AJM Holy Trinity 21st April 2002 am
Morning.
We are looking today at Jesus as our example. I have given you an
example, that you also should do as I have done to you. The first
Christians weren’t called Christians. They were called followers of the Way.
They weren’t a bunch of people who belonged to something called a church, they
were a bunch of people who lived in a certain way, a way that had been
demonstrated and taught them by Jesus himself. Jesus set an example of a
different way of living. The question is, how was it different, and can we
still do it today?
Let’s pray…
What kind of a world do we live in?
Put up your hand if you were born in Leicester… Not many.
Put up your hand if you were born in a country other than England… Lots
of us.
What does that mean for the way we experience life?
I was brought up in London. Apparently the average Londoner encounters
more people in a single week than his pre-industrial counterpart would have met
in a lifetime. That’s OK, if you’re used to it. It even feels quite good – we
feel we must be well connected if we know so many people. It makes us feel we
have choices about who we get close to, who we spend our time with. And we like
choices. We like freedom. We don’t like being tied down. We live in the
ultimate untied down society. Only a short time ago most people lived in the
community where they were born, doing what they were brought up to do. It’s all
different now: we can change what we do, who we belong to, who we are and how
we express ourselves at the drop of a hat. We have immense freedom.
Roger went to a cell group one night recently. The leader of the cell
group started with an ice breaker. She is well known for her ice breakers. I
wasn’t there, but I should think this one would not just have broken the ice,
it’d have left a gaping hole in a glacier. This was the question. Recall a
time when you felt an outsider… I think most of us know or have known what
it means to feel like an outsider. In traditional societies no one feels like
an outsider. It’s a modern disease. You’re an outsider when you leave home for
university. You’re an outsider when you change your job. You’re an outsider
when you marry into someone else’s family. You’re an outsider when you speak a
different language. You’re an outsider when you have different values. You’re
an outsider when you get in the way of someone else’s ambitions. You’re an
outsider when you move to a new place. When you are alone. When you don’t know
what your role is. Perhaps feeling an outsider is the price we pay for social
mobility and freedom of choice. We are free to be who we want to be. But we
don’t belong. And sometimes that hurts.
Well, Jesus came into the world as an example to us. Jesus is the way,
the truth and the life. He offered a model of how to live, and he took every
opportunity to teach that model to his disciples. But the problem is, Jesus was
born into a world that was very different from ours. His society was as fixed
as ours is free. If you’d lived then you’d have had none of the choices and
opportunities we have now. For us it’s the individual that matters; but in 1st
century Israel it was the collectivity. It was a carefully structured community
where religious laws and social conventions governed every detail of life.
People lived in the place where they were born, earned their living within the
parameters set for them, and often failed to make ends meet. There was no real
freedom. The religious authorities surrounded them with rules, the secular
authorities were interested only in whether they paid their taxes. To break the
rules was to risk rejection and even execution. For many the only way out was
armed revolt, and the Romans put those down ruthlessly. It was a tough world.
The problem is, how can anything Jesus offered to that society as
an example of the way to live possibly make any sense in our own
society, which is so different? What are we to make of this demonstration of
footwashing by Jesus on the last night of his life? What did it mean even then,
and is it meaningful for us today? It must have been more than a passing
thought. This, after all, is the last night before his death, and he knew it.
It’s his last evening with the disciples, the men whom he hoped would change
the world and inaugurate a new era. And what did he do. He took off his robe
and washed their feet. Then he told them this was the new way to live. This was
the example that would change everything. They’d got to wash each other’s feet.
Simple enough; simple as an action, simple as a recommendation of unselfish
concern for other people. But why make such a point of it?
Now I don’t know about you but I’ve always found this footwashing a bit
hard to get hold of. I remember once I went to a Maundy Thursday service where
we were supposed to do this to each other. We all sat round and solemnly
removed our clean socks and shoes, while bowls of tepid water were passed along
the rows with a towel so that we could wash each other’s feet. Now it’s
probably a defect in me, but I couldn’t get into it at all. Jesus may well have
felt that washing his disciples’ feet would demonstrate a whole new way of
living, but I couldn’t see it. Taking off my clean socks so that the person
next to me could wash my clean feet just seemed to me to be some kind of joke.
