The Sign & The Sacrament

Jesus spends the last of his time on earth with his disciples and a sense of urgency. In the days leading up to the cross, he gives his disciples everything they need to know before he leaves. But he starts on the night of Passover by doing the most menial and humiliating thing a Jewish Rabbi could do: he washes his disciples’ feet. By doing this task, Jesus shows his disciples two things. First, he shows them that his ultimate purpose in going to the cross is to wash us spiritually clean. Like washing feet, his death on the cross would be a humiliating act that actually gives us freedom from the sin that stains us. Second, Jesus gives us an example to follow. By following Jesus’ example, we too can model self-sacrifice and humility in a way that allows us to become 4^th soil disciples in the 4^th quarter.

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 If you have a Bible, we’re gonna be in John chapter 13. Let me read this over us. This morning. Before the Passover Festival, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the father.

Having loved his own who are in the world. He loved them to the end. Now, when it was time for supper, the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Simon Iscariot son, to betray him. Jesus knew that the Father had given everything into his hands, that he had come from God, and that he was going back to God.

So he got up from supper, laid his aside, his outer clothing, took a towel and tied it around himself. Next, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples feet and to dry them with the towel tied around him, he came to Simon Peter who asked him, Lord, are you gonna wash my feet? Jesus answered Him What I’m doing?

You don’t realize now, but afterward you will understand. You will never wash my feet. Peter said, Jesus replied, if I don’t wash you, you have no part with me. Simon Peter said to him, Lord, not only my feet, but also my hands in my head. One who has bathed Jesus told him, doesn’t need to wash anything except his feet, but he’s completely clean.

You are clean, but not all of you. For he knew who would betray him. This is why he said, not all of you are clean. And when Jesus had washed their feet and put on his outer clothing, he reclined again and said to them, do you know what I’ve done for you? You call me teacher and Lord, and you’re speaking rightly since that is what I am.

So if I, your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet for, I’ve given you an example that you also should do just as I’ve done for you. Truly, I tell you, a servant is not greater than his master, and a messenger is not greater than the one who sent him. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

I’m not speaking about all of you. I know those I’ve chosen, but the scripture must be fulfilled. The one who eats my bread has raised his heel against me. I’m telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen, you will believe that I am. He truly, I tell you, whoever receives anyone I send receives me, and the one who receives me receives him who sent me.

So, God, we give you this time,

and God, we know that you have direct access to our, our minds, our thoughts. We know you have direct access to the deepest parts of us.

And so God, we ask that over these next few moments that we would learn, um,

what it means to let you wash us clean. And we pray all this in your name. Amen. Amen. You guys can take a seat.

Uh, I don’t really know, uh, anything about art. Most of it. Honestly seems a little pretentious to me. Uh, it seems a little elusive, highly subjective. It’s hard for me to tell what’s actually good, uh, what takes real skill and what actually sends a meaningful message. But this painting on the screen has, uh, sort of stopped me in my track since I first saw it on the cover of a book I read a few years ago.

Uh, for those of you who aren’t as cultured in art as I am, let me explain what Wikipedia says about this painting. This is an oil painting from the Dutch artist, Rembrandt from the late, uh, 16 hundreds. Uh, it’s called The Return of the Prodigal Son, and it seems pretty straightforward. Uh, it’s a depiction of the parable of the Prodigal son from Luke’s Gospel.

If you don’t know the story, it’s about a rebellious son who leaves home with his inheritance, squanderers it on debauchery, is forced to return home with nothing left, but is then greeted by a compassionate and eager father, rather than a disappointed, punitive one. And so if you’re looking at the painting, you see that it puts the father and son front and center.

The son’s ragged clothes contrasted sharply against the royal red hues of the father and his older brother. But from what I’ve learned about Rembrandt and Wikipedia, uh. This painting has a lot more depth than what is immediately apparent. So a few things to note. First off the father’s hands, they seem a little different.

If you look closely, one of them is a little larger than the other. Both meaning to represent a fatherly discipline and a mothering, mothering nature. There are also four people in the picture, uh, or four other people in the shadows. There’s, uh, the, the older brother who’s sort of prominently looking down his arms down beside him, judgmentally, uh, staring down at his father and his younger brother.

