Grounded.

John 13:1-20   (October 25, 2015)

I.

One of the things my grandfather would do that I considered somewhat odd was that whenever he put a new flashbulb in his camera (remember flashbulbs?) he would lick the bottom.  I seem to recall he would also do this with batteries.  He would explain it in terms of improving the electrical contact… and maybe for people who remembered when electricity was a new thing that made sense.  

Water conducts electricity, of course, and I guess it was often used to facilitate the flow of electrons in the early days.  Sometimes a good flow of energy requires some kind of mediating substance, something to improve and facilitate the connection.  In chapter 12 we saw Mary anoint Jesus’ feet with the expensive ointment.  Here we see Jesus in turn wash the feet of his disciples.  Our feet are the places where we interface with the Earth; and they are therefore also the means we use to get around.  Our feet are where the rubber meets the road, as it were.  Through our feet we are quite literally grounded.

I have read studies about the importance of being grounded, which means being in physical contact with the Earth’s electromagnetic field.  Our bodies are made of the Earth and keeping in tune with the energy of the Earth is important for our health, as I believe astronauts have discovered.  The literal meaning of the word in Genesis for human being — “Adam” — is "earthling".  God makes us and everything else on this planet out of the rock that is the planet.  Our feet are what make contact with the planet itself.

So even though our heads are in the sky we are deluding ourselves if we believe we are pure spirit, pure mind.  My personality type focuses on the mind and I can get lost there in thoughts and ideas, plans and processes… until I stub my toe.  Then, oh yeah, I’m still down here.  I am still connected to the Earth.  I am still made of matter.  I am not a disembodied spirit.  My toe hurts. 

God made us vertical and upright, as if to show our purpose in being the connection between heaven and Earth.  Humans have showed that we enjoy imagining ourselves to be heavenly, spiritual, mental, rational, intelligent beings.  We aspire to the stars, now quite literally.  When we talk it is clear that we value “higher” over “lower.”  We see things from the perspective of our heads because, well, that’s where our eyes are.  I becomes easy to forget about our feet, way at ground level.

But if we lose our sense of connection to the Earth then we lose our vocation as the interface between matter and spirit.  In Exodus 30 the Israelite priests had their hands and feet ceremonially washed, because what is a priest supposed to do but embody this vocation as mediators between heaven and earth.  As humans we connect what is down to what is up, and priests symbolize and articulate this professionally.

II.

At the same time, of course, foot-washing was an act of hospitality and showed care and appreciation for the rather mundane and prosaic parts of us that both ground us and get us where we’re going.  Our feet hold us up.  And in therapies like reflexology we realize that the nerves in our feet actually integrate with and and connect to every other part of our bodies.  

So when the Lord Jesus, at his last supper with his disciples, chooses to demonstrate his love “for his own who were in the world,” and love them fully, he does so by washing their feet.  He is attending to the point of contact between us and the Earth.  By doing so he is saying that it is important, imperative, to stay grounded.  And he is saying that it is important to keep moving.

But like so many of the important, necessary, basic, and essential things in life, washing and caring for feet, whatever their symbolic and actual importance, had fallen to the people at the bottom of society: slaves and servants.  In our fantasy to be aspirational, spiritual beings, we think it is necessary to denigrate and devalue this merely physical side of us.  We imagine it is an embarrassment to have to deal with such low matters, and we have relegated caring for this side of us to people we don’t pay very well or respect very much.  

When Jesus undresses and ties a towel around his waist, pours water into a basin and starts around the table washing the feet of his disciples, he is identifying with people who are paid very little to do the kind of demeaning work no one else wants to do.  He is taking on the role, the status, the position, and the work of a servant.  Child-care workers, home health aids, social workers, even nurses do not get the recognition and appreciation they deserve among us.

This is a guy that many of his supporters were expecting was about to make himself king!  How many Presidential candidates, how many corporate CEO’s, how many Federal Court judges can we imagine taking a break after a dinner to wash the feet, or shine the shoes, of their staffs?  How many would even help clear away the dishes?  Kings do not do this kind of thing!  Revered rabbis do not act like this!

This is why Peter objects.  Peter is always attentive to the optics of what is going on.  And it just doesn’t look good to have the Christ, the liberator of Israel, down there mucking with people’s dirty feet, for God’s sake.  For his part he will not participate; he reveres and respects Jesus too much.

III.

And for Jesus that is the problem.  Peter is misunderstanding who Jesus is and what he is about.  He does a similar thing at the Transfiguration in the other gospels, when he wants to set up a shrine.  In fact, he does what the church has always been inclined to do, which is to make Jesus as a historical figure the point.  This reduces Jesus to someone out there, someone apart from us whom we can manage, manipulate, control, instead of someone within us; someone to be worshiped instead of followed.  

