March 1 2026
John 13:1-20
While we are somewhat late, nevertheless, we have entered into a new season of our church calendar which we call Lent. This name, “Lent” is simply the name given to this time of the year when the days increase in length, or in the Old English, lent. You see, it is in the spring of the year that the Jewish holy day of Passover is celebrated. This impacts us as followers of Jesus because it is on Passover that we celebrate what the church calls Maunday Thursday, the day when the meal called of Holy Communion was initiated and the commandment to love one another as Jesus first loved us was given to us.
Now Lent begins every year, forty days before Easter Sunday. This time was set aside for those who desired to be baptized on Easter morning in order that those doing so might have a time to prepare themselves for this confession. The reason why forty days was chosen is most likely because that forty days was the number of days that Jesus spent in the wilderness before beginning his ministry, as we read in the fourth chapter of both Matthew and Lukes gospel accounts. During those forty days, Jesus fasted and he was tested by the evil one. So this time of Lent is a time when people often fast as they align themselves with the testing of Jesus. This test Jesus underwent centered on his love of his Father, whether Jesus was indeed able to love him with all of his heart, and all of his soul and with the life he had been given. So here at the beginning of Lent, we are given time to ponder if we too love our heavenly Father just as Jesus has always loved him. This love is what compels us to walk towards Calvary to face the cross. Once again, we are called to consider just why it is that such an awful day is known by the church as being, “Good Friday”. Perhaps you are like me in that it is difficult to comprehend how a dying man nailed to a cross could ever be called good.
So during this season of Lent, we must turn our faces toward the cross. We must be certain as to why the cross does indeed speak to us of the goodness of God. You see, Lent merely follows on with what we discovered during the season Epiphany. During the season of Epiphany we learned that Jesus came to us as the righteous judge, the one who not only came to speak to us a word of judgment but he lived out that judgment as well. Now, when we think of judgment, we don’t always associate it with being good. Yet, this is the very reason why Jesus came as our judge so that we could at last know what good really is. Jesus teaches us that we can know this goodness of God through our experience of being obedient to his commands. You see, in the blessing Jesus spoke to his disciples, we find there the expectations Jesus has for this good life that we were created to live. In the fifth chapter of Matthew, in the sixth, seventh and eighth verses, Jesus defines clearly, his idea of the good life. Jesus tells us that the good life looks like people who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The good life is people who make their life a constant offering of mercy. And the good life, Jesus tells us, is people who seek only the honor of God refusing to be concerned about the opinion of others. So here, in this the very, simple, three-dimensional sketch Jesus lays out for us just what it means for us to be the good people that God expects.
Now when we hear this definition of the good life given to us by Jesus, we probably are thinking that this isn’t at all how we define what a good life looks like. The reason for this is that before the righteous judge named Jesus was given to us by the Father, we never had a clear definition of what it meant for us to be good, other than for us to say that God alone is good. Yet, if God has created us to bear his image and likeness then we can also assume that God is going to make it possible for us to be and do good, just as he is good. So it makes sense that if we are to be good people then the only one who can define for us just what it means for us to be good is God alone. Only as we listen to God can we have any hope that his way of being good will become our way of being good. Now this seems all well and good, doesn’t it, until we realize that the Bible tells us that all of humanity has stopped listening to God. What the third chapter of Genesis explains to us is that all of us have all accepted the lie that we are nothing more than very intelligent animals, the apex predator in our world. This means that instead of listening to the voice of God, as we were created to do, we instead, listen to the voice of our creaturely desires. As we hear in the second chapter of the first letter of John, what guides us as people who live in this world is, first our appetites, the, “…desires of the flesh”. Or we chase after the, …desires of the eyes”, the inner lusts that cause us to covet what we don’t have. Or we listen to the voice that speaks to us of how we can have this, “…the pride of life”, the honor and respect we crave from our peers. When we listen to these inner voices the result can only be evil. This is why Jesus states that we currently live in an evil age because in this world people are all being guided by their base instincts which can only result in evil. So before the arrival of Jesus, when someone was called good, their goodness was defined by how well that person was at being able to constrain themselves from doing evil. You know, if we consider someone to be a good person, what we mean is that they appear to have their appetites under control, they aren’t spending every waking hour chasing after what their eyes catch sight of, nor do they boast or brag excessively. Now this is just what most of us consider to be the definition of good yet in reality, it is merely, good-enough. You see, just walking around keeping a lid on our desires is something we should agree is not really all that good.