You see in the very dark corner in the very back, I don’t even know if you can see it. The mother is actually hidden by shadows and likely because she’s not actually named in, uh, Luke’s gospel, but we have to presume that she’s there somewhere. And that’s exactly what Rembrandt is known for as an artist.

He’s, uh, known for this method of painting that creates depth in his artistry based on shadows and highlights. The way that you look at the picture, your eyes are immediately drawn to certain elements where he has high lighting, but the longer you stare at it, the more you notice in the background. Key to understanding Rembrandt is this.

The longer you linger, the more you learn. That’s good. That’s good. Now, that’s going to, uh. Be relevant in a few moments. Uh, for now, this morning we’re starting a new teaching series, uh, like Pastor Trey mentioned, that’s gonna carry us through the summer. We’re calling it the fourth quarter of the fourth Gospel.

And here’s the main idea. Jesus spends the fourth quarter of his life here on Earth with his disciples and a sense of urgency. So John’s gospel between chapters 13 and 17, give us a detailed picture of what these last days really hours look like. John slows his narrative down and he gives us a picture of Jesus’s interaction with his disciples.

Scholars refer to this portion of the Gospel of John as the upper room discourse. And the question that we want to answer over the next couple of months is this. What does Jesus want to leave his disciples with before heading to the cross? What does he want to tell them? What does he want them to remember?

Or to tie it back to our focus as a church this year, what does it look like for us to learn from these last days of Jesus and become fourth soil disciples? What should we know as disciples today, living in the last days before Jesus comes back to fully unite heaven and earth? And why does John start the last days of Jesus’ life here with this story of washing dirty feet?

Now before we dive in, a few things to know about John’s gospel. So first, it was written by John, most likely the apostle of Jesus, one of the 12. It was likely written at the end of the first century, a few decades after the other gospels had already been written and were kind of circulating around the early churches that were starting to pop up at that time.

So tradition holds that John the Apostle outlived all the other apostles, eventually dying from old age after writing the Book of Revelation, which means John the Apostle, had not only lived and walked with Jesus, but he’d also seen the death and the resurrection of Jesus, the start of the first church and the persecution and deaths of many of his friends, the other 11 disciples.

True, true. Second, it’s completely unique. So Matthew, mark, and Luke are commonly called the synoptic gospels, which is just a fancy way of saying that they’re really similar. They kind of cover the same material and the same themes. They retell many of the same stories, and they contain similar teachings.

But John’s gospel does not include many of that same material. Many of the themes, or even the stories that the other gospels are known for, there’s no sermon on the mount. There’s no parables. There’s no real mention of the kingdom, at least not at length. There’s no casting out of demons. There’s no transfiguration.

There’s no temptation of Jesus. Instead, John mainly focuses on unique encounters that Jesus has with people like Nicodemus, the woman at the well, or his resurrected friend, Lazarus. All stories that many of us know, or at least we’ve heard of, but also stories that are only found in John’s gospel. Third, it feels like a painting.

One of the best illustrations I’ve heard to describe how to read John, is to read it the same way you would study a Rembrandt painting. So Matthew is like a movie. Mark is kinda like a TV show or a comic book. It’s really fast paced, short and quick. Luke is like an investigative journalism article, but John is like a painting.

There’s lots of weird, unique stories in the book, and most of them are multilayered. A lot of the stories aren’t chronological. There are details that are included that seem really odd and specific details that seem to be left out. It seems more like each narrative in John is a carefully constructed portrait of Jesus.

Like Rembrandt John is an artist. He’s good at creating multi-layered pictures with vivid imagery and specific details, highlighting certain elements he wants you to notice immediately and hiding other elements he wants you to search for. The longer you linger, the more you learn. That’s good. So if this passage that we just read is a painting, it’s got a few layers to it.

For our purposes this morning, I wanna focus on two, the sacrament and the sign. So with that, let’s work back through this morning’s, uh, story line by line to see what both Jesus and John are getting at. Let’s look at the painting. So first, the Sacrament, John 13, picking up in verse one, before the Passover festival, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the father, having loved his own who were in the world.

