Joh 13:5-11 | KingComments | STEP | When the Lord has prepared Himself for His servant work, He pours water into the basin and begins to wash the feet of the disciples and wipe them with the towel with which He has girded Himself. The washing of the feet by the Lord has a spiritual meaning. The Lord serves here as a Slave. When He became Man, He took the form of a Slave ( ). He will never give up this position and service of Slave ( ; ). We might think that He stopped being a Slave when He entered glory. He shows us here that this is not the case. He begins a new service among His own that consists of removing the uncleanness they have acquired in their wanderings through the world. For this purification He uses the Word of God which is compared with water ( ; ). When we read God’s Word, it has the effect that our thoughts are cleansed. If we have things in our life that are wrong, He makes us aware through His Word. We can then confess that and remove it. That is the cleansing He works. For this cleansing, the Lord uses water, not blood. It is about presenting the truth, that is, God’s Word as that which cleanses. The blood has more the aspect of reconciliation. He uses the Word to cleanse those who are already reconciled by the blood. The blood cleanses in relation to God, the water cleanses in relation to the believer. The blood is applied just once. God always recognizes its value. The effect is eternal. The believer is sanctified by the blood once and for all ( ). The application of the blood never needs to be repeated, just as no one once born of God needs to be born of God again. After the Lord has washed their feet, He wipes them with the towel with which He was girded. Wiping also has an important spiritual meaning. Wiping the feet means getting rid of the memory of the cleansing. When someone has been cleansed of a sin by the Lord through His Word, He does not come back to it. This is also important for believers among themselves. If a believer sins and someone else points this out to him and the sin is confessed, then that sin is gone. That sin may not be brought to mind as an accusation of the other again.

‏ John 13:5-11

The Washing of the Feet

When the Lord has prepared Himself for His servant work, He pours water into the basin and begins to wash the feet of the disciples and wipe them with the towel with which He has girded Himself. The washing of the feet by the Lord has a spiritual meaning. The Lord serves here as a Slave. When He became Man, He took the form of a Slave (Phil 2:7). He will never give up this position and service of Slave (Lk 12:37; Exo 21:5-6).

We might think that He stopped being a Slave when He entered glory. He shows us here that this is not the case. He begins a new service among His own that consists of removing the uncleanness they have acquired in their wanderings through the world. For this purification He uses the Word of God which is compared with water (Eph 5:26; Jn 15:3). When we read God’s Word, it has the effect that our thoughts are cleansed. If we have things in our life that are wrong, He makes us aware through His Word. We can then confess that and remove it. That is the cleansing He works.

For this cleansing, the Lord uses water, not blood. It is about presenting the truth, that is, God’s Word as that which cleanses. The blood has more the aspect of reconciliation. He uses the Word to cleanse those who are already reconciled by the blood. The blood cleanses in relation to God, the water cleanses in relation to the believer. The blood is applied just once. God always recognizes its value. The effect is eternal. The believer is sanctified by the blood once and for all (Heb 9:12 ; Heb 10:14). The application of the blood never needs to be repeated, just as no one once born of God needs to be born of God again.

After the Lord has washed their feet, He wipes them with the towel with which He was girded. Wiping also has an important spiritual meaning. Wiping the feet means getting rid of the memory of the cleansing. When someone has been cleansed of a sin by the Lord through His Word, He does not come back to it. This is also important for believers among themselves. If a believer sins and someone else points this out to him and the sin is confessed, then that sin is gone. That sin may not be brought to mind as an accusation of the other again.

Having Part With the Lord Jesus

When the Lord comes to Peter to wash his feet, Peter objects. He finds it inappropriate that the Lord is going to wash his feet. He is the Lord, isn’t He? Then it cannot be so that He, the Lord, bows down before him. Peter reveals here a trait of character that many of us also have. Sometimes we refuse to perform this humble service ourselves, and sometimes we refuse such a service to be performed to us, but we will motivate our refusal in a different way than Peter does here. Such an attitude shows that we don’t mind sin all that much. We must learn – and it must penetrate deeply to us by what the Lord is doing here – that the defilement we incur by our going through the world is so bad that nothing less than Christ in His humiliation can cleanse us from it.

