Sermon Audio
The Sixteenth Sunday After Trinity
And It Was Night
St. John 13:1-30
Long before the day of Jesus upon this earth, betrayal was a staple of the theater. As far back as Homer, men schemed and connived and stabbed their friends and even their relatives in the back. Humility, on the other hand, has never been a fan favorite.
We have them before us side-by-side today, Jesus’ humility in washing the feet of His disciples against Judas’ treachery in setting up his Lord.
Betrayal is a highly developed form of arrogance. It uses the trust of another to pierce him. The missionary Don Richardson took the gospel to the Sawi people of Irian Jaya on the island of Papua New Guinea.
When he told them the Judas story he discovered to his horror that they saw Judas as the hero. Entrenched in their culture was the idea that the ability to deceive was the highest virtue. Mercy was a sign of weakness.
They had turned the biblical ethic on its head. And that, put simply, is the way of all flesh beneath the gloss of civilization. From Romans 3 (12-18):
“They have all turned aside; they have together become unprofitable; there is none who does good, no, not one. Their throat is an open tomb; with their tongues they have practiced deceit. The poison of asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are in their ways; and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
(Read text.)
In chapters 13-17 of St. John’s gospel the word “world” appears 40 times, marking off Jesus’ own, His disciples, from the multitude of mankind still lost in their sins. We know He loves His own; now we begin to see that “His own” are those who constitute His church.
His mission to the Jews has ended. His hour has come. This little cluster around Him are the seeds of that church, those called out from the world for a holy purpose. This congregation of the elect will represent Him to all peoples as it ripples out to cover the creation.
How much does He love them? To the end. To the utmost.
By washing feet, He signals what lies ahead. This is the work of slaves, not rabbis. Rabbi Ishmael returned home from the synagogue one day, so the story goes, to discover his mother intent on washing his feet. He would not allow it, protesting that such work was too demeaning.
His mother went to the rabbinic court and argued that she should be allowed to perform this menial chore because she considered it an honor. Jesus is thinking like Ishmael’s mother. When He removes His outer garments and wraps a towel around His middle, He takes on the appearance of a slave.
In both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, such an act was unthinkable. His disciples, who would never have thought of washing each other’s feet, are aghast. In this self-abasing act is a pointer to just how far Jesus will go in His love for His own.
John does not include in his gospel the institution of the Lord’s Supper found in the synoptic gospels in this account of the Last Supper. This episode serves the same purpose, signaling the humility of One who goes willingly to the cross to save those dear to Him.
How much does He love them? He will wash the feet even of Judas Iscariot, who by now is in league with the devil to send Him to the cross.
Consider: Knowing that “the Father had given all things into His hands,” making Him Master of the universe, He might have precipitated a showdown with the devil and vanquished him by an awesome display of power.
He might have splattered Judas like a bug. Instead, He washed feet. Submission is His weapon; love is His armor. How often have we, you and I, our pride wounded, pronounced curses upon one who has slighted us?
Our Lord had just cause to stand tall and lash out. But He took up a towel and a basin of water and went to His knees.
All but one of the 12 lapse into embarrassed silence. Peter, impetuous as ever, must protest. His heart is in the right place but his understanding is dull: “Lord, are You washing my feet?” In the original it comes across as more indignant.
One who has not yet grasped that Jesus truly is bound for the cross can hardly comprehend the symbolism that projects that barbaric moment. Jesus tells him he will know the significance after “this,” or literally, “these things.”
He refers not to foot-washing but to His crucifixion, resurrection and exaltation and to the descent of the Holy Spirit. Only then will Peter and the others make sense of “these things.”
Peter blurts out, “You shall never wash my feet.” So immersed is he in his cultural understanding he cannot raise his line of sight and peek ahead to the grand event that will change the world forever.
Jesus’ reply – “If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me” – would sound petty and prideful . . . if nothing more than foot-washing were in view.
But this foot-washing speaks to more than the day of His crucifixion. It augurs the effect of it. That blood He will shed on the cross will cleanse us of our sins. If He does not wash us in His blood, we are not “His own.”
I think of a line from an old gospel song: “What can wash away my sin? What can make me clean within? Nothing but the blood, nothing but the blood, nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
If we deny Him the opportunity to do what He came to do, we have no part with Him.
Well, if washing is inevitable, Peter wants the $9 super-deluxe job with wax and under-carriage protection. Jesus seizes the chance to expand His teaching:
The fundamental cleansing act can never be repeated. A sinner will go on sinning, and those future sins will require God’s pardon as well, but Christ’s sacrifice is a once-for-all act. He need not provide more blood for future cleansing.