In reality Jesus is both.  He is both the truly Human One and the living Presence of God.  He is to be both worshiped and followed.  He is both in history as a memory and in our hearts as life.  He is the King and he is the slave of all.  And it is this bothness that makes him real.  Indeed, it make him Reality itself.

The place where the true character of his leadership, his kingship and his kingdom, his community, is revealed precisely here, when he washes the feet of his disciples.  It is the one big thing he does on the night before he dies, which he then spends the rest of the night, as recounted in chapters 14, 15, 16, and 17, explaining, unpacking, interpreting, and clarifying.

By washing their feet, by taking on this subservient, even abject, role, the Lord abolishes all hierarchies.  He first abolishes the very notion of God being exclusively “above” and “all powerful,” if by that we mean power as humans understand and wield it.  For he is, God-with-us, the Word by whom all things were made, kneeling on the floor, attending to a very humble human need.  

He finally tells Peter, “Unless I wash you, you won’t have a place with me.”  Unless we live with Christ in his “down here”-ness, in his identity as servant, giver, healer, and slave, we will have no part of his kingship and resurrection life.  We realize one in and through the other.  Unless we let him serve us, we have no hope of serving others, which is the true nature of leadership.  If we don’t let him serve us, then we remain mired in relationships characterized by superiors and subordinates.  For Jesus here indicates that we serve others as equals.  We serve as we are being served.

The church has always has a problem with this, imagining that we are up here generously deigning to help those down there.  And yet here is Jesus, clearly placing himself among those down there.  This is not the attitude of, “I have something and I am going to give it to you because I am such a great person; and you’d better appreciate it.”  No.  The example that Jesus gives here, and in other places like Matthew 25, is not of a church that serves the poor, but a church that is poor.

IV.

“If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you too must wash each other’s feet.”  The thing about washing someone’s feet is that it is almost impossible to do without making yourself literally lower than them.  It is not something that can be done from a superior, let alone dominating, position.  So if foot-washing is the model and pattern for Christian service, it means we serve others only from an inferior, or at the most equal, place.

In Matthew Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant.  Whoever wants to be first among you will be your slave; just as the Human One didn’t come to be served but rather to serve, and to give his life to liberate many people.”

Evidently, Jesus-followers are to lead like he does: from the place we would call “below.”  So many of his images of the Kingdom of God are like light and salt and leaven.  The Kingdom happens as a subtle infusion from within, welling up from underneath.  It is not and by definition cannot be imposed from “above.”  In reality there is no above and below, which Jesus proves by turning so many things upside down.

This appears to be the last straw for Judas, who has been disillusioned with Jesus since the incident with Mary and the expensive ointment, a few days before.  Then, he seemed to think that Jesus was allowing too much attention to be paid to himself; now, Jesus is about washing people’s feet, of all things, and that probably doesn’t sound like effective political strategy to Judas.  

But Judas gets his feet washed like the others.  I imagine he thought it was a silly, embarrassing, self-defeating exercise.  He must have reasoned that this movement was clearly going nowhere.  Foot-washing?  Becoming everyone’s servant?  Seriously?  He resolves to cash in.

We should not be too judgmental of him.  The foot-washing thing makes us uncomfortable, too.  I’ve never been able to get a session to consider literally doing it; it’s one of those things we prefer to keep figuratively and symbolically.  I get that, on one level.  In itself, going through the motions of a particular ritual doesn’t necessarily change anything.

But then we do need to realize the larger reality to which the ceremonial action points, and take seriously the radical message of Jesus here.  Because Jesus is saying that we cannot serve others except by becoming them.  God does not save us from above; God saves us in Christ by entering our existence, becoming flesh and dwelling among us.  God saves us from among us and within us.  And our work in God’s name can only be done in the same way.

V.

This is what the Lord means when he says “just as I have done, you also must do.”  This may not mean that he intends his movement to be about literally washing people’s feet.  It certainly does mean that his movement has to do with serving others from within their own contexts and lives.  He means that to be sent by him is to mimic, imitate, reflect, and express his mission and style of ministry.  He means that we, like him, are grounded in the Earth, witnessing to the profound presence of God in the creation and in every human heart.  For if we identify with his humanness, we also identify with his divinity.

That’s why Jesus finally says, “whoever receives someone I send receives me and whoever receives me receives the One who sent me.”  We are the Lord’s emissaries and representatives, sent by him into the world even as he was sent into the world by the Father.  Like him and in him we are to remind people of their groundedness in God’s good creation, and find our place with the simple, the hurting, the broken, the lost, and the poor, in lives of gentle service, welcoming, acceptance, forgiveness, and grace.

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