The Lord answers Peter that he does not yet know what He is doing, but that he will understand it hereafter. By this he means that Peter will only fully understand the meaning when the Holy Spirit has come. It may also be possible that the Lord is pointing ahead of His statement after the foot washing. Another consideration is that Peter will understand the spiritual meaning once he is restored by the Lord after his denial of the Lord.

Peter is not very much impressed by the words of the Lord. He does not moderate his tone, but vigorously contradicts Him. He will never cooperate with what he considers to be too humiliating an act for the Lord. With similar powerful statements, Peter also said that the Lord would not suffer and die (Mt 16:21-23). He speaks without self-knowledge and without knowledge of the Lord. The Lord tells him the consequences if He does not wash him. Then He will have no part with Him.

The Lord does not say: ‘You have no part of Me’. Every believer has part of Him. The Lord spoke of “no part with Me”. This means that a believer has part with Him in all that is His part, that is all that the Father has given Him (Jn 13:3). From eternity He always has everything in His hands as the eternal Son and the Creator. But He has become Man and now as Man He will possess what has always been His possession as the eternal Son. This has made it possible to share it with people. In this way we have received life from Him because He is life.

In order to have part with the Son in that which He has received as Man, it is necessary that the believer is cleansed of everything that defiles Him. We don’t even have to think about specific sins, although sins are of course an obstacle to fully enjoy with the Son what the Father has given Him. It’s about becoming defiled merely by the fact of our going through the world. It’s about a defilement which we cannot do anything about, but that is nevertheless there. The Lord Jesus washes the feet of the disciples because they have inevitably become dirty from walking through the streets of Jerusalem.

In the same way, we too become defiled spiritually when we go through the world. Unsolicited or unintentionally we see and hear things every day that defile our mind and can influence our thoughts. That makes their daily cleansing necessary (2Cor 7:1). We undergo this daily cleansing when we read God’s Word in prayer. Our mind and thoughts are washed clean by reading God’s Word. No believer can do without it. This service of cleansing is what the Lord Jesus does to us when we read His Word. He can also do this by someone we hear preaching or applying God’s Word in a meeting, or when someone comes to us and draws our attention to something in God’s Word.

Completely Clean, but Not All of Them

When the Lord has told him this, Peter falls into the other extreme. He wants the Lord not only to wash his feet, but also his hands and his head. But that is not what is meant either. The Lord responds to Peter’s exaggerated reaction by giving further important teaching, as He always does after statements or reactions that demonstrate how much His words are misunderstood. He is a Teacher full of patience.

He declares to Peter – and to us! – that there are two forms of washing. There is a one-time washing of the whole body. This is what happened during our conversion (1Cor 6:11; Tit 3:5). It is the one-time spiritual renewal through the Word and the working of the Spirit that is not repeated (Jn 3:3-6). It is the receiving of new life through which we have become children of God. Who once is a child of God, cannot become a child of God a second time. After that it is necessary to wash the feet regularly. This regular washing also takes place through the Word (Psa 119:9).

We have a picture of both forms of washing in what happened to the priests in the Old Testament. When a son of Aaron was ordained a priest, he was washed completely on that occasion (Lev 8:6). That act was not repeated. When the priest entered the sanctuary to serve, he had to wash his hands and feet from the laver (Exo 30:19). He had to do this every time he entered the sanctuary to serve.

This repeated act is what the Lord represents here in the foot washing. Only here it is not a matter of washing the hands, but of washing the feet, because the feet speak of walking and that affects our entire behavior. In the picture of the service in the tabernacle, we see that the washing of the feet is the preparation for entering the first part of the sanctuary, the holy place, in John 14-16, and entering the holy of holies in John 17.

In His teaching to the disciples, the Lord says that a person who is completely washed, is completely clean and needs only to have his feet washed. However, there is an exception among the disciples, someone to whom all this teaching about foot washing does not apply. There is one among them who is not completely clean because he is not completely washed, i.e. because he has not been converted and has no new life. The Lord knows that one exception and He also knows what is in the heart of that disciple. The heart of that disciple is not connected with His heart. There is no life connection between Him and that disciple. Therefore, what He said does not apply to a man like Judas.