Then He poured water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded. So He came to Simon Peter. He said to Him, “Lord, do You wash my feet?” Jesus answered and said to him, “What I do you do not realize now, but you will understand hereafter.” Peter said to Him, “Never shall You wash my feet!” Jesus answered him, “If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me.” Simon Peter said to Him, “Lord, then wash not only my feet, but also my hands and my head.” Jesus said to him, “He who has bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean; and you are clean, but not all of you.” For He knew the one who was betraying Him; for this reason He said, “Not all of you are clean.”
So when He had washed their feet, and taken His garments and reclined at the table again, He said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call Me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a slave is not greater than his master, nor is one who is sent greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
(John 13:1-17)
What a great scene this is! Jesus catches His disciples completely off guard. After dinner, He removes His garments and wraps Himself in a big towel, and begins washing His disciples' feet. Washing feet was the job of a servant. Predictably, Peter balks loudly.
Writing the word "loudly" makes me realize that a lot of Peter's balking, even though entirely heartfelt, was also for public consumption. "Let everyone know that I am Jesus' true friend and servant!"
Peter often gets the message backwards. In his defense, Jesus taught lessons that went deeper than normal, and very often made His point by turning people's assumptions upside-down. But anyway, when Peter balks and is corrected, he replies with something like, "Oh, I see! Then don't stop at washing my feet. I'm your man, Jesus -- wash me from head to toe!" (It's hard for me to picture Jesus not smiling or laughing when He hears this comeback.)
Yet my favorite part of this story comes in the wording Jesus uses afterwards: "Do you know what I have done to you?" Some other versions change this to "...what I have done for you," but "to you" is true to the original wording.
Yes indeed, from my experience, this is exactly how Jesus works. He begins by doing something TO us, something unexpected. Let's say we're desperate for a breakthrough that will move us quickly out of financial difficulty. We've been watching too many "God always wants you to succeed" preachers on TV, so we decide to pray for a miracle. Well, I can't speak for how Jesus chooses to act sometimes, but what He may very well do next is to begin pulling some rugs out from under us. "Don't expect business as usual -- you've asked Me for a transformation, so we're going in at ground level. First I want you to see what's in your heart. You have idols. I'm not the center of your focus yet." ("Oh, great, what have I done..." we mutter.)
Why does He so often start by doing something to us instead of something for us? If we are His disciples, what use will we honestly be in His work if we're allowed to jump immediately to a solution without first passing by at least one gut-challenging "to us" stage? When He starts by doing something to us, He's planting something inside our hearts that may shock us at first. Then it begins to shape us.
By taking us back to ground level to start the transformation, He is able to turn us into people whose lives can deeply affect other broken lives. What person who prays for miraculous financial healing and wins $250,000 the next week goes on to care deeply about others who are financially at sea? What person who has had her heart broken one day and finds the man of her dreams the next day can listen with great empathy and patience to someone with a long-term broken heart?
As Charles Price puts it, "God does through us what He has first done in us." *
So here are the disciples, being given a visual they will never forget -- Jesus, their Master, wearing only a towel, washing their feet. This lesson -- if He served and nurtured us, how dare we mortals look down on one another or fail to care for each other? -- must have been driven home all the more clearly after Jesus' resurrection and ascension, once they fully began to grasp who He was.
But just in case they might misunderstand who He was, He worked it into the wording of the lesson (verses 13-14):
You call Me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.
"You call me Teacher and Lord..." "If I..., the Lord and the Teacher...."
Not only does He reprioritize the titles (Lord first, Teacher second), He adds "the." He's not just their Lord and Teacher, but "THE Lord" and "THE Teacher." The only one.
(There's also an "I am" in the wording. ...OK, this may be stretching things a bit. Although it doesn't seem to have been lost on John.)
Are we allowing Jesus to flip our expectations on their heads? Is He able to come back afterwards and say, "Do you know what I have done to you?" Or are we squirming uncomfortably during what we perceive as the wait time between "I prayed for a miracle" and "I will receive a miracle"? God's miraculous work tends to focus on rebuilding the human heart. Are you still so sure He isn't answering?
* From sermon 2 of "Exodus: Here Am I, Send Someone Else." Available from Living Truth as a CD, DVD, or PDF transcript. No affiliation, but it's a great series of sermons.