READING: John 13:1-17;
Leviticus 8:24; Exodus 30:18-21; Romans 6:4, 8:1,2,4; 1
Corinthians 3:3; Ephesians 4:1,2, 5:2; 1 John 2:6.
There
are several preliminary observations to be made in
approaching the message in John 13.
Firstly,
the end of John chapter 12 sees the close of the Lord's
public ministry. From then onward, He is with His own;
and so it is with them that we find Him when we come to
chapter 13.
Secondly,
chapters 11 and 12 having brought right to the fore the
whole matter of death and resurrection, as seen in
Lazarus and the grain of wheat, chapter 13 indicates what
is to obtain on resurrection and ascension ground,
because everything is being dealt with here and onward
from that standpoint - Christ risen and returning to the
Father (vs. 1).
Thirdly,
everything is now inward and not outward. So far, it has
all been objective; every incident through all these
chapters has been in an outward way. From now on it is
inward, it is subjective.
Fourthly,
it is no longer only individual; it is now corporate.
These
four things must be recognized in order to arrive at the
full meaning and value of what follows. Thus it is a
matter of what the Church is in itself, as on
resurrection and ascension ground, for it is the Church
which is now represented. Judas is going; Christ is being
left alone with those who are to be the nucleus of the
Church, and it all becomes a matter of what the Church is
in itself, as viewed from the standpoint of Christ's
resurrection and ascension, and its union with Him.
He
is about to depart out of the world. All things have been
given into His hands, and He is seeking to secure the
inward ground which will lead to the fulfillment of the
Church's one comprehensive purpose - the continuation of
Himself in representation on this earth, the expression
of Himself here. He is going, but He is seeking to secure
the continuity, the continuation, of Himself here as in
His Church. And so, about to depart, He says that He
leaves them an example, and when we come to analyze the
example, we find that it is something which reaches right
down into the innermost motives of the heart - Christ
cannot be followed in just an outward way; that is
proved. He has to be followed in an inward way.
So,
having laid that foundation, we can come to the inclusive
message of chapter 13.
The Immense Importance and
Power of Meekness
That
which arises is the immense importance and
power of meekness. Perhaps it has not been
sufficiently recognized that the fulfillment by the
Church of its great vocation rests and depends upon its
meekness. It has a tremendous business on hand, and it
has immense forces against it. There is no doubt that the
calling of the Church is a very great thing indeed,
fraught with unspeakably great issues, and opposed by
terrific forces; and to meet all that - the purpose, the
vocation, and all the forces of evil - the one basic
essential is meekness: because, in the first place,
before the Church can get on with its work here in this
world it must be in a position where Satan has no ground.
Resurrection and ascension imply that; they just carry
that with them. Resurrection and ascension mean that the
entire ground of Satan has been set aside. The Lord Jesus
has gone up on high because He has triumphed. So I repeat
that resurrection and ascension just imply that Satan's
power and authority have been destroyed and all things
are in Christ's hands, not Satan's.
Meekness Destroys the
Ground of Satan's Authority
The
Church must come on to that ground, and we find so
impressively - and it is most impressive - that the very
first thing introduced on that ground is perhaps the last
thing that we would have thought we should meet. When we
come on to resurrection and ascension ground, on to the
ground of Christ's great triumph and exaltation, we meet
meekness, and meekness means that Satan's ground is
destroyed, for Satan's fall was due to pride being found
in his heart, and man's fall was because he let in that
same pride. Pride - to have everything in himself, to be
as God, to be himself the seat of knowledge. "Ye
shall be as God, knowing good
and evil" (Gen. 3:5). Wherever there is pride, Satan
has the ground that he wants for destroying and wrecking,
and the risen Lord is providing ground against that by
this tremendous object-lesson as to meekness. Yes, Satan,
sinister, powerful and terrible as he is, can often be
completely nullified by a spirit of meekness, his whole
ground can be taken from him by a spirit of meekness. The
importance and power of meekness is seen, then, firstly
in that it destroys the very ground of Satan's authority.
Meekness the Great Unifying
Factor
Then
it is seen as the great unifying factor. Judas, the
disintegrating factor, has been compelled to withdraw.
Satan is going to do his utmost to scatter, divide and
disintegrate this band. In view of all that, the Lord, by
His example, His acted sermon, is saying, "For the
unifying of the Church, the integrating of the Church,
the establishing of the Church as something which cannot
be broken up or divided spiritually, the one essential is
meekness." "I beseech you to walk worthily of
the calling wherewith ye were called, with all lowliness
and meekness" (Eph. 4:1,2). The message to the
Church at Philippi was because of disunity, and the
Lord's meekness in self-emptying and humiliation and
bond-servant form, His great condescension, is introduced
by the Apostle as the ground of the Church's salvation at
Philippi. The unifying factor is meekness. "Let this
mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus"
(Phil. 2:5).
