It is always tempting, especially in a church that self-identifies as progressive, to go immediately to the second part of this significant reading from John's Gospel. The first part of the reading is about Jesus' washing the feet of his close followers or disciples as they were about to eat a meal. Jesus did for his disciples what a household servant would do for guests as an act of welcome—wash from their feet the dust of the roadway. The second part of the reading is about Jesus' telling his disciples to follow his example and serve one another as he has served them.
But the second part of the reading doesn't stand alone. It grows out of the first part. Jesus in the act of washing his disciples' feet is prefiguring what he will say to them after supper. He will speak of his love for them, which mirrors God's love for him—the God he calls his Father, and whom we can call our Mother or Father, or both. The point is that he is moving his relationship with these disciples to a new level. He will call them his friends, and he will repeat his affirmation of love for them. He invites them into a communing relationship that will transcend time and space.
I continue to discover that contemporary church people have difficulty talking about such a relationship with God or Christ. We are afraid of sounding like fundamentalists or un-cool sentimentalists. Thank God for Barack Obama, Bill Moyers, Anne Rice, Anne Lamott, and lots of other people who speak easily and convincingly about their relationship with God, or with Christ. The foot-washing story is about relationship, relationship without which service loses its distinctive Christian identity.
When I graduated from seminary fifty years ago, I began my ministry as an associate pastor of a church in Texas. About six months into my work there I attended the monthly meeting of the church session—the governing body of the church for any non-Presbyterians here tonight. It was the meeting when the session adopted the annual budget of the church. One member of the session had a heated disagreement with the senior pastor about funding priorities. Both the elder and the pastor said things they later regretted and apologized for some time later.
As I remember it, the meeting ended with the session joining hands and praying together. Elders and ministers offered brief, spontaneous sentence prayers, imploring God to guide and lead that church, its members and officers. It was communing prayer. When we went out into the night, we discovered that Houston had received one of its rare ice storms. The windshields of all our cars were covered with a thin coating of frozen rain. No-one had windshield scrapers in that part of the country. I remember watching as the elder who had tangled so stridently with the pastor went right to the pastor's car, and with his bare hands did what he could to scrape the windshield clean and to thaw the door lock so that the pastor could get into his car to turn on the heater and defroster.
Disagreements don't have to break relationships. They often do, and sometimes they need to. But sometimes it's essential to maintain the relationship in spite of even deep disagreement.
In taking a basin, washing the feet of his disciples and drying them with the towel wrapped around his waist, Jesus was acting out the truth that God's love doesn't stop when we neglect our relationship with God. God's love doesn't stop when we make mistakes, when we make bad decisions, when we act like fools or jerks. We see God in the One who knelt in an act of intimacy. In Jesus we hear God calling us friends.
Knowing that, we are changed, transformed, so that we can go about loving and serving other people, as we love and care for ourselves.
Thanks be to God.