He loved them to the end. Now, most of us who know this story we’ll pause there for a minute. Most of us who know this story focus on, uh, Jesus’s act of surface, uh, service that comes a little later in the passage, which is washing his disciple’s feet. That’s the what, but what makes this story so significant and why I think John’s starts his slowing down of Jesus’ narrative.

Here is also the when, right before Passover. Now Passover is significant because it’s the annual holiday where God’s people remember the way he saved them from death and from captivity in Egypt. So in the story which is told in Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament, uh, this happened century before.

What’s happening here in John, God is about to bring his people out of Egypt where they’ve lived as slaves for about 400 years. So he tells them, I’m gonna rescue you. I’m gonna take you outta the situation you’re in. So pack your stuff, get ready, and sprinkle the blood of a clean lamb on the doorpost so that when the Angel of God passes through Egypt to judge the Egyptians for their wicked enslavement and oppression of God’s people, the angel will instead pass over the doors with the blood on them.

Right. Make sense? Yeah. Every year the Jews celebrate God’s deliverance with a festival Passover. And there were strict regulations about how to observe this festival. The Jews who were generally always a little bit uptight about keeping ceremonial laws that were meant to keep them ritually clean. Uh, we’re especially uptight about keeping ceremonial laws around the time of Passover.

Now in John’s Gospel, John often includes these festivals as details in his stories of Jesus for really specific and important reasons. So in John’s gospel, it was at Passover two years prior to this, that Jesus made the startling claim that he was gonna tear down the temple. Right. This sort of building that represented the sacred middle ground between heaven and earth.

And he was gonna rebuild it in three days. It was a scandalous statement to make and it upset lots of the Jews that were, uh, listening to him teach that day. Of course, John specifies the temple he was talking about was actually his body. So Jesus didn’t actually tear down the temple, but that’s another sermon for another time.

A year later. It was also at Passover that following year that Jesus fed the 5,000, which John interprets as a sign pointing to how we all today will receive the salvation and sustenance from Jesus that we need, just like the crowds receive bread and fish that day out on the lake, Passover is arguably the most revered and significant festival in the Jewish calendar, right?

It’s key to understanding John’s main point in writing his whole gospel. And here Jesus turns it on his head by performing the most menial. And potentially humiliating task a Jewish rabbi could do. Which brings us to the what. So verse two. Now, when it was time for supper, the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas.

Simon is scar its son to betray him. Jesus knew that the father had given everything into his hands, that he had come from God, and that he was going back to God. So he got up from supper, laid aside his outer clothing, took a towel and tied it around himself. Next, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples feet and to dry them with the towel tied around him.

Now, just so we’re not hung up on that part about Satan and Judas, here’s what John is trying to say. Uh, Judas has essentially, for all intents and purposes, joined his will with the will of Satan. Yeah. So Judas is still responsible though. It says that Satan had already put it into Judas heart to betray Jesus.

It’s not like Satan was making him do something against his will that he didn’t want to do. John is certainly not trying to commentate on the complicated interplay between our free will and the will of God or the will of Satan. The point is this, Judas, at this time during this dinner, has already decided to betray Jesus when Jesus washes his feet.

Wow. Now, hang on to that. So foot washing at this time wasn’t something that you did at a wedding ceremony,

right? It wasn’t a weird act that churches sometimes do on mondy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter. It certainly wasn’t something you did once a year at your church’s regular weekly youth group service when you were in 10th grade. Uh. Do. Just, I had, I was really curious. Did anyone else do that? Youth.

All right. The pastor and pastor’s life. And you guys. Okay. Uh, this was a weird thing. I don’t know why we did this, but our youth leaders thought, let’s get a bunch of teens and have ’em wash each other’s feet, and maybe they’ll learn about Jesus that way. And it was really awkward. Foot washing at this time was both routine and degrading much like it would’ve been to a 10th grader.

So it was routine. It was like handwashing, uh, it was something you, uh, did regularly, like right before or after dinner. It was just a way of keeping yourself clean, but it was also degrading. So, uh, there were no paved roads in Jerusalem at this time. Uh, people walked everywhere in sandals. You do the math.

