John and I found the man with the water jar just as the Master had said we
would and he led us to the house where that memorable supper was to take place.
We prepared everything just as he had instructed us and later he and the rest
of our group arrived. By then the evening was drawing on and by the time we had
finished supper darkness had come.
We had become a family and this meal was a family meal, we shared it together. An unlikely enough group of people, yet a new family sharing in the meal to remind us how our ancestors had been rescued from their slavery in Egypt. Later shared meals were to have a more personal significance, but we did not know that then.
Among us there were some who had things in common. Those of us who came from Galilee tended to be quick-tempered, impulsive emotional and attracted to adventure, that’s probably why we were willing to give up everything and follow the Teacher. None of us however expected Matthew to join us, he could make a lucrative living, extorting what he wanted as a tax-collector, and he probably had!
We sometimes found it difficult to get along with each other. We all got fed up at some time or another with Simon and his political ideas, I suppose we should be grateful he restricted himself to debating! Then there was Andrew, always bringing others to the Teacher, never seeking the limelight, don’t sometimes find those people difficult - those goody, goodies! Thomas was always the pessimist and always asking questions, I suppose that’s one way to learn. None of us really got to know Judas, except the Teacher, but it later turned out that he had been taking money from the kitty.
James and John, those sons of thunder, were often argumentative. Earlier in the evening I think it was they who caused the heated discussion amongst us as to who was to be the greatest in the coming kingdom.
What an object lesson we were to be given later!
The Teacher rose up from the table. You could feel this presence as he stood there among us and he took off his outer garment and tied a towel around his waist. Whatever was he going to do with that basin of water?
I think that we were all totally at a loss as he performed the most menial
of services and knelt before us and began to wash out feet. Our dirty, smelly,
dusty feet. I’ve never thought of feet as being the most attractive part of the
body but suddenly I realised how unattractive they really are.
I just couldn’t sit there and keep quiet. This was the Teacher preparing to
kneel before me - me the one who should have knelt before him.
As usual I seemed to have to speak for the rest of them. Why was it always me that had to speak up? Perhaps it was my impatience. Surely they felt the same, yet there they had sat, quiet as mice while he knelt and washed their feet.
My pride would not let me sit while he knelt. My guilt cried out to remind me that I did not deserve this.
But when he said that if he did not wash my feet I could no longer be his disciple well then if I could be his disciple by my feet being washed then I wanted more. Wash my hands and head too, wash the parts that people notice.
He said that what he was doing was sufficient, well then I had to let him wash my feet and I sat quietly enough.
It made me think as he went amongst us doing this. Why had we been chosen? So often while we had been with him there were times when we were afraid. We were all totally inadequate. Some of us had wanted power, perhaps we all wanted some of the glory as the followers of the one who was going to save Israel. Yet here He was kneeling before each one of us. The teacher bending down, making himself lower than each of us and cleansing us.
After he had washed my feet it felt as if the whole of me had been made new. It was as if I had stood under a sparkling waterfall after a hot and dusty journey from which I had become dirty. And he had reached out to each of us in this way. Even to the one who would later leave us for the darkness outside before betraying the Master.
It was after Judas had gone into the night that Jesus explained in part what I came to understand more fully later. He said that his glory had been revealed, that God’s glory had been revealed through him and that he would not be with us very much longer and then he gave us a new commandment to love one another. Well that was not a new commandment in itself, it had appeared in our law books centuries before. But there was an addition to the old commandment and that was that we were to love one another as he had loved us.
He had shown us how by kneeling before us and washing us clean - all of us, not just the chosen few. He had washed the feet of the one who would deny him three times, the ones who would desert him, those who would sleep while he watched and prayed, even the one who would later betray him to the authorities.
And he wants us to do the same to those with whom we share a family meal.
I finished this meditation with the first and last verses of from heaven you came helpless babe omitting the choruses.
Please feel free to use this.