Scripture: John 13:1–17
Long ago, in the ages before Jesus, kings became kings in ceremonies where their heads were anointed with oil by prophets and priests. The anointing oil was a tangible expression of the king’s new divine connection and authority.
In John’s gospel, in the reading between last week and this week — Jesus, the kingly Messiah, is anointed with oil not applied to his head, but to his feet. This is done by Mary Magdalene.
Everything about Jesus’s anointing rejects expectations and convention. Oil to his feet, not his head. By a woman, not a man. And later, in today’s reading, he will wash all his followers’ feet — modeling the service and selflessness at the core of his being.
Jesus knew the history of his people. He knew the traditions of ancient kings. He knew what significance there was for Mary, his anointer, to play the role of prophet and priest, subverting the expectations of history.
By now, we are not surprised at Jesus for any of this. We know for him the first is last, and the last is first; the poor, weak, and powerless are central figures; and love is more powerful than force.
The scripture texts we’ll read in worship this month begin today with the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” begins the reading. He loved them to the end. The readings will continue, to the very end, through Jesus’s arrest, and Peter’s denial of Jesus, and Jesus’s trial before the Roman governor Pilate, and finally the crucifixion, before we arrive at Easter.
Through these weeks, we’ll get to see Jesus in great detail, hearing the stories of his life that Christians usually squeeze into the four days before Easter. We’ll take five weeks. This year, we take our time as we march through these stories. Because, like Jesus, we study and learn our history so that we can be transformed by them.
In that same way, many of us are filled with historically informed dread as the United States yesterday and today attacks fifteen different cities and assassinates a leader. On Friday, we had read news headlines that said negotiations would continue.1 And on Saturday we woke up to headlines, “Iran’s Supreme Leader is Killed in Strike.”
People across a political spectrum know that bombing is not the way bring about peace when there are still other options.
We remember twenty-five years ago, three days after the September 11th attacks, every member of the US Congress voted for war in Afghanistan except a lone House member who asked us to take a strategic pause and consider our options for responding to an atrocity. Barbara Lee ended the speech explaining her no vote, saying, “as we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” We caused and suffered generational violence in Afghanistan for twenty years.
We remember twenty-three years ago. The United States attacked Iraq by rationalizing our violence there on facts that proved to be wrong. We went to war for a reason that was not a reason. The war continued for eight years and caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and one-hundred thousand Iraqis.
War is a disaster. It’s a failure of humanity and a nightmare of the soul. Leaders of non-violent movements throughout history — some inspired by the tradition of Jesus — have tried to find us a way out of the cycles of war that we are stuck in. Non-violent movements have beautiful after-lifes. Christianity itself is the afterlife of Christ’s non-violent movement. The after-life of war bring only the conditions for more war.
Back to John chapter 13 — Jesus didn’t spend the night before he was killed plotting revenge or drawing up battle plans with his generals. He washed his friends’ feet. He washed everyone’s feet. He said, “unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”
Let’s also be clear of the big picture here too. The scripture says there was evil at work in their midst that night. Verse two: “The devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus.” You can conceptualize “the devil” here in any number of ways — it’s humanity’s separation from God, it’s evil incarnate, it’s the embodiment of history’s cycles of violence, it’s a fallen angel, it is the imperfection in creation that makes God’s love all the more powerful. In John, this devil is evil causing Judas to perpetuate a cycle of violence.
Christian realist theologians in the years leading up to the second World War — Reinhold Niebuhr and others — claimed the presence and persistence of evil in our world would always be present, like the evil embodied during the foot-washing. Evil is the motivating Judas to betray his friend for a bag of silver. Niebuhr claimed that there will be times when the use of force is a “necessary evil,” also called a “lesser evil,” in order to prevent, for example, the continuation of Hitler and Nazism. Niebuhr believed that pacifism and accommodation in the face of tyranny was a greater moral failing than taking difficult and morally challenging actions to stop tyranny . . . if no other options exist, or if attempts at nonviolence and aspirational resistance have failed, war may be less evil than allowing a tyrant to sweep over the globe.
Bombs are not are only option, and as I see it today, attacking Iran does not meet the standard of a “lesser evil.” There were and there are other ways. I’m willing to be told that I’m wrong, but right now, the use of force and assassinations feels like a sleepwalker headed into the traps of twenty-five years ago, and sixty years ago in Vietnam, and over a century ago in Sarajevo.
Who will wake this sleepwalker up, lest, as Barabara Lee warned, we “become the evil we deplore.”
But Jesus. On the night before he is killed, we can look to the fact that Jesus washes Judas’s feet too. Jesus knows what harm Judas is doing, preparing to turn him over to be detained and stand trial for undercutting the power of an empire — but Jesus washes Judas’s feet too. We can appreciate Jesus for this commitment to love at the end of the story — he loved them all unto the end — resisting the temptation to seek revenge against those who would hurt him and instead model what it looks like to try and break the cycles of war . . . with love.
Jesus comes into the world as the light, and he leaves it in love. Feet washing is the pivot-point moment for all of John’s gospel. The miracles are over, and the work of breaking the cycles of evil, and sin, and war has begun — with the washing of feet by Mary Magdalene and Jesus, a new way forward in the face of evil and domination comes to the center.
Jesus ends by saying, “now that I have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.” “Now that you know these things,” he says there’s no excuse.
You know your history.
“You will be blessed if you do them” — you will be blessed if you break the cycles of harm, and lead with love into the future.
The gospeler John doesn’t allow us to sit in passive horror. He insists from the depths of despair that we reimagine glory and power.
Violence and war does not win. It is not the last word.
This is the Good News.
May it be so.
Amen.