The disciples were used to seeing people prostrate themselves at Jesus’ feet. Lepers, demoniacs, blind men, rulers of synagogues, foreign women and Greeks, even the mother of James and John, had knelt down before Jesus. They had kissed his feet or the hem of his robe as a sign of respect and welcome or as a prelude to a request for help.
It was a tribute to the superiority of their master, to the wisdom of his teaching, the strength of his healing powers, his capacity to outwit his opponents. And as Jesus entered Jerusalem and its Temple, the disciples might well have felt that the whole population should have got down on its knees as though to welcome the plenipotentiary of God.
To see Jesus on his knees at Peter’s feet must therefore have been a profound shock a turning upside down of their picture of Jesus.
Jesus was their master, their Lord, and at this moment in the upper room he was also their host.
And they had learnt to see that eating with Jesus like this was a parable of what life would be like in the kingdom.
And even uncultured countrymen like them knew the respect owed to the host. But now the host was washing their feet.
Their host had become a slave, doing for them what the household servants would normally have been expected to do on their arrival.
Peter of course is indignant.
He cannot accept this reversal of his values, this inversion of his picture of Jesus. And yet unless he allows this picture to be changed he can have no part in Jesus. Somehow being able to accept this tender service of Jesus is the key to their relationship.
This is of course an enacted parable of love and humility, a model of true discipleship. But it is also more than that.
For we have to remember who it is that is kneeling at Peter’s feet. It is, as Pilate is later to say when displaying the scourged and humiliated figure to the crowd, it is the man.
It is not just the human Jesus at the disciples’ feet, while the divine bit of him is held temporarily in abeyance.
There is no divine bit of Jesus.
The whole of his humanity is the presence of God to us and with us. This is, the church teaches us, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, on his knees at Peter’s feet, gently washing away the dust from between his toes. This scene is so often taken as an example of humility which we are to imitate. But it is far more than that and until we can see what that ‘more’ is we are unlikely to discover a proper humility.
Our image of God, more often than not, is of something remote, powerful, loving yes but also demanding.
To say ‘you’ to God outside the context of worship and formal prayer is not easy. To think of God as intimately present to us is spiritually challenging. We come to God more often than not in what ever the mental equivalent of kneeling in the dust to kiss Jesus feet, might be.
What we are unable to picture is the reverse of that;
God kneeling before us.
And yet until we have like Peter allowed all our built in assumptions of the relationship between God and humankind to be reversed we shall not know what it feels like to be humbled.
True humility is to accept the love of the God who kneels to wash our feet. The host becomes our servant.
The master becomes our slave.
And in that reversal we begin to discover our proper relationship with God. It is a relationship of exchange, where the master can be the servant and the servant can be the master, where love is freely given and received even and perhaps most especially in the most ordinary everyday aspects of our lives.
We tend to imagine ourselves having to do extraordinary things for God. We tend to think the only way we can change is through some dramatic transformation of who and what we are.
But God rarely works like that.
If God chooses to come to us through simple acts like washing in baptism and the eating of bread in communion, then the grace of God is all around us in the sacrament of simple things.
But we will only find God in the humble things if we have become humble enough to see him there.
The image of God as sculptor is often used but contains this precious truth. Grace comes to us like the deeply pondered, slow and immensely delicate tap of hammer upon chisel to bring about a mark in the stone or marble, the significance of which is only understood when the work is complete.
Grace caresses our souls as the water from the jug is lightly poured over the dust covered feet.
All we have to do is accept and trust in the miracle of God kneeling before us. Amen.
Stephen Tucker