A few years after I’d been to the footwashing service I went to Zambia.
There it all seemed to make much more sense. Everywhere we went there was this
red dust. It was on roads, tracks, in houses and vehicles, and it got
everywhere. And everywhere we went people brought us bowls of water to wash in.
It was a labour of love, too. First a girl had to be sent to the water hole to
get the water. Once she’d carried it back on her head the women would pour it
into a large pan over the fire. When it boiled they’d put some into a small tin
bowl. And that bowl would be carried, with a towel and a bar of soap, to me.
Before every meal the host would come round and offer us all the bowl and the
towel in turn so that we could wash our hands, usually with a second person who
had a jug of fresh water to pour over our hands after we’d washed them. Each
evening the bowl would be filled again and taken into a grass shelter with a
log floor, specially built by the men for our benefit, and there I would be
able to wash my feet, once I’d worked out how to balance on a log with one foot
whilst lifting the other. Nothing was too much trouble for them. They really
put themselves out.
Anyway, here is Jesus the night before his death, washing his disciples’
feet. OK, we know why their feet needed washing – Israel is like Zambia, all
dry and dusty, and they’d been doing a lot of travelling. Clean feet feel
comfier than dusty ones. But why did Jesus do it? Any one could have done it;
any of the disciples themselves, or any of the people who were providing the
meal and waiting on them – because you can bet that although they aren’t
mentioned there were a lot of people round the back doing the cooking.
Fortunately we have the horrendous humanity of Peter in the middle of this
passage to help us out.
Now the question is, would you have felt comfortable if Jesus had
offered to wash your feet? Probably not. And Peter wasn’t going to let Jesus
wash his either. He’d realised who he was. You have the words of eternal
life. You are the Holy One of God, he’d said to him earlier. But Jesus’s
reply is rather surprising. If I don’t wash you, you can’t belong to me. You
have no part in me. OH! says Peter. Now if there’s one thing Peter didn’t
like it was being left out. And especially being left out by Jesus. Well in
that case, he cries, wash me all over! Not only my feet but also my hands and
my head! Peter isn’t stopping to think. Peter usually didn’t stop to think.
When Jesus offered to wash his feet he said no, I couldn’t possibly let you do
that. It’s demeaning. The Son of God doesn’t do that kind of thing. Well,
that’s not very perceptive really, seeing as the Son of God has been wandering
around the countryside in rags letting lepers and unclean women touch him, and
has just ridden into Jerusalem, not in a royal procession but on a donkey. The
Son of God has been doing all sorts of things the Son of God doesn’t do, hasn’t
he. But one thing Peter was right about: washing feet was humble service. He
didn’t want Jesus to serve him. He didn’t think it appropriate.
But then Jesus said ‘you can’t belong to me unless I wash you’, and it
occurred to Peter that maybe it wasn’t service, it was cleanliness he was
talking about. Now Peter knew all about cleanliness. It was next to godliness,
and there were all sorts of religious rules about it. Ritual cleanliness was
very important. So if Jesus was talking about
being clean, Peter wanted to be clean. Clean me all over, he says. Jesus
sighs. Maybe he thought that given that God had had the whole of history and
the whole of humanity to choose from, he could have come up with someone a bit
quicker on the uptake than this particular disciple. If the NT was written to
make the protagonists look good, something went wrong with Peter. It’s a great
consolation to us to know that Christianity isn’t for superman.
So Jesus explains. It’s symbolic. I’m trying to show you something. I am
trying to tell you that the way the world does things isn’t the way you need to
do them as Christians. You were right the first time; I’m not talking to you
about being clean, I’m talking to you about service. I’m telling you that you
haven’t been chosen to be important, you have been chosen to serve one another.
To love one another. This is a new kind of community, a new way of thinking. I
have given you an example. If you want to be theological about it, you are
clean already, clean all over. But I wasn’t being theological. I was offering
you a simple example.
