Now if you would take a Bible in hand and turn in the Scriptures with me to John’’s gospel, chapter 13; John chapter 13. These chapters, John 13 through 17, actually give us some details about the very first Good Friday, the night of Christ’s betrayal, the beginning of His climactic sufferings that are found nowhere else in the Scriptures. Chapters 14 through 17 are packed, as you may know, with some of the richest teaching anywhere in holy Scripture where the Lord Jesus Himself expounds the implications of His life and His death and the dynamics of the Christian life in union with Him are illustrated and applied. But all of that is prefaced by the events recorded here in the thirteenth chapter that is now before us.
You may know the story very well. The disciples have gathered with their Savior in the upper room. Passover is about to begin. They are all present as the final supper gets underway when Christ acts to explain His mission, not first here in words, but enacted, dramatized, under their stunned gaze in graphic, deliberate, solemn movements. He rises, strips off His outer garments, wraps Himself with a towel, and stoops and takes their dirty feet in His hands, one by one, to wash them in clean water and dry them with the towel that He has wrapped around Himself. It’s an astonishing moment, shocking even to us as we think about, especially so according to the social mores and conventions of that day and culture. That’s why we see Peter, as we will read in just a moment, Peter who is so often the representative of the whole company, scandalized by Jesus’ actions. But the scandal of Jesus’ lowly servitude here – that’s what’s going on, He’s acting like a slave; this is the work of a slave, washing feet – the shock of it really is the whole point. Jesus was showing them, showing us, why He came, illustrating the meaning and the purpose of the terrible sufferings He will only a few hours later endure. And in particular, He was explaining to them in vivid color, in this dramatic act, the greatness of His love. Here is His great love for us that is His singular motivation for all the sufferings that we remember on this Good Friday.
We are going to look at the opening twenty verses of John 13 and I want to highlight three things about the love of Christ that we should see here. First in verses 1 through 3, I want you to notice that this is love in a warzone. It is love in a warzone. That is to say, it is love under the assault and attack of a hostile enemy. Love in a warzone. Secondly, 4 through 12, it is love in action. Here is a picture and an explanation of what the love of Christ really does, what it accomplishes for everyone who will place their trust in Jesus. Love in a warzone. Love in action. Then finally, verses 13 through 20, love on mission. The love of Christ that changes everything for us, in turn, sends us out with a message of redeeming love for the world. Love in a warzone. Love in action. And love on mission. Before we read the passage together and then consider those themes, let’s bow our heads as we pray. Let us all pray.
Lord our God, as we join the disciples in the upper room and try to take in something of the wonder of our Redeemer’s love, we ask now for the ministry of the Holy Spirit. He is the one who pours out the love of God into our hearts and we ask that as Your Word is read and preached He might perform that ministry here in our midst for Your glory. In Jesus’ name, amen.
John 13 at verse 1. This is the Word of God:
“Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. During supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, ‘Lord, do you wash my feet?’ Jesus answered him, ‘What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.’ Peter said to him, ‘You shall never wash my feet.’ Jesus answered him, ‘If I do not 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!’ Jesus said to him, ‘The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but is completely clean. And you are clean, but not every one of you.’ For he knew who was to betray him; that was why he said, ‘Not all of you are clean.’
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. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. I am not speaking of all of you; I know whom I have chosen. But the Scripture will be fulfilled, ‘He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.’ I am telling you this now, before it takes place, that when it does take place you may believe that I am he. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.’”
Amen, and we praise God for His holy, inerrant Word.
Look at verses 1 through 3 here with me first of all. Here in the first place is love in a warzone. Love in a warzone. Notice how these opening three verses are carefully put together, carefully composed. They start – did you see this – they start and they end with a note about Jesus knowing He is going back to the Father. Do you see that language in the passage? Verse 1, “Jesus knew that His hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father.” Verse 3, Jesus knows that “the Father had given all things into His hands,” that He had “come from God” and was “going back to God.” So Jesus’ knowledge of His imminent death and departure from this world forms bookends around this section. The whole scene is situated in verse 1, in the context of course of the Passover celebration when the Passover lamb was sacrificed as the symbolic instrument of redemption for the people of God.
And in that context we are told that Jesus was contemplating His hour. He knows “His hour had come.” The hour in John’s gospel is a reference to the climactic moment appointed by the Father for Christ’s final sufferings and sacrifice at the cross. At the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry at the wedding at Cana He told Mary – do you remember – “My hour has not yet come.” In the middle of John’s gospel, John 7 at verse 30, they were seeking to arrest Him, His opponents. But John says, “No one laid a hand upon Him because His hour had not yet come.” But here, He knows His hour has come at last. This is it. Everything has been building up to this moment. He came for this. The hour has now arrived in which He Himself will become the true and final Passover Lamb, sacrificed no longer in symbols but in reality for the redemption of His people. But the knowledge of the arrival of those climactic sufferings, the coming of this hour, isn’t it interesting, it doesn’t make Him back away; He doesn’t change course. He doesn’t run and hide – that’s what I would do. In fact, His actions here in the upper room that night, they demonstrate His resolve, don’t they, to go all the way to the uttermost end of suffering. J.C. Ryle says that “Knowing in advance that suffering is coming is a great addition to suffering. Our ignorance of things before us is a great blessing. Our Lord saw the cross clearly before Him and walked straight up to it. His death,” says Ryle, “was not a surprise to Him but a voluntary, foreknown thing.”