So when Jesus arrived on the scene as the righteous judge, the first lesson he gave as our teacher was that the goodness of God comes to us through the blessing of God. We are blessed when God gives us the precious gift of his word. This word of blessing found at the beginning of the fifth chapter of Matthew, speaks to us of the promise of God, the goodness of God and the life of God. So where we used to consider good to be the least amount of evil as possible, now Jesus, as the Son of God, has come to us to a give us a heavenly definition of good, so that this goodness of heaven might be for us an earthly experience. Good, Jesus teaches us, is a life which hungers and thirsts for righteousness, a life that offers mercy to all and good is the life which seeks only after the honor of God. You see, instead of being just good enough we now can be good, a good which brings glory to the God who is the very definition of good.
So during this season of Lent, we are going to consider just what might we expect when we decide to take Jesus up on his offer to be good, not just good enough.Today, we are going to look at what it would mean for us to turn from our life being just about satisfying the appetite of our flesh, to having a life which hungers and thirsts for righteousness. So here, on this most holy of nights, Jesus is preparing his students to become like him so that they too might have lives marked by a heavenly goodness. The power that begins this transformation in the lives of the disciples is love. Here, once again, we find ourselves in need of defining just what do we mean when we speak of love. Much like in the case of talking about what does it mean to be good, the world overuses this word called love. Fortunately for us, this problem of defining this love of Jesus was also a struggle for those who spoke the Greek language even though they had many different names for love. Yet, in spite of having names for all these different experiences of love, the love of Jesus simply did not fit into any of their preconceived categories. The followers of Jesus had to find a new word and fill that word with a meaning which might capture the unusual quality of this heavenly love. The word they used for the love of Jesus is agape/agapaos. This word speaks of being excessive, over-the-top, overflowing, without measure which is the very wonder of this love God has for all of us.
So this special agape love of Jesus permeates the upper room where Jesus and his disciples gathered on the night of Passover. We sense the limitless nature of this love when we are told that Jesus loved his own all the way to the end. So this love of Jesus reaches from the very beginning, from the moment of creation, all the way to the end of time. This same love was able to reach from the heights of heaven all the way to the dusty floor upon which Jesus knelt. This is the love that encircled our earth in order to save it from destruction. It is this wildly excessive love, this is the love that was on display that holy night. You see, agape love, is a love that flows forth from us, having no concern to whom it is given to. So this love is a love which sets others free from any expectations or presumptions. You see, agape love never makes any demands for a response. This means that the person who experiences such love is able to experience real feelings, never having to be on the defensive. Agape love simply accepts us as we are right there in the moment. This is a love so focused on the other person that their interests and needs are naturally placed above our own.
This agape love is the love on display as Jesus does the most remarkable act because we are told that Jesus got up from his place at the table and he laid aside his outer garments, and he took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then Jesus poured water into a basin and he began to wash the disciples feet, and to dry them with the towel wrapped around his waist. Now, it goes without saying that this is a moment of great mystery for there is something more important than the need for clean feet happening here. I believe that John has crafted his story in such a way that here in this image of Jesus washing feet, John has captured the work of Jesus upon the cross. You see, just as Jesus got up from his seat at the table, so too Jesus got up from his throne in heaven. And just as Jesus laid aside his garments, so too the Son of God set aside his glory in order to come to earth to serve us. Then as Jesus took upon himself the towel, we see Jesus take the form of a servant just as he did when he was born as one of us. So when Jesus poured the water in the basin in order to cleanse the feet of his disciples, we are reminded of how Jesus poured out his blood to cleanse us all from sin. Then Jesus finishes up and, once again, Jesus takes his seat at the table reminiscent of how he is now seated at the right hand of the Father. So, even though we see Jesus washing the disciples feet, he is, nonetheless, pointing us to the greater reality of the cross. John has done so in order that we might understand that there at the cross we are given the very means by which we might be cleansed from the pollution of the world.
