The Price of Loving People
The King rose from the feast table, an action that made everyone suddenly alert. Words died in the air, only half spoken. They watched while he removed his robe, and with it, they felt, his dignity. But more alarming than his sudden nakedness was the costume he next chose. The King picked up a towel, the sort of thing a servant would wear for work, and he wrapped it around his waist. What kind of King have we chosen? They thought. The King’s smile always reached his eyes, and so it did now, as he picked up the basin the landlord had politely provided for them. The water splashed, dotting the King’s hands as he filled the basin.
Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.
My phone buzzes, and reflexively, I pick it up. I press my other hand flat against the crisp pages. He loved them to the end. From the beginning, the gospel writer clarifies what we’re about to see. Love. This is the raw truth of it. I glance at my phone, a text from a friend to the whole messy group of us. “I’m so sorry,” she writes. “I haven’t been over to be with you or to help you.” My friend, she wants to love in action.
Had anyone asked them how a King should love, they might have mentioned affluence, influence, maybe recognition. They would not have mentioned this. The bones in the King’s bare knees popped a little as he knelt and picked up John’s dusty foot, sliding it free of a road-worn sandal. The King had said so many things they did not understand, things they pushed away as unfitting. They imagined flashing swords and palaces and reclaimed land; they expected to laugh in the faces of so many enemies. But this they could not set aside, not with the water in the basin turning muddy, not with that same dirty pool dripping from the King’s fingers, not with the smear of their travels wiped across that towel around his waist.
Why had the King not also told them to hire a servant to do the washing? It made no sense that the King should do it. But what they did not understand now was that the King had not misplaced his identity. He did this because He understood His power and position, not despite it. They had heard him say, the greatest among you will be your servant (Matthew 23:11), and it is the one who is least among you all who is the greatest (Luke 9:48), and the one who rules [should be] like the one who serves (Luke 22: 26). It sounded good, but right now they didn’t really like the look of it. Could anything make a Kingdom more upside-down than the King himself dressed as a servant, washing their feet?
They bristled a little, argued over the gesture without offering to trade places. The King became adamant. They needed the King, but they resisted the admission that they needed Him like this, on His knees, his skin sullied by the ugliness they had been willing to leave crusted on the soles of their own feet. But unless I wash you, the King said, you can have no part with me.
My friend, she’s maybe the most serving, giving soul I’ve ever known. She met someone who needed a kidney and literally laid under the knife so they could take one of hers. She resisted every caution, said Love wouldn’t let her shrink back in fear. She’s always doing this sort of thing, setting aside all her own dignity to serve someone else. And now, while she’s packing up her whole life to move miles away, she apologizes for not showing up to help us.
“No apologies,” we text back, eight different voices saying basically the same thing in response. We’re all broken up and losing pieces, but we love. We’ll never be perfect friends, but we will always be friends imperfectly.
“It’s nice to know we’re here for each other, and that often makes all the difference, but I want to DO something to make it better. That’s the price of loving people,” another friend texts. Once, when a dog bit me on one of my walks, this same friend stopped cold in the middle of her day and sat me down in her kitchen. Kneeling on the floor in front of me, she literally cleaned my wounds with her own hands. I read what she’s written now and think of John’s words about love, “Let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth (1 John 3:18).” The trouble is, I’m like those disciples. I feel that dust on my own dirty feet and often still don’t think to get up and pick up the basin.
They would not soon forget the things the King said after he drew his robe back over his shoulders and rejoined them at the table, their feet still fresh, and briefly cool. “You should also wash one another’s feet.” The old teaching fell new, freshened by the King’s example. “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” As I have loved you. Their eyes flitted to that soiled towel he’d worn, to the basin. They remembered him on his knees, the touch of his royal hands on their feet. Later, they would also remember his torn skin, his blood, pooled in the dust. They would come to define Love as the casting off of earthly treasure in favor of serving self-sacrifice. But now they just thought of their King, cleaning the feet of his people.
I saw a meme floating around the internet recently, something posted by a friend that said, “Forget about keeping Christ in Christmas. How about keeping Christ in Christians?” I think of this now, one hand flat pressed against Truth, the other thumbing through the conversation of friends desperate to love with action. Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another,” and “Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.” I wonder how long it took Jesus’ disciples to stop trying to secure places at the table long enough to look for that basin? How long did it take until, because of their identity with Him, they discovered the blessing of shedding affluence, influence, and recognition in favor of putting on Him?
I’m challenged now by my friends, some of whom don’t even know how much they look like the King. They just want to DO something that heals a thousand wounds, something that leaves another person with clean feet for the next walk through the valley.
Ann Voskamp once wrote that the Greek word for remembrance, anamnesis, is a term used to express an intangible idea moving into this material, tangible world. She wrote that remembrance “does not simply mean memory by mental recall…but it means to experience a past event again through the physical, to make it take form through re-enactment (The Broken Way, 35-36). So, remembering the coming of Jesus, this Advent we celebrate, could it really be more about putting on the towel and picking up a cross more than it is about thinking good thoughts about what happened when Jesus was born? Could it be that the best way to anticipate the return of the King is to live Love as His disciples right now?
A distance yet from the upper room, Jesus taught, “Be dressed and ready for service and keep your lamps burning. …It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them (Luke 12: 35,37). I wonder now how long it took the disciples to remember this teaching at the same time that they remembered Jesus kneeling beside them at the feast table, fingers dripping with that dirty wash water. I press my hand flat again now against the Book, at once grateful for the whole of it right here, for the Spirit helping me see. And then I push back from the table, thinking it’s about time to shed my robe for some work clothes and go looking for the basin. Because, as my friend said so well, that’s the price of loving people, and for me right now in the middle of Advent, an old, old command falls new.
*To read the true story of the towel and basin King, check out John 13 in your favorite version of scripture.
