This is a story and a teaching about the ladder, the quiet ranking that people carry into almost every room they walk into, where somebody is above and somebody is below and everyone can feel which one they are. Offices have it. Families have it. Churches have it. Most of us learned as children which rung we were standing on, and a lot of us have never really stopped standing there.
On the last night Jesus spent with his closest friends, he got up from the table, took off his outer clothes, tied a servant’s towel around his waist, and knelt on the floor to wash the dirt off their feet.
So let us go into that room and watch it happen from the beginning, and then look at what he told them once he sat back down.
The room
It was the night before the Passover feast, the biggest night in the year, in a borrowed upstairs room in Jerusalem. Jesus and the twelve men who had followed him for three years were at supper.
Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.John 13:1
Roads then were dirt. People walked them in open sandals. By the time you reached a house for a meal your feet were caked. So a household kept someone at the door with water to wash the feet of everyone coming in. It was the lowest job in the house, given to the lowest servant there. Everybody at that table had known that since they were small.
That night there was no servant at the door. Twelve pairs of dirty feet, and nobody moved.
What he did
Jesus stood up from the meal.
He took off his outer robe and laid it aside. He picked up a towel and tied it around his waist, the way the door servant did. He poured water into a basin.
He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.John 13:4-5
Then he knelt on the floor and started washing feet, one man at a time. He held each foot over the basin, poured the water, rubbed the dirt off with his hands, and dried it with the towel hanging at his waist. Then he shifted along the floor to the next man and did it again.
Judas Iscariot was in that room, sitting with the rest of them. He was the one who kept the money bag for the group, and he had already decided to hand Jesus over to the men who wanted him dead. Jesus washed his feet too.
Peter pulls his foot back
Then Jesus came to Simon Peter, the fisherman who had left his boat and his nets to follow him, the loudest and most eager of the twelve.
Peter pulled his foot away.
Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.John 13:8
Peter had spent three years calling this man Master. Masters did not kneel on floors in front of fishermen. So Peter did what he thought was right and tried to keep his teacher off the ground.
Jesus did not argue with him about rank. He told Peter that if he was not washed, he had no part with him. Peter swung the whole way over in a second, the way Peter always did, and asked to be washed head to foot.
Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.John 13:10
Ye are clean, but not all. Judas was still sitting there.
What he said when he sat down
He finished all twelve. He untied the towel, put his outer clothes back on, and sat down again at the table.
Then he spoke.
Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.John 13:13-14
He kept the title. He agreed with it out loud. And then he told them that the man they called Lord had just done the door servant’s job, so the job was not beneath any of them either.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him.John 13:16
If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.John 13:17
Then supper went on, and before that night was over Judas went out the door to fetch the men with the torches.
What he was doing on that floor
He had taught them about greatness in words before, and it had not stuck. His friends had argued on the road about which of them was the most important. So on his last free night he stopped explaining it and simply did it, in front of all of them, on his knees, with a basin.
But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve.Luke 22:26
The water was doing two things at the same time. It was a lesson about serving each other. It was also a picture of being made clean by him and belonging to him. Both of those were in the same basin.
And the ranking he knelt down into was not out in the world somewhere. It was in his own friends, in that room, at that table. The wish to be the important one. The habit of quietly measuring who is above and who is below. It is not excusable, but it is common, and it is the human part of us. It is not the part where the Holy Spirit lives.
For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.Mark 10:45
If you have spent your life on the low rung
If you are the one who cleans up after everybody and gets thanked by nobody, if some room or some family taught you that you were the small person who serves quietly while the important people are honored, then look at who was holding the towel that night.
The most important person in the story got down on the floor for the people the world would have put on the floor for him. He did it so they would never again believe that some people are made to kneel and others are made to be served. In his room, greatness looks like a towel and a basin.
Isn’t it a good thing that he did it instead of only saying it, so that nobody would be able to argue about what he meant. Now you know why that basin is in the story at all. And there is a seat at that table for you, not down at the far end, at the table. The next teachings ask harder things of us, love your enemy among them, and that is the point. It is a journey, not one moment of understanding.
Come find us online, where we keep reading the old accounts and finding the love Jesus knelt down to show. Someone already saved your place.