Jesus, being God, is pointing them forward, as they will understand retroactively, but He is doing more. He is giving them an example of right conduct for Christians. In the prison program in which I served before we moved to Durango, foot-washing was part of the curriculum for each group of men who passed through.
Robbers and murderers – men so arrogant as to take unto themselves the property and the very lives of others -- fell on their knees and washed the feet of one another, expressing their understanding of a new life committed to the service of both God and man. If this work was not too lowly for their Lord Jesus to perform . . .
And the Lord drives home this very point, telling His followers that He has left an example for them – and us – to follow. He concludes with an admonition to act on this new knowledge. His half-brother James will sound an echo: “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (1:22).
Brian A. Wren wrote:
Great God, in Christ you call our name
and then receive us as your own,
not through some merit, right or claim,
but by your gracious love alone.
We strain to glimpse your mercy-seat
and find you kneeling at our feet.
Then take the towel, and break the bread,
and humble us, and call us friends.
Suffer and serve til all are fed,
and show how grandly love intends
to work til all creation sings,
to fill all worlds, to crown all things.
Having commanded the 11 faithful disciples, Jesus turns His attention to the unfaithful one. In Near Eastern culture, then as now, breaking bread together was a sign of intimacy. A betrayal by one who sat at table with you was bitter indeed.
Jesus reaches back to a psalm of David, No. 41, and quotes verse 9. The psalm is a lament of one who, suffering greatly, is mocked by enemies and betrayed by friends. David is clearly an Old Testament type of Christ.
The early church, when it came to see that the Lord of all achieved His greatest glory in his suffering and death, would link the afflictions David endured, despite his elevated stature, with those of “great David’s greater Son.”
Jesus has a problem . . . or, perhaps better, a concern. A horrific death by crucifixion was cause for great shame. His closest associates have already demonstrated a daunting denial when He has directed their thoughts toward His death.
Now He must not allow them to think back on this moment and see Him as the unwitting victim of Judas’ treachery. He puts them on notice that, looking back, they will know it for what it is, an element in the divine design for victory.
“I am He” is another instance of tying Himself to His Father, the great “I AM.”
Having linked Himself to His Father He links His disciples to Him. To receive the Son the Father has sent is to receive the Father; to receive those the Son sends is to receive the Son. They will be sent forth to proclaim His life-saving message and they will carry the authority of God Himself.
After the resurrection they will recall these words and take comfort from the assurance of the divine commission. Without that assurance they would have stumbled and fallen. We, too, should store them in our hearts and treat them like treasure.
To this point, Jesus has spoken of His impending betrayal in shaded language. His disciples have struggled. They know Him to be the promised Messiah and they can scarcely imagine His arrest and execution.
How could such things befall One so exalted? They look upon One who has multiplied loaves and fish, calmed the sea, healed the blind and raised the dead, and they ask themselves, “Can He fall prey to a traitor in the camp?”
But now He says it plainly, “one of you will betray Me.” Eleven cast nervous, sidelong glances. One feels his throat constrict and asks himself, “Should I confess and repent and beg forgiveness. Or should I flee before the others learn it is I of whom He speaks and seize me?”
We now meet “one of His disciples, whom Jesus loved.” He will emerge again at the cross and the empty tomb; by the Sea of Tiberias, where the resurrected Jesus appears to seven of His disciples, and in the final two verses of this gospel, which identify him as its author.
But who is he? And why is he anonymous? These questions are inseparable. The traditional view is the best, that it is John the author himself. He probably cloaks his identity to avoid elevating himself to the Lord’s level.
Like John the Baptist, he is only a voice. Who he is matters not. His message – Jesus is the Christ – is everything.
He may also wish to avoid giving offense to his fellow apostles. Couching the issue in these terms, he seems to convey his awed appreciation for God’s grace: “Who am I, that Messiah would love me?”
Even Peter is stunned by the Lord’s plain-spoken declaration. When he recovers, he does not blurt out a question but motions to John to pose it.
Be not deceived by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, “The Last Supper.” Jesus and His disciples were not arrayed around the table as men might be at a dinner party tonight in Milan. To us in the West, the image of men leaning on other men is jarring, but it would provoke no such reaction in many parts of the world, even today.
I myself have seen it in Muslim countries. In some places, two men or two women hold hands as they walk down the street. They’re signaling friendship, not homosexuality. At the table, John is seated on Jesus’ right and Judas on His left, the place of honor.