Roads were created by people’s walking routes. In fact, in most Jewish circles at this time, Jewish slaves, I. Weren’t even allowed to wash people’s feet. It was an act only reserved for Gentile, meaning non-Jewish servants. It was so low that no Jewish person would want to do it. Disciples didn’t wash each other’s feet, and a rabbi certainly did not wash anybody’s feet, let alone his own disciples.

There’s even a well-known story at this time of a rabbi taking his mom to court for trying to wash his feet. She argues, I’m just trying to do something nice for my son, and he says, no, it’s too degrading. You can’t do this. It’s unclean. Wow. So we have to look at the painting. Imagine Jesus and his disciples sitting on mats on the ground around a small ground level table.

Now each disciple is leaning on their arm, usually their left arm with their legs sort of stretched out behind them outward from the table. Now the conversation is going on around Jesus. And I imagine in my imagination, you know, it’s that thing where you kind of space and you just take a moment and you realize where you are.

People don’t realize that you’re spacing out, but you’re watching people, the conversations happening around you. I imagine Jesus may have retreated to think to himself. Now, John seems to fill in this portrait of Jesus with details that draw our mind’s eye to focus on certain elements, kind of like Rembrandt painting highlighted hands.

So Jesus thinking to himself about everything that’s about to happen in the coming hours and days about his betrayal by the one sitting next to him, across from him at the table, his death, his resurrection, whatever happens in between that, the whole point of him being here on this earth and also the immense love that he feels for everyone sitting around him.

Judas included, and then he gets up and he does something. Considered weird in any culture, no matter who you are or what point in time you live, he takes his clothes off. Now, to be shirtless at dinner or without outer clothing, without a robe, wasn’t just taboo. It wasn’t just a weird thing. It was the literal dress code of a house servant.

So you identify if you were at somebody’s house for dinner, who the servant of that house was by looking for the people not wearing an outer rope. So as soon as Jesus does this, he’s not just trying to keep himself clean. He’s identifying himself not as a high esteemed rabbi, but as a low esteemed servant in front of all his disciples, which is exactly why Peter responds the way that he does.

Verse six, he came to Simon Peter who asked him, Lord, are you gonna wash my feet? Jesus answered him What I’m doing, you don’t realize now, but afterwards you will understand. You will never wash my feet. Peter said, Jesus replied, if I don’t wash you, you have no part with me. Simon Peter said to him, well, Lord, not only my feet, but also my hands in my head.

One who is bathed Jesus told him doesn’t need to wash anything except his feet, but he’s completely clean. You are clean, but not all of you. For he knew who would betray him. This is why he said, not all of you are clean. Have you ever been to a dinner where someone washes your feet? I’m just kidding. No.

Have you ever been to a dinner and someone says something, so, uh, appalling that you’re just kind of speechless every Thanksgiving? Maybe it’s a political rant. Maybe it’s an embarrassing story. Maybe it’s an awkward confession, or worst of all, at least in my opinion, is when two spouses start fighting in front of you, you don’t really know what to do.

So you kind of look around awkwardly at maybe your own spouse or your friends for some kind of relief. You’re like, what do we do? How do we change the subject? This is weird. Uh, that’s basically what what’s happening here, except Peter breaks the silence, says, Lord, you’re not gonna wash my feet. See, what he sees Jesus doing doesn’t really match up with who he expected Jesus to be a military ruler coming to free the Jews from Roman occupation and establish an earthly kingdom in which Peter himself would likely reign beside Jesus with authority.

Instead, Jesus is demonstrating, it’s like a sign act that prophets in the Old Testament would do a visible demonstration that he has come to rule. Yes, as a king, but also like a servant. And the way he rules is by doing the most humiliating thing possible, washing, dirty feet, execution on a cross. So putting all of this together, the most basic interpretation of what John is trying to tell us with this portrait of Jesus is this, just like the original Passover that happened way back in the Book of Exodus during which God rescued his people, Jesus also comes now to save his people by washing them clean from their sinful stains through his sacrificing himself and possibly the most humiliating way possible public execution on a cross.

