The Humble Jesus
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2021 · 22 August 2021
We are on Thursday night of His final week before His death and resurrection. Jesus will be arrested early in the morning. He will undergo a false trial in the early hours of Friday. And He will be executed on Friday. He will die as the true Lamb of God, the Passover Lamb. This is Thursday night, when the northern Jews in the north part of Israel celebrated their Passover.
The southern Jews celebrated it on Friday. It is that Thursday night He is meeting for the Passover, which is a memorial dinner that commemorates God’s deliverance of the children of Israel from Egypt when the angel of death passed by the homes that had the blood of the lamb on the door. God wants to be remembered in this feast as the Savior and Deliverer of His people.
That Thursday night is when Jesus is with the twelve disciples alone. The Jews were after Him, and He had to hold this feast with them in secret before He was arrested later in the garden that same night. Verse 1, “Before the Passover celebration, Jesus knew that his hour had come to leave this world and return to his Father. He had loved his disciples during his ministry on earth, and now He loved them to the very end.”
This is a night when the Savior out of love deposits to the apostles and all who would ever believe, all the riches of heaven. Five whole chapters are dedicated to the Son of God expressing His love for His own when it says He loves us to the end, to the max, eternally and infinitely. As much as an infinite, eternal God can love, that’s how much He loves us. This is all about love.
Selfless humility is the soul of love. Your capacity to love is directly related to your capacity to humble yourself. That is a simple biblical truth and principle. The humbler you are, the less interested you are in yourself, the greater your capacity to invest yourself in somebody else. They are related to one another proportionately. The more you sacrifice yourself, the greater you will sacrifice for others.
Human love is not like that. There’s a reciprocating reality there that gratifies the person who loves. Biblical love is indifferent to personal gain. It has no concern about personal satisfaction or fulfillment. That’s the kind of love that we are called to demonstrate. Now, Paul summed all that up by one statement, “Love seeks not its own.” It’s not looking for what gratifies the person who loves.
Now, we need an example of that, and that is the Lord Himself. Philippians 2:5-8 says, “Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, 7 but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.”
Now, think about this. Jesus made the greatest sacrifice, and He loves the greatest. He has most humbled Himself and since love is in direct relation to humility, He who humbled Himself most has demonstrated the most love for others. His love is beyond compare, beyond understanding. Its height, depth, length and breadth are outside our capacity to conceive.
In Matthew 11:29 Jesus said of Himself, “I am meek and lowly.” He came all the way down to a criminal’s death that He didn’t deserve. He came all the way down to take our death so that He might go all the way up and express His eternal love to us. In John 15:13 Jesus described it this way, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
So if you give your life like the apostle Paul did trying to reach people with the gospel, and you end up in jail, and you die being decapitated, you say this is a great kind of human love. But you can only do that once, but then you can’t do it anymore because you’re in heaven. Blowing yourself up with bombs strapped to your body sends you directly to hell if that’s what you believe.
You will not enter heaven by any kind of self-sacrifice. That’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re saying is that if you are a believer, you have been transformed, and now you have a capacity to love everybody in a way that the world doesn’t understand. It’s a love that separates us from the rest of society. It is a love that should be willing to take up the cross, right? To die if need be.
So what does that example look like? Well, it is Jesus here in this passage. When you love, it removes fear in the face of judgment. Perfect love casts out fear. You know that because you have a love that is a deposit by God, which means you belong to Him. God is love and those who love belong to God. So if you say you’re a believer and you love your brother, then you know the truth is in you.
So this is very personal. We love one another and it becomes a testimony to the world. As it says in John 13:34-35, “A new commandment I give you that you love one another even as I have loved you that you also love another. 35 By this, all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” This is how we put Christianity on display. We love the world the way God does.
Now in Israel, foot washing was a necessity. There are certain benefits to keeping your feet clean for you and all the people you connect to. Well, in ancient times, sandals didn’t keep you clean, so feet were dirty and dusty. Before every house, there was a water pot outside to wash your feet. Usually the lowliest servant did the foot washing because it was the lowliest task.
In biblical times, a meal like the Passover lasted for hours. They wouldn’t sit in a chair, they would recline. So your head was here and somebody’s feet were close by. Jesus is going to go back to the glory He had with the Father before the world began. Maybe after these 33 years of humiliation, somebody might recognize His majesty, His glory, and somebody would step up and wash His feet. But nobody does.
Remember, they were having an argument according to Luke 22 about which of them was the greatest in the kingdom. So they were all about their own dignity and their own honor. So nobody wanted to take on the role of slave. Just another indication of their spiritual weakness, but Jesus loved them anyway. This makes His love so incredible because they were so ugly at that point.
Then there was Judas. How ugly was he? But that’s how we come to understand what it means that He loved them to the max, in spite of it. So He puts His love on display to undeserving, weak and selfish disciples. This would have been a time when He might have rebuked them like He did the Pharisees that week, but He doesn’t. He just loves them, and He gives them a example of how they are to love.