Another custom strange to us still alive today is that of eating from a common bowl, and this I have not only seen but done. Each one tears off a piece of bread, dips it into the bowl and rakes food onto it with his forefinger.
An American friend who was traveling with me and a mutual friend, a resident missionary, in Morocco turned green the first time he participated . . . but he got over it. When in Rome . . .
Jesus, in the role of host, might have served up a choice morsel to one of the guests at table as a sign of favor.
The gesture is probably not, as some suppose, one of judgment. It is instead a final act of supreme love, which Judas converts into an act of judgment. Jesus has come – this first time – not to judge but to save.
We have heard Him say as much in several ways. Last week, we listened as He told the scoffers:
"And if anyone hears My words and does not believe, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him -- the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day” (12:47-48).
In other words, the individual judges himself by his response to the Christ. This is the fateful moment for Judas. Even now he may pour out a confession of his sin of betrayal and throw himself on his Lord’s mercy. The God of all mercies is extending one last chance to repent.
But this final gesture of love evokes in Judas not love but final surrender to darkness. “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (1:5).
And so Satan enters him, taking complete possession. The die is cast. Jesus tells him to get on with his sordid business: “What you do, do quickly.”
Jesus is speaking in such a low tone to this man seated next to Him that no one but John, the beloved disciple, on the other side, can make out His words. Even he fails to react, probably because this sudden turn has left him in shock.
The other 10 speculate that Jesus is sending Judas, the group’s treasurer, out to buy food for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which begins the night after the Passover, or to give alms to the poor, a Passover tradition.
Even in Satan’s power, Judas must still obey Jesus. No one takes His life from Him; He lays it down willingly (10:18).
Judas departs. “And it was night.” The moon shines bright but Judas enters into the blackest darkness, even outer darkness. And for Jesus? The hour of the power of darkness has arrived.
His hour has come. The blackness of sin, of death, of restitution, has come. Jesus is bound for the cross, where He will pour out His blood to wash you and me. His humility will overwhelm our treachery.
For we, like Judas, have betrayed our Lord. But we, unlike Judas, are washed in His blood. We have a part with Him. Thanks be to God. Amen.
And It Was Night
St. John 13:1-30
Long before the day of Jesus upon this earth, betrayal was a staple of the theater. As far back as Homer, men schemed and connived and stabbed their friends and even their relatives in the back. Humility, on the other hand, has never been a fan favorite.
We have them before us side-by-side today, Jesus’ humility in washing the feet of His disciples against Judas’ treachery in setting up his Lord.
Betrayal is a highly developed form of arrogance. It uses the trust of another to pierce him. The missionary Don Richardson took the gospel to the Sawi people of Irian Jaya on the island of Papua New Guinea.
When he told them the Judas story he discovered to his horror that they saw Judas as the hero. Entrenched in their culture was the idea that the ability to deceive was the highest virtue. Mercy was a sign of weakness.
They had turned the biblical ethic on its head. And that, put simply, is the way of all flesh beneath the gloss of civilization. From Romans 3 (12-18):
“They have all turned aside; they have together become unprofitable; there is none who does good, no, not one. Their throat is an open tomb; with their tongues they have practiced deceit. The poison of asps is under their lips; whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; destruction and misery are in their ways; and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
(Read text.)
In chapters 13-17 of St. John’s gospel the word “world” appears 40 times, marking off Jesus’ own, His disciples, from the multitude of mankind still lost in their sins. We know He loves His own; now we begin to see that “His own” are those who constitute His church.
His mission to the Jews has ended. His hour has come. This little cluster around Him are the seeds of that church, those called out from the world for a holy purpose. This congregation of the elect will represent Him to all peoples as it ripples out to cover the creation.
How much does He love them? To the end. To the utmost.
By washing feet, He signals what lies ahead. This is the work of slaves, not rabbis. Rabbi Ishmael returned home from the synagogue one day, so the story goes, to discover his mother intent on washing his feet. He would not allow it, protesting that such work was too demeaning.
His mother went to the rabbinic court and argued that she should be allowed to perform this menial chore because she considered it an honor. Jesus is thinking like Ishmael’s mother. When He removes His outer garments and wraps a towel around His middle, He takes on the appearance of a slave.
In both Jewish and Greco-Roman culture, such an act was unthinkable. His disciples, who would never have thought of washing each other’s feet, are aghast. In this self-abasing act is a pointer to just how far Jesus will go in His love for His own.