So suffering foreknown, suffering anticipated, is suffering amplified. Already the weight of the horror of it is pressing down upon Him and He doesn’t choose a different path. “Our Lord saw the cross clearly before Him,” says Ryle, “and walked straight up to it.” And the question is, “Why?” What it is that animates and drives the Lord Jesus to choose this path; not to shrink from it, not even to pause in it, but to walk straight up to the cross, to embrace the rejection and the injustice and the agony of the curse of Calvary. And the answer, verse 1 tells us, the answer – look at verse 1 – the answer is love. It’s love. You see that in the second half of verse 1? “Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.” Here is the inspired exposition of the meaning of Calvary. Here’s what the cross is. It is love to the end. The objects of His love, John says, are “His own.” That tells us that the love of Christ in view here is His discriminating love, fixed uniquely upon the elect people of God, given to the Son by the Father in eternity before the world was made. They are His own. And so when John says that Jesus has loved His own, it means He has loved them for as long as they have been His. He has loved them since the Father gave them to the Son to redeem. He has loved them from the foundation of the world. He has always loved them.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, Jesus has always, always loved you. When all there was, was God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – even then the eternal Son, second person of the blessed trinity, loved you. In the sovereign counsel and decree of almighty God, there never was a time when you were not beloved in the heart of Christ. And because He has loved His own eternally, because of the sovereign choice and purpose of God, not based on anything they had done or ever could do, because that’s how Jesus loves His own, that is why throughout their lives Jesus loved His disciples still, even when He was confronted by their profound unloveliness. He lived among them, remember, and He saw again and again their stupidity and their blindness and their selfishness and their sin. And still He loved them. He heard them squabbling among themselves about who would be the greatest. He felt the sting of their persistent failure, despite as many explanations to understand the elementary truths about Him and why He came. His disciples were such disappointments sometimes, such failures, such persistent sinners. They’re just like us, in other words. And even so, He loved them. He loved them. Even so, He loves us. He loves you. Through all our failures, all our ignorance, and all our sin, because He has always loved you and His love for you was not called into being by how lovely you are or how deserving of love you have made yourself. Because that is true, you can be sure today that Jesus will love you to the end. He will love you to the end.
You see that phrase in the text? “Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.” Let that sit for a moment – “He loved them to the end.” He loves you to the end. John means, in context, He loves us to the fullest extent of love. He loves you with a love than which no greater can be conceived. He loves you all the way. He loves you to the max. In particular here, loving us to the end means He loves us all the way to the cross. He loves us all the way to Calvary. What is it that Paul says in Romans 5:7? “For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would even dare to die, but God demonstrates His love for us in that while we were still sinners, unlovely, Christ died for us.” “Here is love, vast as the ocean, lovingkindness as the flood. When the prince of life our ransom shed for us His precious blood.” The cross, it’s the measure of God’s love for you. He loved you to nails in His hands and feet. He loved you to thorns pressed in to His scalp. He loved you till the Father turns His face from Him in judgment and wrath. He loved you to the end, all that the Father might turn His face toward you in grace without end. Sovereign love. That’s the final explanation for the cross, but it is love.
Notice this carefully that flows in the context here of a warzone. This is love in a warzone. Look at verse 2. “The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him.” Jesus bears not just the burden of the looming agony of the cross that is fast approaching, but the heart pain of knowing that Judas, one of His chosen twelve, has been led by satanic malice to betray his master to His death. And so here in the upper room, Jesus was marching not only into a moment of supreme personal sacrifice but into the climactic spiritual conflict of His life. At the cross, the assaults of the devil would continue to assail Him. And here as Jesus provides this graphic picture of His love for us, He does it knowing that right there in the room with Him, among those whose feet He washes, sits His betrayer through whom the evil one himself was at work. And so when we read that Jesus loved His own to the end, to the end, John wants us to understand this is the love of Christ that combats and overcomes the schemes of Satan. It is the love of Christ that goes to every length to conquer hell. It is the love of Christ that defeats the devil. At the cross, the love of Christ triumphs. “No power of hell, no scheme of man, can ever pluck me from His hand.” Because He’s loved us to the end. In a warzone, in a conflict situation with the enemy pressing in and assailing Him, He triumphs. This is love in a warzone.
