Unity Through the Basin and the Towel

“And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.  Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” John 17:11

Jesus and his disciples eat their last meal together and Jesus teaches them and engages them with a new kind of intensity – sharing with them his realization that he would be leaving them soon.

And in a beautiful symbolic action, Jesus washes their feet.

He bends down and picks up each of their dirt encrusted feet and with a basin of water and a towel

Does for them what in that culture only the servants of a house do.

And some of the disciples are deeply uncomfortable with this gesture.  

But Jesus makes it plain to them saying that this is how the disciples will continue the way of Jesus in the world.

He names this new commandment, he gives words to this symbolic action.

He says, love one another, even as I have loved you.

And we don’t find it in John’s telling of the story,

But in Mark’s and the other gospels we read how Jesus on this last night

Takes bread from their meal and pours a new cup of wine

And in turn shares with them these signs.

His life would be broken; his blood would be shed.

But these signs would indicate that brokenness is not meaningless.

Just as bread and wine are new life from the broken fragments of the old.

Jesus’s suffering and being broken in the ministry of God’s love would not end in brokenness.

Bread and wine would continually be shared.  

The Holy Spirit would be given to the disciples in the absence of their teacher.  

The God who loves with a steadfast love would bring to them

A remembrance and a renewal as they ate and drank, as they washed one another’s feet.

The community left behind would be knit together by these practices of service and remembrance.

And in their forgetting of their own self-centered ways of being and their taking up the basin and towel for one another, they would embody Jesus’s way, Jesus’s commandment to love one another.

And their conversation gradually gave way to stillness

And we read that Jesus began to pray.

And in his praying, we see a window into his concern for the disciples.

Jesus knows that it will not be easy for the disciples to work together as one community.

The whole point of giving them the new command to love one another and showing them through foot-washing is to bring home the point that they will not survive as a community if they make their lives, their ministry, their work about their own plans and ideas and not love.

It can sound really easy in theory.  I remember being captivated by this prayer in college.  And being frustrated that Jesus prayed for the church to be one and here we are creating new churches for every different flavor of life.  And leaving churches over minor disagreements or because the church didn’t meet our consumer expectations, like that restaurant we will never return to.

Why can’t we just work together and stop acting like warring factions each seeking to be the one to sit at the right hand of Jesus?

But Jesus knew that this would come about.

And in his disciples’ hearing he prays, “protect them.”

Protect them from what?

I think in some ways it’s a prayer to protect them from complicating what God has made simple.

It’s a prayer for protection from those forces in every culture in every time which take us away from our calling as God’s people to trust in God and to love our neighbor.

In all times humans have divided from one another because of all kinds of reasons.

And today we have a whole market built around the assumption that we do and should divide based on our choices of what “lifestyle” we want to have.

And this market driven division inevitably divides the wealthy from the poor.

And so we enjoy our lifestyle because it gives us a means by which to compare ourselves with our neighbors and show that even though we’re not as great as that neighbor over there, we’re at least better than that neighbor over there.

But if I’m comparing myself to my neighbor in that way, how can I wash their feet?

And this market mentality infects not only individuals and the way they relate to their neighbors,

But also churches as organizations.

Churches are forced to think of themselves as brand-names.

And how can we improve our branding – how can we better sell our product?

We then are led to imitate churches who market themselves better and to disdain churches that are not as good at playing the competitive game.

But if the church ought to be a well-run corporation with an expert manager overseeing everything, where’s the profitability in washing one another’s feet?

But the church is not a well-run corporation with an efficient CEO overseeing everything.

The church runs on one big vulnerable risk.

The risk of that one command that Jesus leaves his disciples.

Holding the towel, wringing it out over the basin, Jesus’s words are not

“Be strategic about this business I’m handing over to you – and learn how to sell your product better in the market where you are.”

Jesus’s new commandment was the very nonproductive but nevertheless profound and powerful one.

Love one another.

Love with the trust that in giving yourself to love, resurrection awaits on the otherside.

Trust that God will take our small acts of service, as unnoticed and as inefficient as they may be

And will change a person’s life.

As Jean Vanier put it,” We are not called by God to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.”

When Jesus prays for his disciples that they be protected so that they may be one.

I get it.

We need to be protected from all of the forces within us and around us which keep us from love.

We need to be protected from a market which forms us into individual consumers

And which drives us to be productive and despise any act that is not productive

We need to be protected from assuming that the church needs better marketing and more stylish worship and will only survive as long as the money comes in.

The church lives on not in doctrinal statements or historic buildings or clever marketing.

The church lives on in human persons who have learned, who have seen the glory of the love of Christ

And who have taken up the call to live in community in the way of the basin and towel.    

We need to be protected from forgetfulness of that one foundation to our life as God’s children as followers of Christ.

That one foundation which is our unity.  And this really hard but really central part of our life together, is not only the way that we become one with another, but it is the way that we truly learn the heart of the God who has called us in Jesus.

Because the good news at the core of our life as Christians is that God’s love is our true home,

And we cannot rest unless we rest in God’s love.

Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  Amen.