Now, Jesus tells Peter, if I don’t wash you, you have no part with me. In other words, in Peter has to learn. That the only way to have access to God through Jesus is to let Jesus do what he needs to do to Peter. Cleanse him from his sins like water cleansing dirty feet. See this foot washing is like a sacrament, meaning it’s a ritual act that serves as a visible sign or a symbol of God’s grace applied to us as sinners.

Yeah. This sacrament specifically though it’s not one that we observe or consider an actual sacrament like communion or baptism, this symbol specifically represents the washing away of our sins by the blood of Jesus shed on the cross. So when you choose to follow Jesus, here’s what happens. All of the deepest interior parts of you that are bent out of shape, wared by selfish desires.

By wickedness, by evil, by what the scriptures call sin are brought to the surface. And Jesus cleanses you. You are no longer identified by the worst parts of who you are. You are now instead identified by your proximity to Jesus. That’s right and according to Jesus, this is the only way you can have any part to do with God.

But here’s why this matters for you and I today. I think like Peter, too many of us are fearful of letting Jesus clean the deepest parts of us, the parts we keep hidden in shame, the wounds we carry from abuses or trauma or whatever language you wanna apply, or the guilt that we feed from wrongs we’ve committed towards other people.

See, Peter resisted Jesus’ initial attempt to wash his feet because it made him uncomfortable. It was shameful. It was degrading both to Jesus, but also to Peter to allow his rabbi, the guy, claiming to be not just one of the most brilliant rabbi to ever live, but also the Messiah. To allow that man to serve him this way would require Peter to not only reject his idea of who Jesus was, but also his own reputation and image, to be willing to sit there and let Jesus do to him what he needs to do.

But in the fourth quarter of his life, Jesus’ invitation to Peter is the same invitation to us today. Here in this room, let me wash you, clean. Amen.

Like the prodigal son from Luke and from that Rembrandt painting, some of us I think are too afraid to come home and to expose ourselves to God, let alone to each other, inspecting, expecting a harsh and condemning father. And instead, I think what Jesus is doing is placing himself in front of us here today, standing with a towel and some water begging you to let him wash you.

Clean next the sign, verse 12. And when Jesus had washed their feet and put on his outer clothing, he reclined again and said to them, do you know what I’ve done for you?

You call me teacher and Lord, and you’re speaking rightly since that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. Thrive. I’ve given you an example that you also should do just as I’ve done for you. Truly, I tell you, a servant is not greater than his master, and a messenger is not greater than the one who sent him.

If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

So Jesus isn’t just giving us a sacrament, a symbol, something we should look back on to help us reorient ourselves to the gospel. It’s not just a reminder that we need to constantly continue to submit ourselves to Jesus, just like Peter had to do for himself, to allow Jesus to wash us clean. No, Jesus is giving us something to replicate, to reenact something, to mimic a sign of what the kingdom looks like.

Followers of Jesus. Disciples, you and I today, who are willing to demonstrate the nature of the kingdom, not by seeking good reputations power or authority, but by sacrificing our image, our convenience, and our preferences, so that we may love and serve others the way God himself showed his love for us.

If the story is like a painting, the longer we linger, the more we’ll learn Jesus’ question to his disciples. In verse 12 is meant to stop us in our tracks. Imagine Jesus as you’re reading this, reaching through the page, turning his head from his disciples, uh, breaking the fourth wall in the fourth quarter of the fourth gospel looking straight at you.

And I, do you know what I’ve done for you? Do you get it? It’s not really about the foot washing. It is about allowing our hearts, you and I, who have received cleansing and washing from Jesus, recognizing that our story doesn’t stop there. Our story starts there. It’s allowing our hearts to be so formed by Jesus that we are truly willing to love others, no matter the cost to ourselves, to receive the unconditional love of God, and then to give it away when Jesus tells us to go and do what he’s done for us.

He isn’t just telling us to do good acts of service, like washing feet or serve it, feed my starving children, or whatever your act of service is. Those, those, those are all good things. Maybe not the foot washing, I don’t know. He’s telling us, be willing to do the most menial, routine, degrading or inconvenient things necessary.

In order to communicate and demonstrate the love of God to the people around you. And at this point, if you’re a keen reader of the text or if you’re a cynic like me, you might be thinking about who exactly we’re supposed to serve. Now, Jesus tells his disciples to wash each other’s feet. He says, what I’ve done for you, you do for each other.