So the question is, what did it mean? Jesus washed the disciples’ feet.
Jesus was a humble guy. Jesus wanted us to be humble guys. That’s what we often
think it means. A nice moral lesson from Granny. But why did Jesus think it was
so important as to make it the subject of his last evening of teaching? Why go
to all the bother of acting it out? And have we really taken it all on board
when we say to yourselves ah yes, Jesus was a humble guy, take off your socks
and shoes and I’ll remind myself I’m sposed to be humble too by washing your
feet?
Let’s put it in context. This is at the end of Jesus’s ministry. From
the beginning, he had said that he came
to set people free. He came to announce that the kingdom of God had come. He
came to bring a message of good news, a message which he wanted his followers
to tell to all nations and all generations. And it wasn’t just to be an
intellectual message, a statement of fact; it was a message that came incarnate,
a message that was to be embodied and communicated in a way of life. It was a
message that was to do with people and relationships. And in a world where
ideological and political brutality was the order of the day, the footwashing
is a demonstration of the kind of relationships he had in mind.
Let me ask you a question. Where do you think the fastest growing church
in the world is?
The answer is Nepal. Nepal is the only Hindu kingdom in the world. 35
years ago there were 200 Christians in Nepal. Now there are 300,000. Why is the
gospel spreading? Because the Christians in Nepal care for one another. If you
have AIDS in Nepal you are thrown out of hospital. There is only one hospital
which will take people with AIDS. It’s run by Christians. The Christians in
Nepal are prepared to serve, and the people have noticed.
Let me ask you another question. Why do you think the gospel spread so
fast through the Roman empire? It was a multicultural society similar to ours,
with cults everywhere, and an imperial religion which insisted on worship of
the emperor as a god. There wasn’t much room for Christianity, and not much
tolerance either. In AD 40 there are estimated to have been about a thousand
committed Christians. By AD 300 there were 6 million. Why? There may have been
mass conversions at the very beginning, but there is no evidence for that later
on. One recent study suggests that Christianity grew slowly and steadily
through social networks, and that the thing that made people sit up and take
notice was precisely what Jesus said: the Christians looked after one another.
One of the biggest problems in the Roman empire was epidemics of plague.
Sanitary conditions in cities were appalling, and people knew it was catching.
Plague victims, as later in London, were left to fend for themselves; it was
more than your life was worth to nurse someone with plague. And yet the
Christians did just that. More Christians survived the plague than
non-Christians. The Christians cared for one another, prayed for one another,
and as the number of non-Christians went down the numbers of Christians went
up. They showed themselves to be a community not afraid of death, a community
who demonstrated the love that was so lacking in the barbarity of secular Roman
society, a people who were prepared to serve one another at risk of their own
lives. And they were ready to offer the same commitment to outsiders, whether
they too had plague or whether they were amongst the orphaned and the bereaved.
In 362 the emperor complained that the growth of the Christian faith was caused
by the Christians’ commitment to people, because they acted to meet people’s
needs while the state did nothing. Eventually plague killed the empire, because
it increasingly lacked the manpower to defend itself. What was left was the
church, and Europe became a Christian continent.
So both in Nepal and in the Roman empire it was Jesus’s example of
service which led people to God. Christianity is a belief system, but more
importantly it is a love system. We believe, but we believe in a God who loves.
Look at verse 34 in this same chapter. A new command I give you: love one
another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men
will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
So that’s what Jesus’s example meant to the Christians in the Roman
empire. It means the same thing to the Christians in Nepal. In a society where
power was exercised without compassion or concern, and the poor were left to
fend for themselves, Jesus offered the example of washing one another’s feet.
It was a revolutionary message; that’s why Peter was so slow to grasp what to
us seems quite simple. After all, we live in a society where all this is taken
for granted. We complain about the NHS, but the health care we receive means we
have a life expectancy of over 70 years. In the Roman empire it was 29 years.
