I’m often drawn to the fact that Jesus, before Passover, during the evening meal, gets down from the table to wash His disciples’ feet (John 13). He is just about to be arrested, flogged and beaten, humiliated and shamed, suffer the cruelest kind of public death known to man, and yet He chooses at His final meal to get down and wash the feet of others.
I’d be thinking, “I must enjoy this last meal; it’s a moment of life and freedom and fellowship with my friends,” if I were in that situation. Instead, Jesus comforts, cleans and prays for His followers. This extraordinary moment is heightened further by the fact that the only gentile slaves washed people’s feet. Here to the amazement of His disciples the Lord, who threw the stars into space, humbles Himself to the point of washing His followers’ feet. This is the reality of our saviour: even though He knows that His time on earth is coming to an end, He does not think of how He can be served; His love for the people causes His focus to be on serving the people.
In Matthew 20:26 – 28 Jesus challenges us to the core as He says, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be the first must be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” Jesus tackles the motivation of our heart and causes us to question why we do what we do. Is it to make personal gain and achieve in human terms? Would we continue to do what we do for Jesus if no one ever saw it, or if we were never encouraged by others to serve? How about if other people started to reprimand us for the way we were choosing to live? Would we still serve if it meant we did not get a pay packet or a pension? I’m challenged to consider who He is calling me to comfort, pray for and serve in this unsettled season.
I am again deeply personally impacted by the life of our saviour. He didn’t come to be served but to serve. Who are we serving and who do we expect to serve us? I remember back in the late 90s my dad telling me about a little old lady in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. The arrival of Hurricane Mitch brought great devastation as it caused such flooding and landslides that her whole town had been buried under piles of mud. She had lost her family, her market stall and everything she owned, but when my dad met her she was almost bouncing down the road with joy. She wasn’t thinking about what she had lost, she was on her way to church. When he asked her why she was smiling in the face of such horror, her reply was gobsmacking: “This is an opportunity for those of us who know Jesus to show those who don’t that even if you have lost everything, you have lost nothing because you still have Jesus.”
This kind of response only comes through the power and love of Jesus at work in our hearts through the power of His Holy Spirit. We are not in Tegucigalpa or about to witness the Messiah go to the cross; however, we are in the face of economic difficulty and rising challenges in mental health, poverty and pain. As followers of the Lord, it’s an opportunity to shine like stars in service for Him. Together, let’s rise and keep asking the Lord to help us follow Him no matter what. This year, let’s invite the Holy Spirit to enable us to take up a posture on our knees, and ask Him to keep equipping us to serve in the places that we are called to.