He doesn’t seem to mention those outside the room. Those aren’t, uh, those who aren’t considered disciples of Jesus. But the longer we linger, the more we learn. And before we’re too quick to determine who Jesus wants us to serve and who we might be off the hook not serving, let’s not forget that Jesus washed the feet of both Peter and Judas.

Wow Peter, the well-intentioned, eager disciple who is quick to Harold Jesus when it made him look good in front of his friends and quick to reject Jesus when it made him look bad in front of the people who wanted to crucify him alongside his rabbi, Judas, the man who decried the woman who gave up her most valuable resources of jar of expensive perfume to worship Jesus and judged her for not, instead giving her resources to the poor.

Instead, Judas, the one who judges where someone’s service should go if our service, our love, our self-sacrifice, our takeaway from this whole passage and teaching is to only give it to the people whom we think deserve it. We’re not mimicking Jesus. I think we probably look more like Judas. Do you know what I’ve done for you?

See, the end goal of our formation. Is this, we become people so willing to love and serve others that we make no distinction between. Those we think deserve it and those we think do not. Amen. That’s the gauge. You want to know how spiritually mature you are. You wanna know if you’re growing. You want to know if you’re really following Jesus.

If you are allowing the Holy Spirit to access the deepest parts of your life and turn you into somebody who looks like Jesus, look at how you treat others. It’s a cheesy message, but we never graduate from this, and I think that’s why John frames it as the beginning of these last few hours of Jesus’ life.

If we don’t start here, then everything else we do, we will probably get wrong. See, our formation does not end with us. It starts with us. We receive from God and we give away freely. Now, one more point before we close. Jesus ends with this odd statement in verse 17. If you know these things, you are blessed when you do them.

So the question is how? How are we blessed? Now, notice what Jesus says. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them. Some of us, I think, have stagnated in our discipleship, those of us who have already received that initial cleansing. What Jesus says, you’re already clean. Maybe those of us, we follow Jesus.

We’ve given our heart to him. The Holy Spirit lives in us. We are Christians. We have stagnated. Because we have consumed so much knowledge and put so little of it into practice, we can, maybe you can exe a gospel passage. Maybe you can explain the trinity. Maybe you can attend a together group. You can tithe sacrificially.

But if we turn away the moment that our image, reputation, resources, or even just our comfort and convenience are put in jeopardy, then we are limiting what God can do in us and what God wants to do through us. In other words, there is some kind of blessing. Jesus says, you are blessed if you do these things.

The implication being there is some kind of blessing that we miss out on if we only stick to theory, not practice. And so for a lot of us, I think the invitation of the story in John is this. Just be willing to be inconvenienced. See, unless we, like Jesus, are unwilling to symbolically take off our robes, we are missing out on something that God wants to do in us and through us.

We are living in an unfinished painting. Yeah. Now, if this really is the fourth quarter, like Pastor Tre said, we believe that we’re living in some kind of time of urgency. People are looking around to Christianity. More and more people are exploring an idea of vague spirituality who may be open to the gospel message and the good news that Jesus can only bring you life and life in abundance.

If that really is the case. And we really want to learn how to live in the fourth quarter, how to conduct ourselves, how to become compelling witnesses for those around us, it’s gonna start with us taking off our robes, putting off our fears, our insecurities, our worries. And allowing ourselves to be vulnerable enough in front of others that we’re actually able to serve them, even if it costs us something, aiming our lives, our priorities, our resources, our calendars, our to-do lists, our schedules, even our spiritual formation and our discipleship.

Aiming those things at others instead of simply at ourselves. To serve this way, to allow ourselves to be stripped of our own importance, our own concerns, our own opinions on who deserves our service. Like Jesus stripped himself of his robe at dinner. Doing that is the only way that we can truly grow from people following Jesus for our own life improvement.

To people formed by Jesus together for the sake of others, yes, serving others this way, self sacrificially. Putting aside your own preferences is the only way we can deform ourselves away from selfishness and open ourselves up to the healing power of God to not only cleanse us, but the power of the spirit to empower us.

And that’s the blessing. So why don’t we stand and respond?