John does not include in his gospel the institution of the Lord’s Supper found in the synoptic gospels in this account of the Last Supper. This episode serves the same purpose, signaling the humility of One who goes willingly to the cross to save those dear to Him.
How much does He love them? He will wash the feet even of Judas Iscariot, who by now is in league with the devil to send Him to the cross.
Consider: Knowing that “the Father had given all things into His hands,” making Him Master of the universe, He might have precipitated a showdown with the devil and vanquished him by an awesome display of power.
He might have splattered Judas like a bug. Instead, He washed feet. Submission is His weapon; love is His armor. How often have we, you and I, our pride wounded, pronounced curses upon one who has slighted us?
Our Lord had just cause to stand tall and lash out. But He took up a towel and a basin of water and went to His knees.
All but one of the 12 lapse into embarrassed silence. Peter, impetuous as ever, must protest. His heart is in the right place but his understanding is dull: “Lord, are You washing my feet?” In the original it comes across as more indignant.
One who has not yet grasped that Jesus truly is bound for the cross can hardly comprehend the symbolism that projects that barbaric moment. Jesus tells him he will know the significance after “this,” or literally, “these things.”
He refers not to foot-washing but to His crucifixion, resurrection and exaltation and to the descent of the Holy Spirit. Only then will Peter and the others make sense of “these things.”
Peter blurts out, “You shall never wash my feet.” So immersed is he in his cultural understanding he cannot raise his line of sight and peek ahead to the grand event that will change the world forever.
Jesus’ reply – “If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me” – would sound petty and prideful . . . if nothing more than foot-washing were in view.
But this foot-washing speaks to more than the day of His crucifixion. It augurs the effect of it. That blood He will shed on the cross will cleanse us of our sins. If He does not wash us in His blood, we are not “His own.”
I think of a line from an old gospel song: “What can wash away my sin? What can make me clean within? Nothing but the blood, nothing but the blood, nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
If we deny Him the opportunity to do what He came to do, we have no part with Him.
Well, if washing is inevitable, Peter wants the $9 super-deluxe job with wax and under-carriage protection. Jesus seizes the chance to expand His teaching:
The fundamental cleansing act can never be repeated. A sinner will go on sinning, and those future sins will require God’s pardon as well, but Christ’s sacrifice is a once-for-all act. He need not provide more blood for future cleansing.
Jesus, being God, is pointing them forward, as they will understand retroactively, but He is doing more. He is giving them an example of right conduct for Christians. In the prison program in which I served before we moved to Durango, foot-washing was part of the curriculum for each group of men who passed through.
Robbers and murderers – men so arrogant as to take unto themselves the property and the very lives of others -- fell on their knees and washed the feet of one another, expressing their understanding of a new life committed to the service of both God and man. If this work was not too lowly for their Lord Jesus to perform . . .
And the Lord drives home this very point, telling His followers that He has left an example for them – and us – to follow. He concludes with an admonition to act on this new knowledge. His half-brother James will sound an echo: “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (1:22).
Brian A. Wren wrote:
Great God, in Christ you call our name
and then receive us as your own,
not through some merit, right or claim,
but by your gracious love alone.
We strain to glimpse your mercy-seat
and find you kneeling at our feet.
Then take the towel, and break the bread,
and humble us, and call us friends.
Suffer and serve til all are fed,
and show how grandly love intends
to work til all creation sings,
to fill all worlds, to crown all things.
Having commanded the 11 faithful disciples, Jesus turns His attention to the unfaithful one. In Near Eastern culture, then as now, breaking bread together was a sign of intimacy. A betrayal by one who sat at table with you was bitter indeed.
Jesus reaches back to a psalm of David, No. 41, and quotes verse 9. The psalm is a lament of one who, suffering greatly, is mocked by enemies and betrayed by friends. David is clearly an Old Testament type of Christ.
The early church, when it came to see that the Lord of all achieved His greatest glory in his suffering and death, would link the afflictions David endured, despite his elevated stature, with those of “great David’s greater Son.”
Jesus has a problem . . . or, perhaps better, a concern. A horrific death by crucifixion was cause for great shame. His closest associates have already demonstrated a daunting denial when He has directed their thoughts toward His death.
Now He must not allow them to think back on this moment and see Him as the unwitting victim of Judas’ treachery. He puts them on notice that, looking back, they will know it for what it is, an element in the divine design for victory.
“I am He” is another instance of tying Himself to His Father, the great “I AM.”
