Jesus washes feet.

From the Sermon on the Mount, I’m jumping over towards Jesus’s other hugely influential sermon, the one He gave to His disciples on the night He was arrested. Some Christians call it the Passion Discourses, so I’ll go with that. It’s found at John 13-17, and begins, as many of John’s stories, with Jesus acting, and then commenting on His actions. (Jesus, you see, wasn’t all talk.) You’ve probably heard the story before: He washed His students’ feet. Big long quote time:

Before the Passover celebration, Jesus knew that His hour had come to leave this world and return to His Father. He had loved His disciples during His ministry on earth, and now He loved them to the very end. It was time for supper, and the devil had already prompted Judas, son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the Father had given Him authority over everything and that He had come from God and would return to God. So He got up from the table, took off His robe, wrapped a towel around His waist, and poured water into a basin. Then He began to wash the disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel he had around him.

When Jesus came to Simon Peter, Peter said to him, “Lord, are You going to wash my feet?”

Jesus replied, “You don’t understand now what I am doing, but someday you will.”

“No,” Peter protested, “You will never ever wash my feet!”

Jesus replied, “Unless I wash you, you won’t belong to Me.”

Simon Peter exclaimed, “Then wash my hands and head as well, Lord, not just my feet!”

Jesus replied, “A person who has bathed all over does not need to wash, except for the feet, to be entirely clean. And you disciples are clean, but not all of you.” For Jesus knew who would betray Him. That is what He meant when He said, “Not all of you are clean.”

After washing their feet, He put on His robe again and sat down and asked, “Do you understand what I was doing? You call Me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and you are right, because that’s what I am. And since I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash each other’s feet. I have given you an example to follow. Do as I have done to you. I tell you the truth, slaves are not greater than their master. Nor is the messenger more important than the one who sends the message. Now that you know these things, God will bless you for doing them.”

—John 13.1-17 NLT

First of all, the writer of John wanted to make it clear—far clearer than we tend to see in the other gospels—that Jesus was in total control of the situation. He knew that His student Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve that He had handpicked to announce the gospel, was about to tell the Jerusalem leadership where He was so that they could secretly arrest Him. He knew that He was going to suffer a nasty, violent death the next day. He also knew He could stop any of this at any time, (Mt 26.53) and that He was going back to God. Too often we portray Jesus as a victim of the world’s evil without recognizing that He was a willing victim.

So He had all of this in mind when He gave this sermon to His students. He was about to leave them and go back to the Father, as He says many times in this sermon. And before He left, He had these things to tell them. But first He had one important thing to show them. He washed their feet.

I wear sandals a lot, and I walk a lot. I know how dirty a pair of feet can get after a day in sandals. I often have to wash them when I get home; I have to regularly take a pumice stone to my heel in order to properly get it clean.

But I also live in a 21st century American city. Most of our roads are paved. We’re in the habit of putting our trash in cans, not dropping it on the street. We’re in the habit of using bathrooms, not just using whatever semi-private corner we can find. We rarely see work animals in American cities, and when we do, we have laws against leaving their droppings anywhere. (I’ve visited places outside the U.S. where that’s not the case, and you can’t even see that there are paved roads beneath all the “dirt,” as I think we’d all prefer to think of it.) Feet were filthy, and one foot would darken the water in Jesus’s basin to the degree that He’d have to change it after each person. Washing feet was like cleaning a clogged toilet.

Some commentators point out that foot-washing was, properly, a slave’s job. Of course, the poor didn’t own slaves, and had to wash their own feet. But in the ancient Jewish culture, the students of a rabbi were considered his slaves—in both his mind and theirs. (Jn 12.26) He was their teacher and lord, (Jn 13.13) and it was their honor and privilege to not just learn from this holy man, but to do every little thing for Him. Like have food ready for Him (Mk 8.14) or go get it (Jn 4.8) or fix dinner (Mt 26.19) or clean up after Him (Mt 15.37) while He waited; like get things ready for Him, (Mk 3.9) go where He instructed them, (Mt 21.1, 6) and carry His messages. Properly, they should have washed Jesus’s feet. And they probably had.

The idea of a rabbi washing His students’ feet, however, was unthinkable in the ancient Jewish culture. What Jesus was doing to them simply was not done. It was considered beneath His dignity. It would lower Him in most people’s opinion—which is something He was willing to risk. It humiliated Him.

But considering how great Jesus is, it didn’t humiliate Him. It elevated service.

People today still have the idea that certain tasks are beneath them: They are too important, too busy, too responsible, too rich, too upper-caste, even too good, to have to perform certain tasks. Jesus’s students had a bad habit of jockeying for position; each of them wanted to be His favorite student, figuring that this might make them His viceroy once He became King. And from what they knew of kings and governors and emperors, those folks didn’t have to do anything for themselves. Or, really, others. The idea of a leader as a “public servant” had been taught many times in the Old Testament; the king was not an absolute ruler, but a servant of God, and responsible to teach and enforce His law instead of their own whims. But this was rarely practiced, and even the best kings, like David and Josiah, sometimes acted like despots and did as they pleased (and suffered the consequences). And there were plenty of pagan examples all around the students: To be a king meant you can do as you like, with no one to tell you otherwise. If you don’t like washing your own feet, you’ll never have to.

So in order to make God’s idea of public service nice and obvious, Jesus demonstrated it personally. If He is the King, and He washes feet, and slaves are not greater than their master, (Jn 13.16) what business do we have in saying that any job is beneath us? Foot-washing is as lowly a job as one can think of. Yet Jesus did it. He even washed Judas Iscariot’s feet. (Jn 13.10-11)

Simon Peter objected to Jesus washing him because he was clinging too tightly to the idea that certain tasks are beneath certain people: Jesus was too important to wash feet. Simon didn’t understand the implication (Jn 13.7) —that if Jesus isn’t above washing feet, neither would be Simon—and here’s why: When Jesus told him matter-of-factly, “Unless I wash you, you won’t belong to Me,” (Jn 13.8) Simon’s response was “Then wash my hands and head.” (Jn 13.9) Simon thought this was about washing, and was a special circumstance that wasn’t really connected to actual service. Certainly that’s the way many Christians look it. Some of us will ritually wash someone’s feet, and do so easily. But when it comes to really doing humble work, like scrubbing the church’s bathroom or hosing off the church’s trash cans, we’ll leave those tasks for others. We don’t mind rinsing off a pair of pampered 21st-century feet that would never turn the water brown, but we’re far too important for grunt work. So we repeat Simon’s mistake.

Others of us don’t wash feet at all. We figure we get the point—that no Christian is above any kind of service—and as a result we don’t have to take Jesus literally when He says “Do as I have done to you.” (Jn 13.15) Any service will do. But despite getting this point, we miss another: Jesus said “Do this” because doing this—washing feet in particular—makes a huge impact on people.

Particularly in 21st century America. Nobody washes our feet. Maybe nurses do, but any able-bodied person is expected to wash their own feet, and be proud of it; we do for ourselves. So when someone offers to do it, it suddenly becomes a big deal. It humbles the person getting washed as well as the person doing the washing. Especially if the person getting washed believes the person doing the washing is somehow a greater person—a boss, a pastor, one more talented, one more famous, or one who should think themselves above this sort of thing. It reminds us all that Jesus puts us all on the same level, and even though God has greater and lesser people in the Kingdom, we have no business deciding who those folks are.

And it reminds us of this story, and what Jesus meant by it: It shows that in the Kingdom everyone is a servant. It shows how highly Jesus thinks of service. It shows respect and love for one another. It shows exactly the sort of attitude that Jesus wants in His Kingdom.