There is great pride in false humility and one way to have a bad Easter is to reject what Jesus wishes to do for you. It isn’t that Jesus will smite you, but that you will have harmed yourself by choosing to cut yourself off from joy, mercy, and healing. If you wish to be sad, bitter, and sick, you may, but then you should not complain about the evil in your life.
God became a man, fully human, so that we could become like God. The Divine Being did not want merely to know our pain, He experienced our pain. He took our pain and learned how He could heal our pain. Omnipotence and eternity are now turned to the task of doing the job and Jesus will not fail. The healing of the world, the cleansing of all the dirt, is underway.
Jesus is not a stalker or a cad. For God “no means no.” On the night on which His best friends would betray Him, Jesus took on the job of a slave. He took a towel and a basin and washed His students’ feet. None of the others had taken on this job . . . they were too busy posturing for jobs in the coming Kingdom. In our day and age, they would have been busy granting themselves titles, honors, and positions of authority.
Oddly, if you had asked them the nature of leadership, they would probably have gotten the answers right on a quiz. They had been with Jesus for three years and knew they were called to serve and not be served and so when Jesus got around to washing Peter’s feet . . . the student was exposed by the master as one who knew the right answers but wasn’t willing to do them.
And so Peter tried to recover. In the historical record, as Jesus approached Peter to wash his feet, Peter is quoted as saying this:
He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!”
Peter must have thought he had said the right thing. He could quickly reverse roles with the Teacher and start doing what he should have done at the start of dinner. But Jesus was using this act to make a point: only He could make Peter clean. Peter, God bless him, got the point. Nobody ever had to tell impetuous Peter he was error prone. He asked for a full bath! Jesus calmed Peter down, washed his feet, and went on with the last supper before His death.
We have greatness in our hearts. We know what we should do, but cannot do it. A few try to pretend we should only do what we can, but our hearts long for more. We know that our hatred, our lusts, our twisted desires are wrong. We demand that everyone shout our praises, condone our sin, give us medals and prizes for our failings and still it is not enough. We are not the best we know humans can be.
We want the best.
Jesus came with the promise to take our filth and clean it up. He knows our dirt isn’t just on the surface, like the dirt on the disciples feet, but is a cancerous wound that runs to the bone. We need washing, cleaning all through. If we could be born all over again with a new nature, there would be hope. This cleaning and glorification of our humanity that will take all of eternity to finish, but is started in a single moment is the job Jesus came to do.
He was going to die because that is what the wicked do to righteous men. He was going to die and so show a way to conquer death. Death was going to be sent a God-man. Jesus could die in His humanity, but had to live in His divinity. The two natures that existed without confusion in His person were the medicine shot to the very bottom of human hell. The Romans killed the God-man and the God-man trampled down death with Life.
Some more dense than most have decided that the celebration of Christ’s triumph over death is somehow morbid as if we are not actually going to die and did not need that triumph. The day is coming when we will face the undiscovered country. Nobody can be sure of what is on the other side who has not been there. One man went there and came back to tell us about it. Better still, that man came back having provided a way to go through death to Life with Him. Death remains a foe, but one that has turned into an operation leading to health and not a plunge into nothingness and decay.
We do not glory in the Cross because it was violent, but because Jesus’ love triumphed over the violence. Just as the horrors of Stalin’s bloody atheistic regime make the forgiveness and sacrifice of the Soviet martyrs all the more astounding, so the terrors of the Cross are overcome by a Love that refused revenge and that forgave His murderers from the scene of his murder.
God did not ask or demand His Son die, but if humanity chose to kill God in the flesh, then God would bring the greatest good from this horrific evil. This too is hopeful as no barbaric act is justified by the good done, but good still comes and redeems the moment. Humanity has the promise that over eternity in which any suffering in this life is swallowed up, that redemption, justice, and mercy will swallow all gratuitous pain.
And the Peter in us is correct: “Lord, don’t do that for us. The cost is too high. We are not worth it. Start over.” This is true. We are not worth it, but Love does not count sacrifice by the calculus of worthiness. Love gives because Love must and if we reject Love, then there is nothing left to us. There is little wonder that those who reject Love become crabbed, loud, abusive, and narrow: the irreligious and the overly zealous.
The first must justify their meaninglessness by creating a meaning for self that cannot stand the test of metaphysical reality. The irreligious must stay offensive or crumple under the weight of Beauty. The zealot cannot let God clean up his soul, because this will reveal how bad that soul really is. In his pride, Peter must wash off the superficial dirt, hide the filth under the bed, and cover up the wounds with makeup. Get too close to the zealot and he will lash out in rage. You are too near the truth of his heart.
Jesus comes calmly and kneels before us with a basin and a towel. We need not let Him wash our feet, but if we will not let Jesus serve us, then He can have no part in us.
Wash my feet, Lord. Wash my feet.
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