Love spurned is in verse 2, “And supper being ended, the devil having already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray Him.” What is this about? This is disastrous for Judas. How can he be with Christ for three years, see everything, hear everything, watch every act that Jesus did, know the absolute perfection of His life, and still give himself to Satan?
Jesus knew when Satan showed up. He knows what’s in the heart of a man. He can read thoughts. Satan showed up right on time, right on schedule, and Jesus said to Judas, “What you do, do quickly.” Go orchestrate the betrayal because we’ve got a time clock going now. The clock is ticking to make sure that I am executed when the Passover lambs are being killed tomorrow.
Why mention this here? Because the contrast is instructive. The contrast makes everything in the expression of love stand out in bold relief. The blackest hatred contrasted with the purest love. All he was interested in was what position he would get. Judas is a hater, and the more Jesus has failed to fulfill Judas’s ambitions and greed, the more he hated Jesus.
The words of love which Jesus gives these verses capture our hearts, draw us to love Him more while they cause Judas to hate Him more. One writer said, “I wish that the traitor’s kiss that Judas gave was the only one, but in the spiritual sense, Jesus still has to endure it a million times to this hour. For hypocritically to confess Him with the mouth while the conduct betrays Him.
Finally, love is shown. How did He love, and how is that love manifest? The nature of this love is completely consumed with the object of love, and it will humble itself, and that’s exactly what Jesus does. Verse 3, “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come from God and was going to God.” This is a statement of His absolute, eternal being and deity.
That is the whole point of His humiliation. Verse 4-5, “He rose from supper and laid aside His garments, took a towel and girded Himself. 5 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.” Remember, verse 2 says, “During supper.” They’re already eating. And they’re into the Passover meal.
For a fisherman to wash another man’s feet is a small act of humility, but for the Creator of the Universe to wash the feet of proud men is indeed amazing. You might think that He maybe would wash the feet of those who were somehow sacred or those who were somehow holy. No, He washes the feet of those people who are proud and self-interested and ambitious. It’s just what He does.
They have such short memories. It had been that week that Jesus said to them, “Whoever would be greatest among you, let him be your servant.” They completely forgot that. So with calmness, Jesus rises up, takes off His outer robe, puts on this towel and begins to wash their feet. We see that this devastated those men. That’s the information that is articulated by Peter, “This isn’t right.”
Verse 6-9, “Then He came to Simon Peter. Peter said to Him, “Lord, are You washing my feet?” 7 Jesus answered and said to him, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but you will know after this.” 8 Peter said to Him, “You shall never wash my feet!” Jesus answered him, “If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me.” 9 Simon Peter said to Him, “Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head!”
“What I do, you do not understand now, but you will understand after this.” He’s not talking about foot washing. He says, “Peter, you still don’t understand My humiliation.” Their view of the Messiah was that He comes triumphantly to establish the kingdom. He throws out the enemies. He reigns over Jerusalem and over the world, everything that is promised to Abraham and David, reiterated in the prophets.
They couldn’t handle the suffering of Jesus. So our Lord says to him, “Peter, you don’t see all that, but you will hereafter.” And he did. In 1 Peter, he fully understood the humility of Christ. “You are redeemed not with corruptible things like silver and gold, but the previous blood of Jesus Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot.” He understood the execution of Jesus.
Jesus said to him, “If I don’t wash you, you have no part with Me.” To which Peter says in verse 9, “Then Lord, wash not only my feet, but my hands and my head.” He goes from one extreme to another. He wanted more than anything else a relationship with Jesus Christ. Lord, if this is how I sustain a relationship with you, give me a bath! Wash my whole body, all of me.
What did Jesus mean when He said, “If I do not wash you, you have no part with Me.” He was talking about the need that Peter had to be spiritually cleansed. He needed what Ezekiel promised in the New Covenant: the washing. He needed what Paul wrote to Titus about; the washing of regeneration. He needed spiritual cleansing, and Christ was going to the cross to provide that spiritual cleansing.
Jesus follows up on this spiritual truth in verse 10, “Jesus said to him, “He who is bathed needs only to wash his feet, but is completely clean.” He’s saying, “Peter, you don’t need salvation. You just need some clean-up. You are clean.” Jesus just told him, “You’re saved.” “But not all of you,” verse 11, “for He knew who would betray Him. For this reason He said, ‘Not all of you are clean.’”
Verse 12, “So when Jesus had washed their feet, taken His garments, and sat down again, He said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you?” And He goes back to the practical application of love. Of course they did. Verse 13-14, “You call Me Teacher and Lord, and you say well, for so I am. 14 If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”
Love like this. Love selflessly, humbly, in the most menial, simple necessity of life. Start there, and all the more elevated things will come. Verse 15, “For I have given you an example that you should do as I have done to you.” That’s a summons from the Lord to His followers. Verse 16, “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 I, the most exalted, elevated person in the universe can stoop, can’t you, who are infinitely less than me, humble yourselves?” Verse 17, “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.” How do you release heaven’s blessing? By loving sacrificially, unselfishly, humbly, without any thought of personal gain, but completely committed to the well-being, fulfillment, and necessity of somebody else. Let us pray.