Not My Feet Only

Most of us would far rather wash than be washed. Holding the towel keeps us upright and useful; sitting down and putting our feet in someone else's hands does not. That preference is the whole difficulty of this passage, and John stages it at a supper table.

He builds to it with a sentence we tend to read straight past: “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist” (John 13:3–4). Not although he knew. Knowing. The security is the reason for the stooping — the same descent Paul sings when he says he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant (Philippians 2:7). In that room the work belonged to the lowest slave in the house, and the Lord of the house did it.

Then he reaches Peter, and Peter says two things that sound like opposites. First: “You shall never wash my feet” (John 13:8) — pulling his feet back, refusing the basin altogether. Then, warned that refusing leaves him no share in Christ, he swings hard the other way: “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” (John 13:9) — pushing forward now, asking for more than was ever offered. Refusal and eagerness look like opposite postures, but underneath they are the same instinct: Peter deciding how much washing will happen and where it will stop. Naaman did the same at the Jordan, holding out for a better river before he would consent to wash, and be clean (2 Kings 5:10–12). We do it whenever we would rather bring the water than sit still under it.

Jesus refuses both sets of terms and answers with a plain fact of ordinary life, the kind everyone at that table would have known from experience: “The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but is completely clean” (John 13:10). Two washings, then, and only one of them is repeated. The bath happens once and it is total — “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 6:11) — and it is not administered again on the mornings we feel dirtier. The feet are the daily part, and they are only the feet.¹

The basin at the table is not the whole of what Jesus means by washing; it is a preview of it. The garments he laid aside to kneel and wash his friends' feet are the same garments soldiers would divide among themselves beneath a cross within a day (John 19:23–24), and it is there, not merely at the supper, that “the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7). The towel around his waist points forward to the price he was already on his way to pay. That is why the foot-washing can be a small, repeatable thing and the cross a bath given only once: the first borrows its meaning entirely from the second.

Which leaves us where Peter did not want to be — seated, still, with the towel coming toward us. For centuries the kings and queens of England knelt on the Thursday before Easter and washed the feet of the poor; in 1556 Mary I washed forty-one pairs of feet, one for each year of her age, and gave the woman she judged poorest her own gown. Somewhere along the way the kneeling itself became too much to ask, and the monarchy quietly replaced the basin with a purse of silver coins handed out at a Maundy service instead — a gift, but not a stooping. No monarch attended the service at all between 1698 and 1932, and what survives today is that purse of coins, still called Maundy money, still given on the same Thursday, but emptied of the one gesture that made it costly.² The coins were easy to keep; the basin was the first thing to go. It is the trade we are all tempted to make, and he has never once made it. He is still kneeling at the end of the table, and the only thing asked of us is to stay in the chair.