Then secondly, look at verses 4 through 12 and notice love in action. As we read this part of the passage, as we read it a moment ago, I wonder did you hear how the narration slows right down? As we read it through, did you notice that? It is glacially slow, isn’t it, that the film director suddenly focuses his camera and zooms in so that Jesus fills the whole frame. And he starts to shoot in slow motion so that every step, every turn, every gesture unfolds on the screen with almost painful clarity. There is no soundtrack. We imagine all the happy chatter of the disciples getting ready for the holiday dinner fizzling out as one by one they realize what Jesus is now doing. Notice the verbs. In verse 4, first, Jesus “rose.” Then we watch as He “laid aside His outer garment.” Next we see Him “taking a towel.” Then He “ties it around His waist.” Then verse 5, “He pours water into a basin.” Then He begins to “wash the disciples’ feet.” And then He “wipes them,” John says, with a towel. John wants us to focus. Every gesture, every action, verb by verb is being described. He wants us to focus on this moment and join the astonished disciples and begin to feel with them the shock of it.
You probably know that it was a basic courtesy in that culture and time to provide for the washing of your guests’ feet when they entered your home. It would typically be the task of a slave, perhaps of a servant. Failing that, the youngest person in the group would perform the duty. On this occasion, however, Jesus takes the initiative. The disciples are sometimes faulted in expositions of this passage because none of them volunteers and the charge of pride is often leveled against them. But the text doesn’t actually tell us that that’s what was going on, and we can’t really know that that was what was motivating them because Jesus acted before anyone else could act. What we know is, we don’t know if anyone else was about to do this service; we know that Jesus seized the initiative. The issue isn’t the disciples’ failure; that’s not the point of John 13. The issue is Jesus’ initiative. Before any of them could make a move, He rose and took the part of the menial servant, the household slave, and washed the feet of each disciple in turn.
When he comes to Peter, the dam finally bursts. Peter just can’t hold it in anymore. “Lord, do You wash my feet?” And even though Jesus explains to him that the full significance of this action will have to wait until after His death and resurrection and then it will be finally and fully understood, Peter insists, he doubles down. “You shall never wash my feet!” Now in Peter’s case, his resistance was an expression of misguided reverence for Jesus’ wasn’t it? He thought it was beneath Jesus’ dignity. But Jesus’ answer in verse 8, look at verse 8, His answer explains that unless Jesus washes him, he could have no share with Him. The foot washing, we are beginning to see, is symbolic of the true cleansing Jesus has come to provide. In fact, this whole scene provides a commentary on the life and mission of Jesus Christ, doesn’t it, rising and stripping away His outer garments, wrapping Himself in a towel. It is a commentary on His incarnation. The God of all glory descends into our humanity. And as Paul puts it in Philippians 2:7, “emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in likeness of men, and being found in human form He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” That’s the picture here – washing the disciples’ feet, wiping them with the towel that He wears, so that when He is finished, they’re clean and He is dirty. Now He wears the grime and the filth they carried. That’s what’s happening as Jesus marches towards His hour, towards the sacrifice of the cross. As our Passover Lamb, He is bearing the filth and pollution not of the daily grime of the streets but of our sin and He does it in order to wash us clean.
That’s why He says to Peter, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with Me.” You must have Jesus wash you clean. Sometimes we make the same objection as Peter, don’t we? In Peter’s case it was misguided reverence for Chrirst, for His greatness. He thinks that he is beneath the attention of his Lord. Footwashing, after all, is what social inferiors did for their superiors, and here is Jesus inverting all of that. And it makes Peter really uncomfortable. And it may actually be that some of you here resist accepting the cleansing that Jesus gives because you think you are too small, too bad, too dirty, too far beneath His notice to care. And so you rule yourself out. You will not come to Him. You will not accept His ministrations, His washing. Of course others of you might make a similar objection to Peter’s but for other reasons. In your case, it’s not that you are so ashamed of yourself that you think you are unworthy of Christ’s attention. Actually in your case you are so confident that you have no need to be made clean in the first place that the very idea of Jesus washing your feet offends your pride. “What I need, if I need anything at all, is a bit of good advice, maybe a minor course correction here or there for sure, but listen, I’m really not that bad. I’m certainly not dirty and I definitely don’t need cleansing.” And so you join your voice to Peter’s resistance and you refuse the work of Christ.
