Jesus Washed Judas's Feet Also
Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.
And supper being ended, the devil having already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray Him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come from God and was going to God, rose from supper and laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself. After that, He poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded. … So when He had washed their feet, taken His garments, and sat down again, He said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.
John 13 1-5, 12-17 (NKJV)
When I used to read these words I overlooked the fact that Jesus was washing the feet of all of the disciples. Judas Iscariot, the man who was in the process of betraying Jesus, was still in the room. He hadn’t been exposed yet and was still waiting for the opportunity to leave and go earn his 30 pieces of silver. Jesus knew all this. In that same chapter He said “You are not all clean”. Long ago He had told the Twelve “one of you is a devil”, and that same night He had shown John who would betray Him after being asked who it was by handing Judas the bread He had dipped in the bowl. So there is no room for thinking Jesus didn’t know while He was washing Judas’s feet what Judas had in mind to do.
This is entirely at odds with how the world teaches us to treat our enemies. There is no shortage of stories in my Google feed about people who got back at coworkers, managers, landlords, tenants, neighbors, and family members who had wronged them. Some of these stories detail truly egregious acts of callous, indifferent, reckless and even cruel behavior toward the original poster. I can appreciate why the author would be angry and when the opportunity arose used their leverage to gain some measure of perceived justice. The feeling we get reading these stories is one of satisfaction that someone got their well-deserved comeuppance.
Jesus certainly had that opportunity to deliver a proper smack-down on Judas. He could have called Judas out in front of everyone and then let the other disciples loose on him (I suspect Peter, in particular, would have been happy to punch him in the face). He could have, in His own words later that night, brought down twelve legions of angels on Judas to execute justice. At the very least, He could have refused to wash the feet of a man He knew was actively betraying Him to the people who wanted Him killed. Washing feet was a act done by servants. Consider Peter’s reaction when his turn came and he initially refused to let Jesus do it. He knew that, in his culture, this was far beneath Jesus’s stature as the Messiah. It was an extreme act of humility and service, the way we might view someone cleaning a public bathroom today (not that I’m suggesting we should look down on that).
Why did He do it, then? Well, for one thing, it aligned with what He taught about loving our enemies in Matthew 5:43-44 (“Love your enemies, bless those who curse you..”) and Luke 6:27-28 (“Do good to those who hate you..”). Jesus was going to be leaving the disciples soon and returning to His place by His Father, and He wanted to leave His followers with a powerful example of what He really meant by this teaching about how to treat your enemies. I think He was very deliberate in washing their feet before Judas left the room. He wanted to include Judas so that later on, when both they and we remember this incident, we would understand how radical an idea it was that He was really speaking about.
Our culture today celebrates gaining revenge on those who cause us trouble or hurt us. We post about it online and revel in the comments that praise our boldness and cleverness in getting back at our adversary. We share stories about it at parties and get laughs and pats on the back. It’s become a central platform of some politicians that they will destroy those who, justly or unjustly, call them out for their misdeeds, and they are increasingly finding this a successful campaign issue to run on within a voter base that wants to see the opposition get their due.
The call to love our enemies is not simply to not seek to harm them or even to avoid wishing them harm. That is a great starting point, but it’s an incomplete picture of what Jesus calls us to do. We are supposed to go further. We need to offer kindness over retaliation and service instead of spite. We need to actively seek to serve our enemies with kindness and humility. It may mean taking on humbling tasks for their benefit, not unlike when Jesus washed the feet of Judas.
Lest this principle be misunderstood, I should clarify that it is possible to have a heart of a servant toward those who abuse you and still have boundaries at the same time. For example, I have stated my position very clearly that the spouse of an abuser should be safe from that abuser, and that will usually mean physical separation. It would not be possible in that context for that person to serve their abuser in person without a sincere and demonstrative change of heart on their part. The service in this case might be limited to praying for their abuser. Not an easy thing, by any means. But the point being that loving our enemies does not mean ignoring appropriate boundaries. Sometimes loving our enemies must be done at a distance.
When we can, though, we should look for opportunities to serve others, including those we are at odds with. Maybe it’s helping that rude, cantankerous neighbor who is always reporting you to the HOA by mowing their lawn. Maybe it’s giving that supervisor at work who is always claiming credit for your ideas by giving him a ride when his car breaks down. These things are not easy because they aren’t natural for us. They run counter to how our culture tells us to behave. I’d be lying to you if I said I was good at it. But it is the standard by which we are called to live as followers of Christ.
Therefore “If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
If he is thirsty, give him a drink;
For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12:20-21 (NKJV)
Why do this? Because God wants those who are living in the darkness of bitterness, resentment, anger and despair to be shown the light of Christ by our actions. People who mistreat others are often going to be people who are genuinely miserable in their daily outlook. As Joyce Meyers likes to say, hurt people hurt people. And sure, that’s a generalization and there are folks who can go around causing pain to others all day long and whistle their way through life without a care, because they either have an incredible lack of self-awareness or are psychopaths who lack the capacity to care about others. Even then, I would argue we should pity them.
