Lord washing his feet – and you can probably understand why. But what he didn’t understand then was the necessity of this washing. Unless I wash you, you have no part with me”. Jesus isn’t some clean freak who has issues with dirty feet – he’s talking about something far more fundamental.
I was talking to a teenager a little while ago who was really troubled about the sort of person he saw himself as. He talked about harming himself and constantly repeated to me that he was irredeemably selfish, guilty and unforgivable. I’ve spoken to other kids who have said similar things, as well. In the secular world, they’d say he had a problem with self-esteem. But I’d like to suggest that he is more of a realist than the countless other kids who think they’re perfect and invincible. We all have that sort of guilt in us. Some of us are acutely aware of it, and others are completely oblivious. But what we all have in common is that we need to be washed. We are all stained by this guilt, we’re all stained by this dark, dirty smear across our very souls. We’ve all done the wrong thing by God. But here, as he washes his disciples’ feet, Jesus offers us cleansing. He offers to wash this guilt away. That’s what I tried to say to that teenager, and I continue to pray that God will show him that he can be washed. That guilt he was feeling, that inadequacy, that sense he had that his sin was too big and too weighty and too burdensome to ever get rid of, so why bother trying? – that can be washed away.
David Berkowitz fatally shot six New Yorkers, wounded seven others and set more than 1,400 fires throughout New York City in 1976 and 1977.
Today, as one of 266 convicted murderers in the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, N.Y., two hours from Manhattan, Berkowitz studies the Bible in his cell.
"I feel more free now in prison than I ever felt in my life because I know Christ," Berkowitz said he felt connected to evil as a child. "I used to feel that the devil was all around me, that somehow he wanted me as a child," he told reporter Peter K. Johnson.
Berkowitz was uncontrollable in school, skipped classes, smoked marijuana, didn’t fit in and was haunted by suicidal thoughts. His personality deteriorated after his mother died in 1967.
In 1974, after a three-year hitch in the U.S. Army infantry, Berkowitz returned to New York, hooked up with a group of satanists at a party and became fascinated with the occult. He participated in satanic rituals and animal sacrifices and continued to set fires throughout the city until the idea for a sacrificial shooting spree was hatched.
Berkowitz served hard time in Attica and Clinton prisons, once surviving a murderous attack by another inmate. He was stalked by despair and anger and considered suicide.
Another inmate met Berkowitz in the yard at the Sullivan penitentiary and told him God loved him. The two soon began working out and walking together. Rick continued sharing his faith and gave Berkowitz a Gideon’s pocket New Testament that also contained Psalms and Proverbs.
Berkowitz cried when he read his first Psalm. Several weeks later, after reading Psalm 34:6, Berkowitz broke down weeping. "Suddenly God just started to melt my heart," he recalled. After he got up he said he felt as if something had lifted. "It was a heaviness that I had for so many years. A yoke seemed to lift," he recalled.
His sins were washed away – David Berkowitz, a multiple murderer is free from his guilt. We all need that washing. If you know Christ, then you have already been washed, just as Jesus says to Peter that he is already clean in vs. 10. But we all need to be cleansed from that guilt, we all need to have that burden of our sin lifted from us, we all need to be washed by Jesus. And that’s what he’s offering.
But how does he do it? How does Jesus cleanse us from this guilt? Let’s look back to vs. 1. It was just before the Passover Feast, just before the festival which remembered when the Israelites sacrificed a lamb so that the angel of death would pass over their homes in Egypt. Jesus knew that his time had come to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he now showed them the full extent of his love.
What is the full extent of Jesus’ love? How far will he go for his people? The story we get directly after that verse is about washing some feet, but Jesus will go much further than that.
We hear a lot about love, particularly around this time of year – Valentine’s day. One girl in year eight wrote on the cover of her Christian Studies book last year “I love George 4 eva” Half-way through the year I noticed George was crossed out and Simon was written in, and then in about November “love” was scribbled out and “hate” had been scrawled over the top. I’ve come to realise that “forever” means a few months in the language of teenagers. The difficulty is, that that’s what many people think we mean when we talk about love.
But if you want a picture of the love, don’t look at some feeling you may or may not get when you’re with that special someone, don’t look at some sickeningly sweet inspirational poster, don’t focus on some emotional feel good garbage – if you want to know love, look at an instrument of torture and execution – look at the cross. If you want to know the full extent of God’s love, look at that man, Jesus of Nazareth, God in the flesh. Look at him beaten, bruised, pierced and broken upon that cross – for you! Look at him and you can know what love is. Look at him and you can what being a servant is really all about. “This is love”, we hear in 1 John 4:10, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as as sacrifice for our sins”.
