// We Want Feet //
Jesus was provocative. His message was provocative. His actions were often remarkably simply yet profoundly subversive shattering perceptions and reconfiguring worldviews. He never did anything that was so far removed from peoples cultural expectations that he lost them. Rather he used familiar customs, stories and practices and loaded them with new and unexpected significance, adding new layers of divine meaning into the often mundane. As Jesus turns water into wine, tells a tale of a beaten up Jew or steps in to halt a stoning, these are moments where the things of heaven fall to earth. One of those moments took place hours before his arrest and execution, in a moment of contradictory divine humility we find him washing the feet of his sometimes-faithless ordinary radicals.
Christ humbled himself - not: was humbled Soren Kierkegaard
In that moment of expectation busting divine humility, as Jesus, adopting the dress of a menial slave, washed his disciples feet an extraordinary contradiction occurred. In those moments the entire universe was being upheld by one who was on his hands and knees, washing middle eastern dust from the crevasses between the toes of his unbelieving, misunderstanding disciples. As Jesus poured water on the callous soles of those who had walked with him for the past three years, time for the disciples, must have stood still.
In a culture where even untying someones sandals was demeaning and the job of a slave Jesus’ actions were remarkable. For sure the disciples would have been happy to wash his feet, but washing one another’s feet was beyond consideration. This was a task normally reserved for the lowliest of menial servants.
Peers did not wash one another’s feet except very rarely and then as a mark of great love. Some even insisted that washing feet was too menial a task for a Jewish slave. This job should be reserved for Gentile slaves, or for women and children and pupils. DA Carson writes that the disciples ‘sense of the fitness of things was shattered.’ Disciples were seen as servants of their Rabbis. Rabbis didn’t wash feet, slaves did, and often not even Jewish slaves but Gentile ones. A familiar experience of someones hospitality for sure, always instigated by the host but never carried out by him. The king without a earthly crown was constantly taking the disciples expectations and turning them inside-out and upside-down.
Can you think of a moment where your expectations were shattered and your view of the world or a specific situation was significantly changed?
The Disciples say nothing, in stunned silence they watch as the cultural boundaries that gave them security and comfort were swiftly relocated. Except for Peter, he didn’t do silence, but in his amazement began his familiar objection. Like us Peter was learning that humility is as much about allowing someone to wash your feet as it is to be the one who does the washing. It takes humility to be the recipient of an act of humility.
The grace loaded act of explosive humility shattering every perception of hierarchy that society would have conditioned the disciples to understand. This was a new kind of king, not one that came with brute force (although he could have) like the rulers of the day. There was no earthly, explosive military power behind this revolutionary, just an incredible act of humility that not even the best story teller could have written into a novel. With such power and divine status at his disposal, we might have expected Jesus to defeat the devil in an immediate and flashy confrontation, and to devastate Judas with an unstoppable blast of divine wrath, instead he washes his disciples feet including the feet of the betrayer. Jesus was revealing a new script, one penned with divine hands deep in eternity past. The cross was coming, Jesus knew it, his disciples didn’t, what was about to happen would change everything. The foot washing was shocking to the disciples, but not half as shocking as what they were about to witness. The king suspended as a criminal.
Humility is multidirectional. The mark of a true disciple is not just washing the feet of others, but first being someone who is prepared to have their feet washed. The resonance of Jesus’ words ‘unless I wash you, you have no part with me’ echo hours later as, on the cross, as he breaths no more. It is this kind of humility that changes us, first we need to be washed, but before that can happen we must realise, it is our feet that are dirty. It is then that Jesus’ instruction makes sense, ‘You also ought to wash one another’s feet’. When we experience the divine washing we are humbled, the response of being washed is to go and wash.
Can you think of a moment where your feet were washed? How did it make you feel?
Humility is boundless. A true disciple is an indiscriminate foot washer. For Jesus the feet of Judas the untrustworthy were no exception. The heart of Judas had already been turned, Jesus knew what was about to unfold, rising from supper the betrayers feet were washed. As water was poured over the feet of Judas a picture is painted of the gritty grace that would see the foot washer executed as a criminal to see his enemies saved. The picture of the betrayer and the betrayed is a snapshot of everything Jesus was about.
Whose feet would it be hard for you to wash?
Humility wont save you. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote ‘No amount of striving can earn salvation. Therefore there is grace. But here there is a danger, that danger that grace may have a stupefying, paralyzing effect. The mystery of grace consists in the fact that the most strenuous human effort is still fool’s play, a wasted inconvenience, a ridiculous gesture, if it should be an attempt to earn salvation - and still to push on just like one who soberly and seriously believed that by his efforts he could earn salvation.‘ Grace that paralyzes is not real grace but a poor quality, cheep imitation. The gospel is not what you can do but what has already been done for you. Wash feet until your hands are raw and your knees sore, but unless your feet have been washed it means nothing. Gods kingdom is not one of meritocracy where your works slowly propel you upwards on a ladder called success. Gods kingdom is one of Graceocracy where someone else’s hands became raw because yours couldn’t become raw enough. Humility and grace are inseparable.
What is the equivalent of washing someones feet in your context?
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Caption: crucified feet
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