The Servant King

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When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, ‘Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him.” Let’s take a couple of fictional examples that are representative of how we tend to imagine servants. Or perhaps you are in a supervisory position at work, and the people you are supervising refuse to collaborate on an important project. Your task could be to use your position to step in and model collaboration. In this way, you are leading them in the direction you want them to go, and you are serving them by being willing to walk alongside them instead of lording your power over them. Now, the way John words this I think is really interesting, because it’s not merely that Jesus was doing this functional task. It was that; this isn’t mere ceremony. But the way John words this shows us something about how this reveals the heart of Christ and the heart of God. That’s crystal-clear here in chapter 13:1. “Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father.” So the hour has come. We’re right on the eve of Jesus’s crucifixion and death. He knows he’s about to die.

To understand what Jesus is doing here, we have to understand something about the cultural context. In the ancient world, there were no paved roads, there were only dirty, dusty roads and dirt trails, dirt streets. No paved roads. People did not have boots and shoes with closed toes the way we do today; they wore open-toed sandals, which meant they were constantly walking these dirty, dusty streets, and their feet would get really dirty. If it was raining, their feet would get really muddy. So their feet, when they came inside from being outdoors, their feet would be really dirty. Listen, if that’s the God you reject, I reject that God! That is not the God of the Bible. That’s not the God that is revealed in Jesus Christ. The God as he is revealed in Jesus, the true God, is the God who loves his people so much that he goes all the way to the cross to serve them, to save them, to wash them, to cleanse them. The foot-washing is just one stop along the way, which is symbolizing that saving act. We’ve seen the love of the servant king, the humility of the servant king, and his teaching. What’s our response? Love him, and love others as he has loved you. Trust him. He stooped to wash your feet, he went all the way to the cross to wash your soul. Trust him. Then follow him by loving and serving one another. Let’s pray. Now, I feel like a baby in this, so I’m not trying to hold myself as a model, I’m just trying to say, if you will do this, if you will embrace it, if you will take the risk—yes, get outside of your comfort zone and serve others—you too will find this joy. If you know these things, happy are you if you do them. So it was customary—every household would do this—that when a guest came to the home, part of ordinary hospitality was to wash your guest’s feet, clean their feet off before they came into the home. Now, the deal was that only the servants would do this. This was not something that the master of the house would do, this isn’t something that the high and the mighty would do; this was a functional menial task that was reserved for the servants and the slaves. This is what the slaves did. And Jesus, in a surprising, startling act of humble service, washes the feet of his disciples. That’s the context.

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What Jesus is showing us in this passage is that the expression of love—the tangible, concrete, real-life, on-the-street expression of love—is serving people. It’s servanthood, which means that if you’re not serving people you don’t love people, and if you do love people, it should bear the fruit of service. We do it for love. We serve for love. Even though they’ve heard Jesus anticipate his suffering and death twice already, they still “imagine a triumphant, regal scene with themselves sitting in positions of honor at King Jesus’ right and left.” [1] They want power and prestige. Whitney goes on to say, “When Christ’s love controls or constrains people, 'they no longer live for themselves, but for him who for their sake died and was raised' (2 Corinthians 5:15), they serve God and others, motivated by love for God and others. The more we love God, the more we will live for him and serve him, and the more we love others, the more we will also serve them.” That’s the clear teaching, right, the example that Jesus gives. He’s given us a model, a pattern for how to live, a model of Christian conduct.

There are some people who combine those two things, and for them God is kind of a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. Sometimes he’s good, sometimes he’s mean, and you never know which he’s going to be to you. There’s one more thing that puts an even finer point on what Jesus does here, and it’s in verse 2: enter Judas. We read that during supper, “the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him.” Jesus knows this, and you have to read between the lines just a little, but it’s pretty clear that Judas does not leave the room until after the footwashing, which means that Jesus, when he washed his disciples’ feet, he also washed the feet of Judas. He washed the feet of his friends, he washed the feet of his enemy. Why? Because of his love and because he is the servant king. It actually corresponds pretty closely with Philippians 2, which we read earlier, Philippians 2:5-11, which is that famous Christ hymn. That’s what we used in the assurance of pardon.

I Speak Jesus Chords by Abby Benton, Carlene Prince, Dustin Smith, Jesse Reeves, Kristen Dutton, and Raina Pratt Our Jesus is both servant and king, king and servant. For him, these two identities go hand in hand. He is both a leader who serves and a servant who leads. I hope you are beginning to see that these are not mutually exclusive. It says that, “having loved his own, he loved them to the end.” This shows the duration of his love. He loved them to the end! The end of what? Well, the end of his life. He loved them to the very point of death. He loved them completely and fully. Some versions would say he loved them to the uttermost. The word carries this idea of the completeness of Jesus’ love. Here he is, about to be crucified. This very night he will be betrayed; the next day will be Good Friday. What is on his mind as he is headed towards the cross? That’s what we’re going to find out as we study these chapters together.