It’s by that cross, that sacrifice, that Jesus washes us clean. It’s by that sacrifice that our guilt is passed over, that we, no matter what we’ve done, can be forgiven. It’s by that cross that the teenage boy I was talking about can have his guilt washed away and he can be transformed by the power of the Spirit to be a new man. It’s by that cross that a serial killer can be purified and made perfect in the sight of God. When Jesus tells Peter in vs. 10 that he has already had a bath, he’s not talking about a little splash with water. He’s talking about being fully immersed in the blood of Christ. That’s how we’re washed, that’s how we’re purified, that’s how our guilt is taken away.
You see, that’s the nature of a true king, of a true leader. He humbles himself. He is a servant. Though he can claim dominion over all things, he comes not to be served but to serve and to give his life for many.
Yet as much as he is our servant, he is also our Lord. Often we seem to think that these two things don’t go together. To serve someone else, we think, is somehow weak. To be humble before others is to be powerless. What Jesus commands his disciples to do is a revolution in human relationships. I am your Teacher and your Lord, he says in vs. 13 – and I have washed your feet. If I can do it, then so should you wash each others’ feet. Jesus set an example for his people to follow, an example of service. To perform some lowly or menial feet for another is not degrading or pathetic – it’s following in the footsteps of the king of the universe.
Notice the nature of Jesus’ humility. It’s not of the sort that tries to deny who he is – he knows he is from God and that the he is Lord. Rather, it is humility which says “that does not put me above others”, that does not make me too good to be a servant to my disciples.
There is, then, a clear and constant challenge to those of us who are disciples of Jesus. Are we following the example of our Lord? Are we washing one another’s feet? – and that should be taken not to necessarily to refer specifically to feet-washing but a broader attitude of humble service to each other. Are we doing that? Jesus tells us in vs. 16 that “no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him.” Are we, even subconsciously, saying “I am greater than you, Jesus, because I don’t have to serve others.” You see, we’re all tainted by the world’s way of thinking. Many of us desire to be the leader, the centre of attention, the most powerful, the one who is looked up to and respected. Our ambition is to be served by others, because we want to think ourselves more important than them.
But we need simply to look to the example of Jesus. Let’s briefly read from Philippians 2:
3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4 Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.
PHP 2:5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
PHP 2:6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
PHP 2:7 but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
PHP 2:8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death--
even death on a cross!
PHP 2:9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
PHP 2:10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
PHP 2:11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Jesus is God, yet he humbled himself to die on a cross so that we could be washed clean. And we, too, must consider others more important than ourselves.
That might mean being prepared to do those degrading menial tasks that we might think are below us – the toilet cleaning, the dealing with the kid who’s just thrown up all over themselves on the bus (I got that job last year!). But it’s just as likely to simply mean having an attitude of service to our brothers and sisters. The general attitude of kids at school that I see on a day-to-day basis is “what can I do for myself”. But, as people who have been washed clean and transformed by the blood of Jesus our attitude needs to be the same as his: “what can I do for others?”.
If putting up with abuse and misbehaviour every week is what it takes to serve the kids whom you teach – then take it. If getting no recognition and no thanks must putting hours of effort and prayer into those whom you minister to is what it takes to wash their feet – then do it. If giving up your hard-earned time and money to support evangelists in schools and elsewhere is what it takes for you to be a humble servant of your brothers and sisters in Christ – then do it.
To minister doesn’t mean to lead. It doesn’t mean to lord it over someone. It doesn’t even mean to teach. It means to serve. That’s what our leaders and elders are – servants. And it’s what we need to be
We know that the full extent of Jesus love is seen in his broken body on the cross, a body broken as a sacrifice for us. If you are still burdened with the guilt of sin, if you haven’t yet been washed clean, then know that you can be this very hour, this very minute. You can be free of that, and you can be one of the people of God. That was the problem with the kid I mentioned at the beginning who had sold his bike – he hadn’t been washed clean, and he didn’t first appreciate humility, generosity and love that Jesus had offered him. And to those who are already clean, remember that Jesus is not only our Saviour, he is also our Teacher and our Lord, and he commands us to show the same humility and the same love to each other that he showed us. Let’s go forth and do so.
Close with 1 John 4: 7-12