But whether you think yourself so small, so bad that you are beneath Jesus’ care, or so good, so sound that you think you don’t need it, either way I want you to listen carefully to Christ’s response. “Unless I wash you, you have no part, no share with Me. Unless I wash you, there is no other hope for you.” You must have Jesus. There is no hope without Him. If you want a share with Him, this is where it starts. Tonight He comes to you in the Gospel, girded with His towel, basin in hand, ready to wash you clean. He comes with the forgiveness of sin and the cleansing only His blood can afford, ready to wash all the stain away, all the guilt away, forever. However small and bad you may feel, you are not and you can never be beneath His care. And however good and capable and self-made you may consider yourself, you are not and you must not put yourself beyond the urgent need of His cleansing. Do not refuse His service. Unless He wash you, you have no share in Him.
Now when Jesus said that to Peter, don’t you love His characteristically enthusiastic response? Verse 9, “Lord, not my feet only, but my hands and my head as well! If You washing me is the necessary condition of my relationship with You, don’t stop with my feet! I want all You have to give me!” That Peter doesn’t really understand what is going on terribly clearly, but he does understand this much – he can’t live without Jesus. And his instinct for total cleansing isn’t wrong here either, is it? Notice what Jesus says in verse 10. “Those that the one who has bathed does not need to wash except for his feet but is completely clean. And you are clean, but not every one of you.” Jesus’ death washes us – this is such good news – it washes us completely clean. Completely clean!
Don’t you want to be completely clean? A once and for all pardon that Jesus secures for all His disciples. When He cleanses you, you’re clean now and forever and always. But everybody that Jesus does cleanse, everyone He washes, puts right with God. Every one of them, we all recognize, don’t we, those of us who have received His cleansing, we all recognize that day by day, I still fall short, I still stumble. I’m still stepping in the mud. I need daily pardon. I can never stop coming back to Jesus. But the wonderful good news of this story is that it doesn’t matter how grimy and filthy our sin may make us day after day after day. You can never exhaust the cleansing, pardoning grace of Christ. Come back day by day, and again and again He washes you. Isn’t that good news? Isn’t it such sweet, good news Jesus never stops washing? His blood never runs out of its cleansing power. He came to wash us, once and for all, and to wash you every single day. That’s His great work, so never stop coming to Him. He’ll never get tired of you. He’ll never turn you away and He will never fail to make you clean. His patience with us never fails, His grace for us never runs dry. Here is love in action. Do you see it? It is a love that goes to the cross to make the foulest clean. I wonder if you will accept the cleansing that His love provides. You’ll find it nowhere else.
Love in a warzone. Love in action. And finally and very briefly, cast your eye over 13 through 20. Here now is love on mission. You can see the central takeaway in verses 14 and 15. “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.” We actually miss the real message of Good Friday if we don’t hear the call to mission. Jesus washing the disciples’ feet that first Good Friday was not simply or only a graphic picture of the work that He came to do, it was a call to us to go on mission in imitation of Him. Washing the disciples’ feet was a Gospel act. It was about the cleansing that Jesus secures.
And when He tells His disciples that they in turn should wash one another’s feet, we mustn’t let the Gospel significance of it fall from our view. How do you follow Jesus’ example? He is telling us, “I want you to follow My example.” How do you obey Him? Well it’s about much more than mere acts of service and kindness. I think Jesus intends us to participate in His washing of others by bringing them to Him who alone can make us clean. When you share the Gospel with the world and in humility and sacrifice serve your neighbor with good news, you bring them cleansing and washing and pardon through Jesus Christ. That’s how we wash one another’s feet. It’s a costly business, of course. It requires a willingness to be the servant, to humble ourselves. It demands that we love the unlovely, but that’s how Jesus here shows us He has already first loved us. It’s the call of Christ. His love for us makes us clean and then it sends us on mission, a mission of love to the world, to bring to them the same cleansing we now enjoy through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Good Friday is about love in a warzone, a love that conquers sin and death and hell, a love that never began and so a love that you can never forfeit. It is love in action. Love that makes you clean and a love that never fails to make you clean any time you come to Him crying for pardon. So come. Come and get clean. And it is love that sends us with that wonderful good news to the ends of the earth. It is love on mission. May you know the love of Christ this Easter season, making you clean indeed, and then sending you across the street and around the world with really good news. Let’s pray together.
Father, thank You for Jesus. Thank You for the way that He loves us. It is, we confess, sometimes hard to believe that He does, that He would, as we look at our own hearts and lives. But as we humble ourselves now before You, we want to join Peter and say we are “all in.” We can’t live without You. Wash us, Savior, or we die. Foul I to the fountain fly, wash me Savior or I die. Wash us. Come to us. We need pardon tonight. We need mercy and cleansing. Lord Jesus, thank You that You have shed Your blood to secure it for us, provide it for us. May we not be so proud that we fail to come to You for it or think ourselves so beneath You that we would not dare to ask. Wash us and make us truly clean indeed. And then as we stand before You clean at last, in the joy of that moment, would You send us to others with good news – come and get clean at the hands of Jesus Christ. Would You do it please this Easter and in all the days remaining to us, for Your honor and glory in Jesus’ name, amen.