He didn’t take his seat right away like the others. He stood in the doorway and watched as we gathered around the table to dine. We kept motioning for him to come and sit, but he stood silently, resolved to wait until something else happened first. I didn’t know what. I couldn’t have possibly known. I never knew what was swirling in the man’s mysterious mind. His parables, his miracles, his teaching that surpassed any teaching I had ever heard, and yet he was a blue-collar guy, just like me. A tradesman. He was a kid from the wrong side of the tracks with little opportunity to become anything more than any one of us who sat around the table that night. We could have forgiven anyone who mistook us for a band of social misfits instead of the leaders of a new movement. Government workers and fishermen sitting side by side with all eyes fixed on the man we were following, who stood silently in the corner of the room, waiting for something.
Then, in an instant, he dropped his cloak and took instead a small servant's towel and wrapped it around his waist. We recoiled in a mix of embarrassment and confusion at the image of his bare chest and legs. Our confusion swelled to bewilderment as he stooped to gather a clay basin and water jug and approached the table. What on earth could he possibly be doing? This was not the script for the evening. An evening dedicated to remembering our exodus, our salvation, and the blood of lambs splashed on doorposts. Freedom.
He moved across the small room with his eyes fixed upon me. These eyes I had stared into a thousand times over these past three years, looked unfamiliar that night. There was something urgent, something intentional, something far more serious than anything I had seen in them before; something as close to fear that I had ever seen in those eyes before. He stood before me and in a moment dropped to his knees on the barren floor. At first I thought it an odd way to pray for a meal, but instead of speaking a word, he reached out with his hand towards my foot. Instinctively, I flinched. What was he doing? Again, without a word he moved towards me and despite everything in me that wanted to do otherwise I let him touch the filthiest part of my entire body. His rough, blue-collar hands took hold of my heel and he pulled it towards the basin.
I asked him, “Lord, you aren’t going to wash my feet are you? We have servants to do that kind of work.”
Without moving his eyes off of my foot he said “I know you don’t understand why I am doing this, but you will, later, it will make sense, later.”
The other men gathered at the table gasped in audible tones and I began to feel the blood in my face rising as all eyes around the table watched in heightened anxiety at the unfolding scene. As he cupped the water in his hand and raised it towards my foot I pulled back once again and told him simply, “No…no.”
Then he raised those eyes to meet mine. “You have to let me do this, Peter. You can’t be my disciple if you don’t.”
Was this some sort of initiation rite, like that dunking in the water John had asked us to do? In one of those typical moments when my voice moved before my thoughts I told him “Jesus, don’t wash my feet then, wash my head, wash my body.”
Then he smiled.
It was the same smile he had given me a dozen times. The smile that said, without any words, “I love your heart Peter.” As he moved his hands slowly over the base of my foot I watched the water become stained with miles of dirt roads and dirt floors, the dust of barren hillsides and stretches of wilderness and the filth of fishing boat decks. While he washed away the layers of mud and clay he taught us, reminding us that once we have taken a bath our body is already clean, it is just our feet that need to be cleansed once again. All of you, he said, all of you are already clean.
We spent the rest of the night drinking wine, eating bread, laughing and telling stories. We had eaten countless meals together, but it was obvious that this night was entirely different. He talked about leaving, he talked about blood and covenants and broken bodies. He talked about betrayal. Everything seemed to be couched in mystery, but after the way the evening had started, with the towel and basin and him washing the most unclean parts of each of us, nothing seemed too strange. At the end of the night he told us that the events that evening were a lesson for all of us. The foot washing, the sacrifice, the posture of slaves, all of it, he said, was a lesson.
“You call me your teacher, and that is true. You are my students, my disciples. And people will know that you have been taught by me when they see you with towels wrapped around your waist washing the darkness away from the least of these in the most unlikely places.”
“When I am gone,” he said, “remember tonight. Remember what happened here, and tell the story over and over again with your lives.“
It was the last night we spent together before he was arrested and sentenced to death.
