Washed, Prepared, and Sent (John 13:1-16)

John 13 One through 16 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 is bathed does not need to wash

except for his feet, but is completely clean, and you are

clean, but not everyone of you, for he knew who was to betray

him. That is 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, I say to you, a servant

is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than

the one who sent him the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God, you may be seated.

What are the qualities that you look for in your leadership?

What would you say makes a good leader in our church and your

businesses and the organizations and schools in your community

and our governments? We were just read one of the

greatest pictures from the greatest leader in the history

of the world, Servants leadership.

Our purpose here today is to be exhorted, encouraged, corrected,

and equipped by the text. But I ask you those questions

first because I believe if we were honest, what we as

individuals and collectively, what we as a society want from

our leaders, servant leadership is not often the first quality

that comes to mind. You probably say something like

intellect, competency, command, charisma.

We want leaders who win. We want leaders who are grand,

sometimes even larger than life. The amazing thing about Jesus as

a leader is he did win, and Jesus was grand.

But what's remarkable about the way that Jesus did it is that he

redefined what winning meant and what it would mean to be great.

This passage in the Gospel of John is the only time in the

Bible that we have the foot washing from the four gospels.

But in the Gospel of Luke, at a similar point in the narrative,

the disciples come to Jesus and they ask him who will be the

greatest amongst the disciples. What blows me away personally by

the Lord Jesus response is he actually does not rebuke their

desire to be great. He redefines what the word

means. He says to be great means to be

a servant, the one who does not try to be equal with those he is

even leading, but takes the posture of being less than.

That is what greatness means in Jesus world.

And just as Jesus challenged his disciples and their view of

greatness, those he spent three years of life with, he is doing

the same for us today. And we have the pleasure today

of seeing that through how he served them as he washed their

feet. Today we're dividing our text

into 3 sections, Washed, Prepared, and Sense.

We see that Jesus washes because he loves us.

Jesus prepares us because He has plans for us, and Jesus sends us

because the Father has provided us the opportunity to serve.

First. Jesus washes us on this

Ascension Sunday as we remember Jesus in his resurrected body

being raised to the heavens and leaving his people here on earth

with the gifts and the promise of the Holy Spirit.

We remember how we who are in Christ, we are destined to

heaven to follow Jesus to that place.

But for now, we wait. We wait for his return or we

wait for Him to call us home in in death, whichever comes first

by God's Providence. PCPC as we have just been

walking through the Gospel of John on this Ascension Sunday,

on this day, we're commissioning members to proclaim who Jesus is

in Dallas into the ends of the earth.

We find ourselves at a critical moment in the Gospel of John,

verse one from our passage now before the feast of the Passover

when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this

world. This is the third Passover feast

that we've come to in the Gospel of John, and we are at the night

of his arrest. Jesus will spend the next 5

chapters with his disciples explaining to him what is about

to happen. But John slows down in these

final hours. We have so much to learn from

our risen Savior. The second-half of verse one

tells us the explicit motivation of Christ through the washing of

the feet that He carries us into as He begins His farewell

discourse. And that is, it is His love for

those who are his, having loved His own, who are in the world.

He loved them to the end. On the eve of His death, Jesus

gives us his most emphatic expression of love that we have

seen up to this point in the Gospel of John, a love that will

be taken to the end with his dying breath.

And we see at this most intense moment, a love so intense that

it persists and endures even in the face of betrayal.

The dynamic of Judas is is entered in pretty quickly into

our narrative. And Judas, as we see the

betrayal that's there, shows us the contrast between how man

loves and how God loves. Jesus came to the dinner table

with the motivation to love the disciples.

It was a face to face interaction.

It was intimate. It was the fellowship of a

dinner table. Judas was there.

He was experiencing the same things that the other disciples

were experiencing. But what does the text tell us

was different, that the devil had tempted him away?

There was a misordered love in Judas's heart that he had

prioritized other loves ahead of receiving the love from God.

Personal wealth, Security. Jesus.

Judas's heart was cold to the love of Jesus, even as God was

manifesting it before his eyes. But Jesus loved to the end, even

in the face of his own betrayal. We hear the word Judas,

particularly if you've grown up in the church, and there's a bit

of a temptation to distance yourself from that.

And while we are not engaged in the act of betrayal of our

Savior, it would be foolish to believe that we're not more like

Judas than we'd like to think. The world and the sin that is,

that is in us, It tells us to love those who are like us.

It tells us to love those who can help us get something that

we need. That's something that our

hearts, those misordered love of the hearts, are longing for.

That might be social approval, it might be something that gets

us ahead in life. We are tempted to love based on

the favourites we keep, based on who is in our in list.