We complain about poverty, but poverty in this country doesn’t mean no food and
no clothes, it means no holidays and no car. Social care is no longer a
revolutionary message – rather the reverse, it’s what everyone believes in. We
are unlikely to hear the government complaining that everyone is becoming a
Christian because only the Church cares for the sick, or the unemployed. To
care for the marginalised in our society is part of our value system; it’s the
normal middle class social agenda. It isn’t revolutionary at all.
So I think we need to think very carefully about what Jesus’ example
means for us today. Jesus looked at the society of his day and saw the pain. He
saw the pain of a people struggling with oppression and poverty, in which
leadership meant power and power was exercised without compassion. And he said
to the disciples, living in God’s love means living a different way from this.
It means a new kind of leadership, a serving kind of leadership, in which
people give their lives for one another. It means setting an example which is
completely different from anything anyone has ever seen before. In telling the
disciples to wash one another’s feet, Jesus was offering them a model of life
that reflected the nature of God himself and that would mark them out from any
other grouping. You can imagine that same message today in say Iraq, or indeed
in Palestine, and how starkly it would stand out against the normal way of
doing things.
What then would be the way of life that would make the love of God
visible, and mark Christians out as a community with a different set of values?
What does it mean to wash each others’ feet today?
Christian service in the 3rd millennium
Let me tell you a story I read in a book recently. It’s about a man
called Bob married to a woman called Sue. They are both Christians, but Sue is
an alcoholic. They have two children. For years Bob has tried to stick with
Sue. They love one another. But he’s got to the point where he can’t cope any
more. Sue is reluctant to face the issue and family life is impossible. Bob
shares his despair with the minister of the church, and says he’s decided
divorce is the only way forward, both for his own sanity and for the sake of
the kids. The minister knows he wouldn’t be able to cope with marriage to Sue
either, and so sadly he says he agrees that Bob’s got to find a way out, and
says he’ll support him in his decision. The minister goes home. Next day, another
member of the church rings him. ‘I hear Bob’s at desperation point.’ Yes. ‘What
are we going to do to help him cope in his situation?’ For her, Bob’s problem
was the church’s problem, and not his alone. Bob was not an individual, who
deserved sympathy for the tough hand life had dealt him; he was part of a
church, and his pain was their pain. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant; we are
to be a community of people who see pain as a shared thing, and problems as
commonly rather than individually owned.
If we were really to do this all over the country, we would become
profoundly different from the culture we live in, which is individualistic and
self-serving. Laurence Singlehurst, who writes and teaches about cell churches,
says he reckons the most important verse in the NT for the church today is 2
Cor 5.15: he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for
themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them. And perhaps that
is the challenge of the foot washing episode for us today. It isn’t just a
point about humility. It’s about a whole way of life. We are to live for Christ
and for one another. We must know one another. We must share our lives with one
another. We must meet one another’s needs, as a community. We must be the
traditional rural community, but spread out over our city. That shouldn’t be
hard, when we have phones and cars and computers. If once we decide that we
belong to one another, instead of regarding each person as a kind of floating
island that we bump into occasionally, we can. We don’t have to live the
isolated and individualistic life that the world offers us. We can sacrifice
some of our freedom and some of our time, and belong to one another. We can do
it. Many of us are doing it already, in a thousand little ways. Many of us are
still keeping going, only because it has been done for us.
I think the best way of putting it is this. We are to show the world
that God loves us, and we are to do it by loving one another. That doesn’t mean
running this programme or that programme, it means mutual service and
commitment. The church is not called to have a social strategy. It is
called to be a social strategy. And that strategy is to be based not on
organisation, on structures, on programmes but on sacrificial relationships.
Our task is to model an alternative community, one marked not by self-seeking
and self-determination, by freedom and independence, but by commitment to one
another, by loyalty, and by the desire to meet one another’s needs. It’s not
our job to change the world out there; we are to learn to create a new world,
one called the kingdom of God, and one which is open to all. That might be
costly; but it isn’t complicated. It’s a very simple concept. As simple, in
fact, as washing someone’s feet for them.