between the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and the Jesus way of sacrificial service. The crucified Lord of all is preaching to us from his knees and he invites us to join him in the sacrificial life of discipleship: “to love one another as I have loved you.”
The third tension is between Jesus’ Passion Narrative and our life narratives. We are sometimes slow to realize that Christ’s Passion Narrative has turned each of our lives into a passion narrative. We are not detached observers watching Jesus’ drama. We are seated at the table of broken bread and poured out wine. We are called to follow the crucified Lord.
The fourth tension is between Jesus’ deliberate action and our obedience. We like the idea of free grace and no-load discipleship. Jesus didn’t wash our feet and go to the cross so that we could realize our potential and feel successful. The intensity of the upper room is not religion as usual.
The fifth tension is between Jesus’ humility and our quest for honor. The meaning of the upper room ought to pervade every sanctuary, boardroom, lecture hall, living room, and kitchen. I may preach humility but I am tempted to practice hubris. Where do self-promotion, institutional pride, and expensive public relations fit in the ethos of the upper room? John 13 offers a fresh understanding of spiritual ambition. We ought to ask ourselves, how do we keep up with the God who kneels?
The sixth tension is between Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial. We ignore the personalities seated at the Last Supper at our peril, because we are very much like this company of confused and conflicted individuals. The great Reformer Martin Luther was not as ready to write off Judas as a singular aberration of evil as we may be. He saw the likes of Judas and Peter in the church of his day. The tensions around that table are with us today. We are still coping with betrayal and denial around the Lord’s table and in the boardrooms of our churches. We are a mixed bag both within ourselves and within the congregation.
The seventh tension is between divine humility and divine glory. Many of us have been trained to separate the theology of the cross from the theology of glory, but Jesus insists on keeping them together. This is evident in the upper room. We cannot have the cross without the glory of God and we cannot have his glory without the cross. Humility and exaltation belong together. They are inseparable. But this glory has nothing to do with worldly glory and power, nothing to do with success in the eyes of the world. The incarnate God who kneels shows us the glory of the Father’s love and approval.
In the days ahead we will explore these tensions in the text. To the degree that we identify with Jesus, his person and his work, we live in these tensions. But it is exactly these tensions that we have largely lost in contemporary Christian communication. We have obscured the polarity between Jesus-like lowliness and worldly success. We have blurred the distinction between human glory and God’s glory. We have blended Jesus-centered truth and cultural conformity.
The Danish Christian thinker Søren Kierkegaard called this sorry state Christianity without Christ. The Christianity of his day had taken on a religious life of its own—divorced from the message and method of Jesus. Instead of teaching people how to follow Jesus, preachers inspired congregations to admire Jesus. Kierkegaard accentuated the difference between discipleship and admiration. He called Christians to take up their cross and follow Jesus.
When we ignore the tension in the text, Christian communication becomes repetitive and boring. True meditation draws us into the real tension between the Word of God and the way of the world. We wrestle with sin and salvation, judgment and worship, law and grace. Real reflection confronts us with the fallen human condition and God’s redemptive provision. Jesus’ message in the upper room is light-years away from the religious info-sermon and the latest self-help drivel. He embodied his final parable. His actions and words corresponded perfectly. Message and method converged in a sermon that exposed the fault lines running between conventional religious thinking and the gospel. If at first you don’t understand this, give it time. As you read and reread John 13, Jesus, John, and the Holy Spirit will make sense of it for you, and you’ll find surprising life applications. We may not realize the depth of this truth at first, but Jesus promised “later you will understand.”
Upper Room Reflection
What does it mean to belong to the order of the towel and basin?
Which of the tensions in the text challenges your understanding of discipleship the most?
How have you experienced the difference between admiring Jesus and following Jesus?
What strategies or excuses do we use to evade the order of the towel and basin?
Day 6
The Mind of Christ
“Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father.” John 13:1
Jesus on his knees is not about a great man condescending to do a menial task in order to inspire his followers to be humble. This moralistic reading of John 13 skims the surface and misses the meaning of the text. What appears simple on the surface—a towel and basin, and the menial work of a servant—was intended by Jesus to reveal the unfathomable mystery of God’s great love and sacrifice. Jesus deliberately performs a prophetic act “that will interpret to the disciples that terrible event which they cannot now understand.”4 A moralistic reading of the text may inspire admiration for Jesus but it does so at the expense of theological truth. It is all about Christ’s atoning sacrifice and sacrificial discipleship.
A faithful pastor preached on “loving service” from John 13. He did a fine job presenting the necessity of foot-washing for a group of men walking the dusty dirt paths of Palestine in the first century. He emphasized the awkwardness around the table as none of the disciples deemed it their responsibility to take on the role of a servant and wash the disciples’ feet. No one was willing to humble themselves even though it was a breach of etiquette to recline at the low table with unwashed feet.
The preacher noted that Jesus’ loving service issued out of his fullness. Jesus didn’t need to be needed. There was nothing lacking in his life that needed to be fulfilled by giving himself away to others. To illustrate this the pastor said, “It is like the popular high school senior who goes out of her way to reach out to an unpopular girl.” But then he added, “I can’t say that of a junior high girl, because if a popular junior higher reached out to an unpopular student, she would immediately become unpopular.” His unintended aside unwittingly backed into the tension in the text. The illustration of the popular high school student who lowers herself to reach out to others fit his theme. Altruistic kindness has its rewards. Lower yourself to help others and people will think more highly of you. Servant-hearted kindness to those in need is love in action and cultivates self-respect. But the disciples were not buying this take on Jesus’ actions. They were embarrassed. The text forces us to go deeper.
What Jesus did in the upper room provoked the disciples’ disapproval, not their admiration. When Jesus strips down and begins to wash the disciples feet, he becomes, at least in Judas’ mind, like the junior high student who reaches out to the unpopular girl—despised and rejected. A disillusioned Judas, with his hopes dashed, must have been filled with disdain for Jesus. The prophet Isaiah summed it up this way: “Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem” (Isa 53:3). Ted Turner, the founder of CNN, famously said, “Christianity is a religion for losers. I don’t want anyone to die for me.”
John makes us aware of the immediacy of Jesus’ death. The movement of this entire scene is deeply theological. Foot-washing serves as an object lesson. It is Jesus’ final parable and its significance lies in the cross—Christ’s atoning death. The Passion Narrative begins now, hours before Gethsemane and