If
we did but know it, a very great deal of the strain that
is known by the Lord's people collectively, the
postponement of full blessing, the delay in fulfillment
of essential purpose, the distress and the heartbreak and
the bewilderment, is due to secret pride. The Lord sees
it - unwillingness to let go somewhere, unwillingness to
acknowledge somewhere, unwillingness to come down from
some position taken as to our rightness. Yes, there is a
lot of painful history of that kind, if we did but know
it; it can be traced to pride, hidden pride; and the Lord
says that the counter to that - to all that delay and
postponement, to that arrest, to that threat of the
complete disintegration of the Lord's people - is
meekness. If that is true, we are right in saying that it
is of immense importance and power. None would say that,
during the three years with the Master, the Twelve, or
even the Eleven, were a unity, and so much was due to
rivalry, jealousy, personal interests. These are features
of pride.
Meekness the Hallmark of
Love
But
then there is another thing which comes out here. It is
that meekness is the hallmark of love. You
know that John's Gospel can be divided into three
sections, under three words - Life, Light and Love, and
the love section begins at verse 34 of the thirteenth
chapter. "A new commandment I give unto
you, that ye love one another; even as I have loved you,
that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know
that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to
another." But meekness is the hallmark
of love. Pride and love can never go together. Love and
meekness will always be found together if the love is
genuine. If the example is to be taken account of - if
the Lord Jesus is the great example of love - the
argument is just overwhelming. "Having
loved his own that were in the world, he loved them unto
the end [or: unto the uttermost].... And... he took a
towel" (vs. 1,13).
He
loved; we have no doubt about His love, and that He is
the supreme example of love. He is equally the supreme
example of meekness. These two go together. "What I
do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt understand
hereafter." What an afterward! This
Gospel is being written in the afterward. How does it
begin? "In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and THE WORD WAS
GOD. The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made through him; and without him was not
anything made that hath been made." "And he
took a towel, and girded himself."
These
disciples really had not grasped the magnitude of the
Person who was in their midst. From time to time it came
home to them with some force, and they felt that He was
more than man. But it had not yet come home to them in
fullness who He was, and it never did until after His
resurrection and ascension. When, forty days after His
resurrection, He was received up into heaven, and the
mighty Holy Spirit came forth into them, then, and then
only - but then - they knew in fullness who He was. It
overwhelmed them.
And
then they had a retrospective contemplation. "God,
very God, who made all things, the Creator of the
universe, has been down here and washed our feet!"
That is tremendous, is it not? They knew afterward what
had happened, they knew afterward the greatness of the
condescension of God in the Person of Jesus Christ, and
that did have an effect; it was a mighty power in their
lives. They may not see eye to eye on all matters. The
work in them was not immediately perfected, so that they
were in perfect agreement in all interpretations. Peter
and Paul may represent different standpoints, and at one
time they may clash. Ah, but there is something deeper
than that. Peter will say: "our beloved brother Paul
also, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote unto
you" (2 Pet. 3:15). Something deep down has been
wrought, and you find them very meek men, and, by their
meekness, pillars of the Church. It is significant that
when Paul wrote to the Corinthians, dealing with
divisions, he said: "The trouble is with your
feet" - "ye... walk after the manner of
men" (1 Cor. 3:3). John says, "You must walk as
He walked": "he that saith he abideth in him
ought himself also to walk even as he walked" (1
John 2:6); not walk as men. It is all here symbolized in
the feet being cleansed.
The Walk of the Believer
We
can pass now from that to the next thing. The Church's
walk in this world is the link. We have read all those
passages about the feet and the walk. We are able to see
what a large place the walk has in the spiritual life.
The Lord Jesus says something very strong about this. "If
I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me";
"that depends upon your walk, upon your
feet." What does He mean? Well, after all, this
washing of feet was the neutralizing of the "earth
touch," the contact with the earth - that which lies
under the curse, which God can never accept, that which
is completely contrary to God's mind. We have to be here,
we have to walk here; but we have to have a great
sensitiveness to the dust, a great sensitiveness to dirt.
Some
people can bear a lot of dirt without being bothered by
it! They are not very sensitive in this matter, and so
they are not found washing very much. There are other
people who are very sensitive to the slightest touch of
dirt, because they know the danger of contamination. The
surgeon is extremely sensitive to dirt; you will
constantly see him laboriously "washing up."
The ordinary person would ask whether all this is quite
necessary: is this not overdoing it a bit? There he
stands; he goes on scrubbing and washing, rinsing and
washing again and scrubbing. But he knows the infinite
peril of dirt, of contact with a world that is
impregnated with dangerous elements, with another life
that is harmful; and he is sensitive to that. The Lord
Jesus was extremely sensitive, and He must have suffered
terribly, walking, in His sinlessness, on this earth.
Here in this chapter He is only saying in a pictorial
way, "You must have a great sensitiveness to the
death touch, to the earth touch."
That
will work out in many ways. It will work out as to our
conversation. If you and I are really spiritual, really
growing in the spiritual life, we shall have violent
reactions to our own talk. It will touch us, too, in what
we read. It will touch us in all sorts of ways. The point
is that there has to be sensitiveness to that which
belongs to the realm on the other side of that Cross, the
realm to which we are supposed to have died, and which
has nothing in common with this realm of "walking in
newness of life"; yes, a growing sensitiveness, that
means pain when there is anything present which the Lord
does not accept or agree with. If the Church is going to
fulfill its vocation, if the Church is going to be here
with the impact of the risen, ascended Lord, it has to be
very, very sensitive to what is against the Spirit. And,
of course, this has to be true of the individuals who
make up the Church.
