The Last Supper ‘You are clean, but not all of you’ John 13
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…rose from supper and…took a towel, poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet…And Peter said to Him, “Lord, are You washing my feet?”
These opening verses are a beginning-to-end summary of events that the subsequent verses flesh out.
1. Before Passover…John reports Jesus’ state of mind and spiritual understanding, from deep in his relationship to and with God, the Father. From this well of knowing, which included knowing his suffering was imminent, he orchestrates the supper in the upper room,t he feet washing, the betrayal, and the arrest.
2. And supper being ended…after the Passover meal (some details of the meal are contained in the other gospels) John records Jesus washing the disciples' feet. We will come back to this. I do not believe the text supports the notion that Jesus washed Judas’s feet. This is key.
3. The devil having already put it in the heart of Judas to betray him…note the past tense. That is, before supper, the devil had done his work. This is supported by other texts e.g. Luke 22v3. Judas left midway through the meal as he and Jesus dipped bread together. The feet washing was after supper. As it says later, ‘Having received the piece of bread, he (Judas) then went out immediately. And it was night.’
4. Jesus said to Peter, “You are clean, but not all of you.” During the foot washing, Peter challenges Jesus to wash him from head to toe, not just his feet. But Jesus disarms him with this typically enigmatic comment: ‘He who is bathed needs only to wash his feet’.
What does this mean?
I can only share my ponderings; this morning’s ponderings, in fact.
Jesus was talking figuratively, not literally, although his statement works in the real world of baths and stepping out of the bath onto an unclean surface.
Spiritually, Jesus saw Jesus and the eleven as clean. When Jesus whispers to us through the gospel ‘You are clean’ we hear perhaps the most profound three words we will ever hear. Those three words contain complete forgiveness and an unshakeable restoration. It is heard in other forms littered throughout Jesus’s parables e.g. Luke 15’s triple set of ‘I was lost but now I’m found’ parables.
Judas only heard ‘unclean’ and ‘woe unto him who betrays me’ and ‘what you are about to do, do quickly’ and ‘it was night’. He left with his feet unwashed into the night.
But what of the eleven, and Peter? Peter who denied Jesus. The eleven who ran away? Did Jesus’s words ‘You are clean’ last only a few hours before being dismantled in failure and regret?
No.
The chasm between ‘You are clean’ and Jesus’s prediction of Peter’s denial seems unbridgeable, unfathomable, and yet it is contained and dealt with in Christ through the cross when he took upon himself all our iniquities, moral failures, sin, and broken-heartedness.
It is always this. When we fail – and we do as believers – we come back to those three words ‘You are clean’.
In Peter’s experience, his denial proved to be a stepping stone through which his love for Jesus and Jesus’s love for him would not only be revealed but taken deeper, into a new dimension.
Equally, for Paul, who had arrested and harassed believers, he wrote these words.
‘He made Christ, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God’ 2Cor5v21
Perhaps in some way you feel you have denied Christ, or are walking away from him, having been lured away. May Christ come to you and may you hear those three words once more, ‘You are clean’ and once again, like Peter on the beach, confess ‘You know that I love you’, and leave your nets to follow Him.