On Servant-hood…
Peter persisted, “You’re not going to wash my feet-ever!”
Jesus said, “If I don’t wash you, you can’t be part of what I’m doing.”
“Master!” said Peter. “Not only my feet then. Wash my hands! Wash my head!”
Jesus said, “If you’ve had a bath in the morning, you only need your feet washed now and you’re clean from head to toe. My concern, you understand, is holiness, not hygiene”
John 13:8-12 (The Message)
I can only imagine what it would have been like to have Jesus literally wash my feet. I think that my reaction would have been something like Peter’s, maybe not as outspoken, but I am sure that I would have at least felt as though something was definitely wrong with the picture.
“Who am I that You should be doing this for me?!?”
I wonder what everyone was thinking. Perhaps some of the disciples thought that it was about time that Jesus did something for them. I say this because so often, we feel as though God should be doing something for us. We get that feeling of “entitlement” so easily; that feeling of deserving something for our good deeds, or our good behavior, or our obedience. Yes, we have a Pavlovian[1] response to God: we know that God is good and we begin to expect Him to spoil us based on something that we do. We expect “causality[2]” from God. The problem here is that God is in debt to no one. In fact, we are in debt to Him, a great deal of debt. It would be easy, I think, to be standing in line, waiting for Jesus to wash my feet, and as I was thinking through the whole thing, to remember the time that I did this and that at such and such a place and think-if only for a moment-that it’s about time that Jesus did something for me.
I can say this because I know that there are times that I have thought that God owed me something. I’m almost certain that everyone that has ever spent any real time trying to figure out life and God would at some point, if even briefly, think “in my youth, or childhood, I must have done something good”[3]. Then again, I probably would have responded primarily like Peter.
I think that far more prevalent than our deluded feelings of entitlement is our feeling of unworthiness. There are so many of us that think that we can’t have anything to do with God because we are so frail, so imperfect, so duplicitous in our nature, so, so, human. This is where many of us begin to think things like “I’ll come to God once I have this all straightened out, once I’ve cleaned up my act.” The problem here is that God is not waiting on you to do ANYTHING. He has already extended His offer of peace, of love, of fullness, of totality. There is nothing that we can do to earn His love: He offers it freely.
This is where I think that Peter’s response becomes interesting, “You’re not going to wash my feet-ever!” Sometimes I feel like we give this guy so much trouble saying things like “he was unstable” or “he was learning to be a man”. I think that if Peter weren’t already a man or a stable person then he wouldn’t have responded the way that he did. He was honest with his master; he didn’t hide anything about how this whole “washing of feet” thing was making him feel. I think that this honesty speaks volumes about what a very, very mature person that Peter was. Anyone that is willing to face something difficult head on earns a great deal of respect in my book.
I also love his next statement, “Not only my feet then. Wash my hands! Wash my head!” Peter knows what he wants, he wants to please his master, he wants to know that he is secure in his relationship with Jesus, he wants to be sure that Jesus is getting the respect that He deserves. Peter, in this statement declares his absolute dependence on Jesus.
Jesus’ response to this was a very calm and certain statement, “If I don’t wash you, you can’t be part of what I’m doing.” He followed it by saying that He wasn’t trying to make them hygienically sound, but holy.
Jesus wasn’t trying to wash their feet in order to make them clean, He was washing their feet because He wanted to serve them, to do something special for His friends. Jesus proclaims that Peter can’t have any part in Him unless Peter allows Jesus to serve Him. You can’t have any part unless you let Jesus serve you.
So much of following Jesus is about serving, about giving of yourself and your resources for the sake of helping others, but the implication of Jesus’ words here is that unless He serves you, you can have no part in what He is doing.
How magnificent are the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! They are unsearchable!
If you don’t allow Jesus to work in your life, then you can have no part of Him. We become so busy trying to DO the things that a “good Christian” does, serving in church, living a certain kind of life, paying tithes, and the list goes on and on. And yet, all that He is looking for is for you to stop and let Him serve you, to stop and let Him work in your heart, to wash your feet. He is so emphatic about it that He says that if you don’t let Him “serve” you in ways that only He can, that you can’t have anything to do with Him. It doesn’t matter how many good things that you do, unless you take the time to let Him wash your feet, you do them in vain.
I have known many people that try to prove their spirituality through their deeds. What if we stopped trying to prove our spirituality and started seeking Him honestly? What if instead of being consumed by an insane assumption of what God wants you to do with your life you sat down and let Him wash your feet? What if the only way to learn how to serve people is to learn first-hand from Jesus what it means to meet someone at their deepest need?
Let Him wash your feet.
[1] Pavlov was the one that trained his dogs to respond to the ringing of bells; every time he rang a bell, he would feed the dogs. One day he rang the bell and did not feed the dogs. They began to salivate, expecting their meal.
[2] Watch the second installment of the Matrix Trilogy, Revolutions, for a good understanding of this concept.
[3] This of course is from The Sound of Music.