I think sometimes even the broader secular culture under

the guise of tolerance, there's only tolerance for those who

share the same views that we do. There's an intolerance for

anyone who appears appears to be intolerance.

But Jesus shows us a better way. He shows us his service, which

is motivated by his love, even to those who would betray him,

motivated by love. In the middle of their Passover

dinner, Jesus stands up. He begins to undress.

He ties a towel around his waist.

He begins to wash the disciples feet.

Jesus laid aside his garments in order to take on the work of a

servant. He's doing this face to face

with the disciples. They're seeing the fullness of

the form of a servant. It's also in the presence of his

disciples whom he just called his own.

What I want to say about Jesus service, it is not

inconspicuous. He is not trying to just kind of

go around the edges and wash the feet that no one would notice.

It's in your face. He wants the disciples to feel

the intimacy of the moments. Those he was just around table

with, he's now looking them in the eye, down on one knee,

washing their feet, doing the work of a servant because he

loved them. He was going to love them to the

end. Now, this washing would have

been normal for a Passover meal, but what is not normal about

this particular washing is that that washing would have happened

before the meal would have started, and this washing

actually took place right in the middle of the meal.

And so I think even from this early phase of the narrative, we

sense that Jesus is showing them that this is a different kind of

Passover. Jesus is maintaining the

continuity of God's story that started with the people of

Israel, the promise of the Passover that had been practiced

since they had escaped from the land of Egypt.

But he's also showing there's a preparation here that's somewhat

different. The preparation is different.

It's preparing for a more complete Passover.

So now we see how Jesus prepares us, prepared because he has

plans for us. And this preparation has to do

with a deeper understanding of his relationship to us.

And we currently know and we see that in the person of Peter in

the story, Jesus is showing us he's preparing the disciples for

a calling. And we see from Peter's response

at first in verse 6 that he he gets it.

He gets that there is a significance here.

That's why Peter asks the question.

It's, it's, it's interesting to know everything about Judas and

Peter and how the contrast here. Judas, we actually don't hear

anything from the text that Judas refused his feet to be

washed. I think it's, we can assume that

actually Judas had his feet washed by Jesus that night.

Judas was willing to accept the washing even though he knew what

he was about ready to do. But in Peter, we have a disciple

who's eager to announce who Jesus is, eager to say that

Jesus is the Messiah. But his first gut reaction is, I

don't need that. Why?

Why would you do that to me? He his mind is still kind of

catching up with what is happening in front, in front of

them. We pick up Peters response in

verse 6. Jesus was working his way around

the room. John, the Gospel writer, he was

in the room. He was either waiting for his

turn for his feet to be washed or they had already been washed

at the moment. And he recorded for us this

interaction, this dialogue. Peter is using some personal

pronouns here. Lord, do you wash?

Do you, Lord Jesus, wash my feet.

So that intimate nature of the interaction, he's getting it.

He understands that there's a relational nature here.

But the servitude, the action, Jesus lowering himself to Peter,

it's just too much for him. He's not able to accept the

washing. That's pretty clear from the

dialogue. Jesus, ever patient with Peter,

tells him that though he doesn't understand now, he will

understand later. We get a sense of the journey

that Peter is going to be on in these next couple of days, in

the next week. But Peter's pretty clear.

He double s down on his refusal. He states that Jesus can never

wash his feet and in preparing Peter for the greater Passover,

Jesus drives a point home pretty clearly.

There is no option of Peter maintaining this relationship

with Jesus if he doesn't receive the service.

In order to be with Jesus, Peter has to let himself be served by

the Holy Messiah. The Son of God is looking into

Peter's eyes. Peter knows who Jesus is.

Peter is tempted towards misunderstanding Jesus's role in

misunderstanding his own salvation.

But by the grace of God, Peter is brought to the end of

himself. We see at play here the grace of

a Savior who's willing to receive Peter's refusal at first

to explain what this means and the significance of it.

And who's there to respond to Peter's repentance in the

moment. He is always willing to remind

his disciples, those whom he loves, that they will always be

in need of Jesus service to them.

I've been reminded many weeks or many, many times this week that

I try to proclaim independence from God, say I don't know if I

need it this week, Jesus, I don't know if I need you to wash

my feet today. But this image from the gospel

of Jesus undressing himself, he washes our feet that we might be

clothed in his own righteousness.

And from that point on, we have feet clean enough to spread the

good news of what he has done. So I, as I have pondered this

week about how I try to refuse Jesus's moments of, of his

service to me, I want to ask you, how do you try and refuse

the washing of your feet by the Son of God?

And do you hear that kind voice of our Savior who explains to us

that we won't have a share with him if we don't receive it?