Having linked Himself to His Father He links His disciples to Him. To receive the Son the Father has sent is to receive the Father; to receive those the Son sends is to receive the Son. They will be sent forth to proclaim His life-saving message and they will carry the authority of God Himself.
After the resurrection they will recall these words and take comfort from the assurance of the divine commission. Without that assurance they would have stumbled and fallen. We, too, should store them in our hearts and treat them like treasure.
To this point, Jesus has spoken of His impending betrayal in shaded language. His disciples have struggled. They know Him to be the promised Messiah and they can scarcely imagine His arrest and execution.
How could such things befall One so exalted? They look upon One who has multiplied loaves and fish, calmed the sea, healed the blind and raised the dead, and they ask themselves, “Can He fall prey to a traitor in the camp?”
But now He says it plainly, “one of you will betray Me.” Eleven cast nervous, sidelong glances. One feels his throat constrict and asks himself, “Should I confess and repent and beg forgiveness. Or should I flee before the others learn it is I of whom He speaks and seize me?”
We now meet “one of His disciples, whom Jesus loved.” He will emerge again at the cross and the empty tomb; by the Sea of Tiberias, where the resurrected Jesus appears to seven of His disciples, and in the final two verses of this gospel, which identify him as its author.
But who is he? And why is he anonymous? These questions are inseparable. The traditional view is the best, that it is John the author himself. He probably cloaks his identity to avoid elevating himself to the Lord’s level.
Like John the Baptist, he is only a voice. Who he is matters not. His message – Jesus is the Christ – is everything.
He may also wish to avoid giving offense to his fellow apostles. Couching the issue in these terms, he seems to convey his awed appreciation for God’s grace: “Who am I, that Messiah would love me?”
Even Peter is stunned by the Lord’s plain-spoken declaration. When he recovers, he does not blurt out a question but motions to John to pose it.
Be not deceived by Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, “The Last Supper.” Jesus and His disciples were not arrayed around the table as men might be at a dinner party tonight in Milan. To us in the West, the image of men leaning on other men is jarring, but it would provoke no such reaction in many parts of the world, even today.
I myself have seen it in Muslim countries. In some places, two men or two women hold hands as they walk down the street. They’re signaling friendship, not homosexuality. At the table, John is seated on Jesus’ right and Judas on His left, the place of honor.
Another custom strange to us still alive today is that of eating from a common bowl, and this I have not only seen but done. Each one tears off a piece of bread, dips it into the bowl and rakes food onto it with his forefinger.
An American friend who was traveling with me and a mutual friend, a resident missionary, in Morocco turned green the first time he participated . . . but he got over it. When in Rome . . .
Jesus, in the role of host, might have served up a choice morsel to one of the guests at table as a sign of favor.
The gesture is probably not, as some suppose, one of judgment. It is instead a final act of supreme love, which Judas converts into an act of judgment. Jesus has come – this first time – not to judge but to save.
We have heard Him say as much in several ways. Last week, we listened as He told the scoffers:
"And if anyone hears My words and does not believe, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him -- the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day” (12:47-48).
In other words, the individual judges himself by his response to the Christ. This is the fateful moment for Judas. Even now he may pour out a confession of his sin of betrayal and throw himself on his Lord’s mercy. The God of all mercies is extending one last chance to repent.
But this final gesture of love evokes in Judas not love but final surrender to darkness. “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (1:5).
And so Satan enters him, taking complete possession. The die is cast. Jesus tells him to get on with his sordid business: “What you do, do quickly.”
Jesus is speaking in such a low tone to this man seated next to Him that no one but John, the beloved disciple, on the other side, can make out His words. Even he fails to react, probably because this sudden turn has left him in shock.
The other 10 speculate that Jesus is sending Judas, the group’s treasurer, out to buy food for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which begins the night after the Passover, or to give alms to the poor, a Passover tradition.
Even in Satan’s power, Judas must still obey Jesus. No one takes His life from Him; He lays it down willingly (10:18).
Judas departs. “And it was night.” The moon shines bright but Judas enters into the blackest darkness, even outer darkness. And for Jesus? The hour of the power of darkness has arrived.
His hour has come. The blackness of sin, of death, of restitution, has come. Jesus is bound for the cross, where He will pour out His blood to wash you and me. His humility will overwhelm our treachery.
For we, like Judas, have betrayed our Lord. But we, unlike Judas, are washed in His blood. We have a part with Him. Thanks be to God. Amen.