We
have, therefore, little difficulty in seeing why the
Church has so little influence and power and effect. It
has become so contaminated, and it has lost its
sensitiveness to spiritual things. It can allow so much
that, from God's standpoint, was put out when the Lord
Jesus died. Go back to Aaron and his sons, the priests,
and the laver between the altar and the tabernacle, the
tent of meeting. "Aaron and his sons
shall wash their hands and their feet thereat... THAT
THEY DIE NOT" (Ex. 30:19). They have to get rid of
the death touch - of the earth touch which is the death
touch. So the blood was placed on the great toe of the
right foot, indicating the whole walk of the servants of
God. I think it is unnecessary for us to go further than
that. I only call you back to that selection of passages
at the head of this chapter, and there are many more
about the walk of the believer.
And
there is that great inclusive word to the Colossians: "If
then ye were raised together with Christ, seek the things
that are above, where Christ is, seated on the right hand
of God. Set your mind on the things that are above, not
on the things that are upon the earth. For ye died, and
your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:1-3). There
is the great divide of the Cross between earth and
heaven. Union with the risen, ascended Lord does mean
that there is set up inside the believer, and inside the
Church when it is according to the Lord's mind, a faculty
for discerning and perceiving what is and what is not of
the Lord; what belongs to this new realm and what does
not belong to it; and the development of that faculty is
the way of the Church's increasing spiritual life and
power, as it is of the individual's.
The Washing of One
Another's Feet
Then,
finally, as to this matter of feet-washing. "Ye
also ought to wash one another's feet." We do
not take this literally; we know that the whole thing
here is symbolical. But there it is something that we
ought to do. "We also ought to wash one another's
feet." What does it mean?
It
is a picture again. "Brethren... if a
man be overtaken in any trespass, ye which are spiritual,
restore such a one in a spirit of
meekness; looking to thyself, lest thou also be
tempted" (Gal. 6:1). It is the spirit
of meekness helping the one who has become touched,
tainted, or overtaken in the way. This one is in the way,
and there creeps up something to corrupt or pollute, and
overtakes him; his feet are caught. Now, "ye which
are spiritual," wash his feet, help him out of that,
help him to get free. I think we more often point out the
dirt than wash it off. We are far more ready to criticize
our brother for his fault or faults than to set ourselves
to help him to get rid of them. Washing of the feet
surely does just mean making it our humble business, in
all lowliness and meekness, knowing our own frailty and
weakness, to help to remove that which we see as a
defect, a fault, a wrong, an evil, in our brother.
Well,
that covers a lot of ground, and I am not going to stay
longer with this matter of feet-washing, but it is
something that the Lord has said is to be a ministry in
the Church, if the Church is to be kept in purity;
something that we have to do. It is what Paul calls
"speaking the truth in love" (Eph. 4:15) - in
love being faithful with one another. That is
feet-washing. It may sometimes be hot water, it may
sometimes need a little caustic - but the balm of love
must be there.
Have
we established our statement as to the immense importance
and power of meekness? If I were to go back and underline
anything that has been said, I think I should underline
mainly that part about spiritual sensitiveness to the
touch of that which has in it the power of death and
disintegration. It comes so subtly, just a suggestion. We
have only to hint at something about a fellow-believer,
about another Christian, and it becomes something which
works and grows. The enemy just looks for the slightest
thing like that, to build it up, and before long that
which was only a hint or a suggestion about them has
involved their whole life in a black cloud, and they
become suspect and wholly unclean, and you begin to avoid
them. It is only one of the many ways in which you and I
are called upon to be sensitive to dust, to dirt. We are
moving in a very unclean world, naturally and
spiritually. It is so easy for us to be affected, and we
must have this sensitiveness to dirt to get rid of it in
order to maintain a healthy living body.
One
of the books which perhaps has, by way of illustration,
helped me most in this whole realm of spiritual
sensitiveness, is The Life of Lord Lister. It
is the story of the man who was largely responsible for
that whole science of antiseptics, the great warfare
against the deadly microbe. What a story it is! And the
story opens with the battle that he had to wage, and what
a battle was waged against him! You could hardly imagine
a surgeon coming in to perform a major operation in an
old dirty coat that he had been wearing doing all sorts
of other things, then going from that operation, with all
its blood on him, to perform another one, and so on. We
are not surprised that the hospitals themselves were
scenes of more mortality than the outside world. What a
battle! His whole theory was laughed at, scorned,
ridiculed. He had to fight this battle through, but it
was won.
We
know today the importance of washing. The Lord Jesus knew
all about it; they did not know. This greater than Lister
knew all about that counterpart, that antitype, of
contamination, when He, coming into a universe
impregnated with these evil germs working death and
havoc, said, "We must wash up before we touch
anything." So He said to the Church, as the first
thing upon a resurrection-ascension basis: "Let us
get down to wash the point of contact with this world,
and break that contact, get clean and clear of it."
Our whole vocation and testimony hangs upon that.