And he accepts our repentance as we come back to him again and

again. I love the way Claire read the

passage for us because I think this phase two of Jesus dialogue

with Peter, it shows you kind of a little bit of how Peter's a

bit of a ping pong right in this dialogue.

He's willing to accept, but he still does not understand the

purpose accepting the washing. Peter's statement in verse 9, he

wants Jesus to go a step further with what he's offered him.

He said not just my feet, but also my hand and my, my head

also, my hands and my head also. And what I see here in Jesus

response is that upon hearing Peter's response, Jesus knows

what's in Peter's hearts, just as he knows which is in all of

our hearts. And he sees Peter, instead of

receiving the service, looking down at his Savior who was

serving him. And he takes his gaze off Jesus.

He takes his gaze, his gaze off his Savior.

Jesus primarily wants his disciples to see him in the

position that he is taking that is lower than them.

He uses the the cultural image of the time, of what it was like

to dine. And he's, you know, a dinner

guest at that time was not expected to come to the table

having been completely washed, completely bathed.

And we know that some of the hygiene of the time was quite

different than what we have today.

So there probably would have even been a sense of even though

the feet were clean, it would have been a little smelly.

But a dinner guest was not expected to have come to the

table completely bathed. They just need to have their

feet cleansed from the dust and grind of the road.

And then they were welcomed to the table.

I think you can summarize Peter's mistake here as he's

confusing this doctrine of salvation that we must be

cleaned. He's accepted that at this

point. He knows that.

He's confusing that with forgetting that it comes through

a person. He's missing the face of his

Savior as he's declaring what is right and true.

Jesus verses and 10:00 and 11:00.

It's amazing how in in those two verses he actually does away

with this idea of universalism, but he also negates any attempt

to try and to add on to his work as necessary for salvation.

As necessary as being called one of Gods.

God's table and fellowship with him can only be obtained through

allegiance to Jesus, and allegiance to Jesus can only be

received by accepting the service he gives you.

Cleanliness here is symbolized by the washing of the disciples

feet. But the preparedness that Jesus

is demonstrating comes from our union with Christ.

It comes from knowing and believing and remembering that.

It comes from seeing our Savior face to face as He is below us,

washing our feet that we might be cleansed, being welcomed to

the table of God. So we must be careful not to

make the mistake of Judas, of misordered loves of the hearts,

but not also not make the mistake of Peter, of forgetting

that it's all about allegiance to a person, not to just a right

way of thinking. The preparation for the ultimate

Passover is that the one who needed no cleansing, the one who

would become the Passover lamb given over for all of our sins.

He was the one willing to cleanse and act as a servant,

not just living the perfect life through the absence of sin, but

living the perfect life through his commitment to serve to the

end. This is the only preparation

that can prepare Jesus's disciples for what He was

calling them to. As we think about the depth of

the foot washing scene, we see many ways in which it shows the

beauty of who Christ is. He is loving.

That was his motivation. He is forgiving.

He's forgiving Judas as he washed his feet.

He is enduring knowing what lies ahead is mere hours away,

serving to the very end. He is patient with Peter.

He is kind and gentle as he washes.

And I was reminded in this week from a sermon from a one of my

professors from seminary Doctor Tim Keller.

He preached a sermon on this text in 1998, and he talks about

how as we view the beauty of Jesus in this scene, it actually

brings out the Trinitarian nature of our text.

Remember, Jesus is getting ready to to begin his final discourse.

These are some of the most explicit chapters that we have

in the Bible on the relationship between the Father, the Son, and

the Holy Spirit. But in preparation for that

discourse, Jesus is showing the fruits of the Spirit and all

that he is doing before them. He's living out the discourse

right now as he washes their feet, showing the senteness of

the Father, the relationship and submission of the Son to the

Father, and their fullness of the fruits of the Spirit on

display in Jesus's act. We have been washed because of

Jesus's love for us. We have been prepared because He

has a plan for us. And that plan is that He is

sending us out because He desires for us to serve.

Jesus continues to explain to the disciples what what they

were not only supposed to believe, but how they are to

apply their union with Christ, with one, with one another.

He got dressed again and went to work explaining that which would

only be ultimately clear at the crucifixion.

You see, the foot washing is a visible tangible picture of

servanthood, that at the cross it has its fullness.

So thus disciples right now in this moment, they can understand

the visible sign of the foot washing as their teachers

becoming a servant, but they will understand that much more

deeply just hours from that moment.

I want to take us to a time as we look at Ascension Sunday, a

time when Jesus was actually had already been raised from the

dead. His body has been resurrected

and he is waiting for his ascension comes from the Gospel

of John, chapter 20. It's just one verse, chapter 20,

John 20 · chapter mention

verse 21 and Jesus says to his disciples, he's he's raised from

the dead, he's waiting for his ascension.