So it becomes somewhat evident that John, in the telling of the washing of the feet, is here giving us an extra layer of meaning that lay behind the receiving of the elements of the supper which the disciples ate that special evening. It seems that the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup are still part of the story, but they have just been pushed to the background so that the truth they convey to us might be front and center. What Jesus did when he he washed the feet of his disciples is to make it abundantly clear that he has come to serve us as a servant sent from our Heavenly Father. It is Peter who speaks for us all when he protests this image of Jesus, the very holy one of God seen groveling in the dirt. Peter, like many of us, believes that he does not stand in need of anyone to come from heaven to cleanse him from the stain of this world. You see, Peter is much like us, because he too believes that he is good-enough yet as Jesus tells Peter, if we want to have a life with him, then being merely good-enough just won’t cut it. If we want to be good, as Jesus is good, then we must allow Jesus to be our servant who serves every person there upon the cross.
What Jesus does for us upon the cross is that that he offered his body to be broken. This is what is heard as the bread is given to us. We are right to wonder just why it is that Jesus has allowed himself to be broken as an act of agape love? Well, the answer is found at the end of the fifty-seventh chapter of Isaiah. “Thus says the One who is is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy; “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is broken and of a lowly spirit, to give life to the spirit of the lowly, to give life to the heart of the broken.” You see, the agape love of God reaches down from the heights of heaven to the very lowest places on earth to lift the broken up from death in order to bring them back to life. This scripture also causes us to wonder why it is that there are people who have been cast off, found there in the lowest of places? The answer is that these broken people trampled down in the dirt, are the very result of a world where life is controlled by the appetites of one’s flesh, the lusts of a person’s eyes and this incessant need of people to be honored and esteemed by others. You see, the people who do not aid our purpose of finding satisfaction for our appetites, those who do not give us pleasure or those who do not further our plans for greatness, these sorts of people are easy for us to write off. Those judged to be of no use to us can easily become what Jesus calls the, “least of these”, in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew. Another way of describing these would be to call them, “less-than-human”. When people are judged to be less-than humans, then it is easy to deny them the very basics of life such as food and shelter. Instead of the unlimited love of God, what we find is a love limited by by our predetermined usefulness of the people we meet. Such is the pollution of the world.
Jesus, in contrast, allows his body to be broken and this he does so for each and every person. Jesus unites himself with those who have been written off by the people of the world so that their suffering might become his own. Jesus does so because righteousness demands that Jesus do unto others as he would want done to him. So, Jesus, by being broken for us, is saying to us us that he has judged us to be equal with him. Not only that, but every person is now to be seen as one who has been judged by Jesus to be his equal. So no longer can it be said that anyone is, “less-than-human, for all people are found by Jesus to be his equal.Therefore, now that Jesus has declared that all of us are equals we too must find all people worthy of our service just as Jesus has found us worthy of suffering with us in our brokenness.
You see, righteousness is living in the world where all are equals. So when we see the broken and lowly of this world, we must not forget that the cross declares that Jesus calls them, as well as us, his equal. You see, when we hear the words, “The body of Jesus broken for you”, we are to remember that just as Jesus was willing to give his life to serve the lowly, beholding in their face his very own, so too he demands that we rise up and follow him. This is what is expected when we are good as Jesus is good. We too are to love with agape love, this love without limits. We are to go down to the lowest of places, to the broken and cast off. There in their faces we are to see the very face of Jesus. This is why we hunger and thirst for this righteousness because in serving those called the least of these we find that we do indeed serve Jesus, the one who is the greatest of all. Amen!
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