If I act toward those who hurt me the way the world teaches me to act, through resentment and retaliation, then they see only myself. I’m merely going to be a reflection of the rest of their world that is shrouded in the same human tendency toward revenge and spite. I offer nothing to them in doing so, except a helping of the same despairing, dark nihilism that the world at large lives with. If I behave in the way they least expect, with kindness and humility, willing to serve and bless them, that shows them the heart of God instead. That can be transformational.
Stories abound of how people are set on a completely different path in life because someone showed them kindness in spite of their own cruelty. After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which an estimated 800,000 to 1 million people were killed, many survivors of this massacre have embraced a path of forgiveness. There are numerous and well-documented cases of victims of this brutality offering hospitality to the very men who had killed their families. There are even friendships that have emerged between them. Many of those who carried out these killings have openly expressed their repentance for their one-time ethnic hatred and have been profoundly changed by the mercy they have been shown by the ones they had wronged. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest this had an impact on the nation’s healing from the horrific trauma it had experienced.
In Perth, Australia, a bus driver, Riyad Barakat, was confronted by a man who had boarded his bus and began shouting threats and obscenities at passengers. In most situations our response to this would be to tackle the man, or call the police, or restrain him in some way. Riyad offered him a cup of tea. The man was completely disarmed by this small act of kindness and broke down, sitting peacefully and accepted help. It could have gone way off the rails if it Riyad had not de-escalated the situation. For this man, that small act was all he needed to calm down and start him on a path to recovery. No one was harmed. Sure, situations like this don’t always work out so nicely, but a kindness turned out to be all that was required to avoid violence in this one.
Corrie Ten Boom and her sister, Betsie, spent months in Nazi prison camps for helping Jewish refugees escape persecution. Betsie would eventually die in prison, but before she did, she shared with Corrie how she wanted to help the same guards and officers who were cruelly mistreating them and their fellow prisoners. She witnessed their brutality but recognized they were loved by God as well. “If they can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love”, she said.
We can all can teach others to love. Love isn’t something we can teach through verbal instruction as effectively as we teach it through our actions toward others. If you see me acting out of spite toward someone, or even just being indifferent, I’m teaching you how to hate. If I make the choice to stand up for someone you know I don’t like, or help them meet a need, or wash their car, or some other act of service, I’m teaching you how to love. Maybe you get the lesson and maybe you don’t, but those choices I’m making are instructive to others about what it means to be a Christ-follower.
The unbelieving world is looking to us to put our money where our mouth is. When we profess our faith, what we do is going to be measured by the world to see if we really are going to practice what we preach. “I like your Christ, but not your Christianity,” Gandhi once told a reporter for the Harvard Crimson in 1927 (some have reported what he said at other times was “I like your Christ, but not your Christians.”). There are many who do not consider Jesus to be their savior but are still have respect for His teachings, and are observing how His followers treat their adversaries. The world is looking to us to provide a different way of responding to hostility, rudeness, cruelty and wrongdoing. This is part of what Jesus meant when he said his followers were a light to the world.
I like your Christ, but not your Christianity.
- Mahatma Gandhi, 1927, interview with The Harvard Crimson
It takes real effort to do this. I’m not going to pretend that I take to it naturally. There are people in both the private and public sphere I pray for and bless but not because I like them, or agree with what they say and do. Quite the opposite; I’m pushing myself to do it because it’s what Jesus told us to do, but also because I need to remind myself that I’m no better. I cannot stand on my moral pedestal and look down on anyone because I’m all too aware of how much of a mess I am. God draws near when we humble ourselves enough to pray for those we would, in the natural, not shed any tears over if they were to come to misfortune. When I pray for and bless those I naturally dislike or disagree with, I find myself shifting out of the mindset of judgement and disagreement and more toward a recognition of our shared humanity, of God’s love for each of us, regardless of where we are at spiritually.
The point here is to challenge you to shift your own thinking about how to respond to hurt caused by others. There is something immensely freeing about choosing the path of forgiveness and kindness. It’s not an exaggeration to call it an act of rebellion against the way of the world and the desire Satan has to sow division and keep up the cycle of retribution. When we show love and kindness to those who hurt us, we’re showing the strength we have in Christ. It’s empowering to be able to say we’re not going to do things the world’s way, not going to just follow the crowd in seeking our own form of justice against those who wrong us. We’re conveying that we’re not going to be controlled by our natural impulses to do what everyone else does. Some may call it weakness to refuse to retaliate, but it is in fact a demonstration of real strength to be able to say “I could return the same upon you that you have done to me, but I refuse to do so.” May we learn to tap that strength.