He says peace be with you as the Father has sent me.

Even so I am sending you. So part of what Jesus is

teaching the disciples is he is teaching them how they are to be

sent. When they heard those verses

with Jesus resurrected body, they would have remembered what

it was like to have their feet washed by Jesus.

And what I see here and how Jesus sends us is he sending us

and demonstrating to us a type of character that we were

supposed to have as he sends us out into the world.

Now I think it, I want to be very, very careful at this point

because I believe it could be possible to leave having heard

this sermon, having listened to this text, and to leave here

thinking this is all about imitating a morality that we are

saying go and be servant leaders because that is how you are to

be saved. And I think what I want to be

very explicit about is this is about the nature, the character

of our servanthood that is meant to imitate how Jesus was

submitted to the Father. When we talk about that, our

mission here at Park City's Presbyterian Church is to extend

the transforming presence of the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ

here in Dallas into the ends of the earth.

That is meant to encompass a type of character, an experience

of the Kingdom and how we go out where people can sense through

our service, through our character, the type of Kingdom

that Jesus is extending. And it's 1 of servant

leadership. It's one of submission one to

another. And I talk about this in this

way because I think there's a lot that our culture tries to

tell us about calling. Our cultural, our culture today

puts a lot of pressure on the individual to find calling.

But as we consider what we are being sent to, I would say that

the word, the world puts too much emphasis on it.

They put too much emphasis on what we are being sent to.

What is that thing that we are being sent to?

And it's dangerous because it deemphasizes the way in which we

are meant to be sent. Our character and how we are

sent, I argue, is actually far more important than what the

specific thing is that we are being sent to.

What would it look like to be a church that embraces A radical

acceptance of serving to the other most, wherever, whenever,

to whomever, by God's Providence, He is sending us to.

We miss opportunities to wash one another's feet because we

are too concerned about what's that person doing, what's that

person doing and where do I fit into it.

To our short term missionaries this summer, you will be sent

into all kinds of opportunities, all kind of circumstances as a

team. There will be moments when

someone on the team has an opportunity that you want and

you're going to wonder why am I not the one getting to do what

they get to do? Be a servant leader.

We have professionals amongst us right now that I trust perhaps

or even waiting for an opportunity, waiting for a job,

wanting that next step up and they're thinking that God has

forgotten them until they've got they get it.

God is sending you also into this moment.

How can you without be a servant leader as you wait for God's

Providence to give you that next opportunity.

There might be someone here who has recently experienced a big

discouragement, lost an opportunity you wish you had

back. You can still live in the

fullness of the servanthood of Christ, even as we wait for

God's Providence to show us what that is.

How we go matters. But as I think about that,

that's a big ask. I can even feel and remember it

in moments where I felt that tension of wanting a different

calling than the one that God had given me.

It could be on that given moment.

It could be on that given day. It could be talking about career

job level. And so I kind of as I remember

what I needed in those moments. I'm sure you're asking where do

we get that strength to serve? It comes from looking,

remembering the the picture of Jesus.

We look to him. We are reminded, we allow the

text to to correct us, to exhort us, to show us what this picture

looks like. But on this Ascension Sunday, as

we remember Jesus being raised to heaven, it also comes from a

look for the future. And so, as I conclude, I want to

leave you with a quote that came from the end of the Chronicles

of Narnia, CS Lewis's work, The Last Battle, that speaks about

what future we have to look forward to as we wait for Christ

to come back. And as he, King Aslan, spoke, he

no longer looks to them like a lion.

But the things that began to happen after that were so great

and beautiful that I cannot write them.

And for us, this is the end of all the stories.

And we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever

after. But for them it was only the

beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and

all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the

title page. Now, at last, they were

beginning chapter one of the great story which no one on

earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter

is better than the one before. Let us pray.

God, I thank you for these pictures of leadership that

correct us, that show us the better, the deeper way, and even

show us that the categories which our world tries to define

things, you are the one who needs to define them.

And so as we close our time here in the Word this day, I pray

that you would, by your Providence, by your sovereignty,

to allow one needs to remain in the lives of our brothers and

sisters, hearts that they would be sustained.

Sustained in the act of understanding who they are in

Christ. Preserved in the preparedness

that you've showed them, and strengthened and encouraged to

go out and be sent wherever it is that you might be sending

them to do the work that you, Jesus, have showed us to do.

Imitating you, Jesus, who was submitted to the Father, and

that you are filled with the Holy Spirit.

We trust you and thank you for this day.

And I pray this only with the Father, the Son, and the Holy

Spirit. Amen.