“So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:14)
He knew. John is insistent on that. Jesus knew that his hour had come. He knew that the Father had given all things into his hands. He knew that he had come from God and was going to God. In other words: he knew exactly who he was and exactly what was coming. And knowing all of that, he got up from the table, took off his outer robe, tied a towel around himself, and began to wash his disciples’ feet.
This is the act of a slave. The lowest task in the household. The disciples would have washed their own feet before a meal, but they would not have washed each other’s. Washing feet was for servant, but here is the one they call Lord and Teacher, kneeling and washing, holding feet that have walked the dusty roads of Galilee. Peter can’t stand it. ‘You will never wash my feet.’ And Jesus says: unless I do this, you have no part in me.
There is something of Peter in all of us. Something that resists receiving care; something that would rather do the serving; because to be served is to be vulnerable. To have someone kneel in front of you and hold your feet is to be seen in your dustiness, your tiredness, your ordinary humanness. And many of us find that harder than any act of heroic discipleship.
But the command that follows is not ‘allow yourselves to be washed.’ It is ‘wash one another’s feet.’ This is not a ritual of passive gratitude. It is a commission. The love Jesus demonstrates is not meant to be received and stored; it is meant to be passed on. And what he is passing on is precisely this: a love that does not rank, does not manage from above, does not lord it over others. A love that gets on its knees.
Wesley understood this. He did not preach from a safe distance. He went to the prisons and the poorhouses. He organised Methodist societies to care, practically, for one another: visiting the sick, lending without interest, clothing the naked. Holiness which does not reach the feet of our neighbours is not holiness at all.
Every system of power that maintains itself through hierarchy (think ‘saints and sinners’), through the humiliation of those at the bottom (think ‘class), through the insistence that some people’s dignity matters more than others (think ‘citizens, immigrants and refugees’) is indicted by that man on his knees with a towel. Maundy Thursday is not a gentle domestic scene. It is a manifesto for healing.
The new commandment is deceptively simple, “love one another as I have loved you”. But the ‘as I have loved you’ carries the weight of it. As I have loved you means: get on your knees. It means: the one you thought was beneath you is the one whose feet you are holding. It means: love is not a feeling you harbour privately; it is a posture you assume publicly.
Whose feet need washing in your community? Who is carrying something heavy? Who has been in the dust? Who is waiting, like Peter, to be told: you are not too ordinary, too tired, or too far from grace for love to reach you here?