What happened when someone actually wanted to wash my feet

Modern insights into Biblical footwashing

John 13:1-17

*Note: this is part of a series on how living in Eurasia affected my understanding of the Bible. Please head over to my post “Birthday Cake for Chickens“ to catch my explanation and disclaimer there if you haven’t yet. 

In my Western life, I had only ever seen footwashing in church. It was always terribly vulnerable and awkward. Who takes off their shoes in public, that close to another person’s face? And why? It was something we giggled over in youth group as we were forced to endure the humiliation of having our feet washed, even though the pastor always tried to explain how this was such a special gesture in Jesus’s time. 

Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.

John 13:14

But my time in Eurasia changed all that for me. For the first time in my life, someone actually washed my feet, not as a sermon illustration but because I needed them to be washed. Let me explain. 

I was visiting a mountain village where I stayed with my Eurasian “uncle” (my host mother’s brother) and his three daughters. I spent the first day with the youngest daughter hiking around in the potato fields, picking hazelnuts from a tree, and carrying teapots of sloshing water from a spring a few hundred feet down a slippery, muddy trail from the house. 

In the evening as we got ready to go inside the house, we realized how dirty we had gotten. Eurasians always take off their shoes when they enter a house. They leave the shoes outside and some change into slippers when they go in; others just wear socks. It’s considered good hospitality to provide slippers for guests to keep their feet warm inside the house. Many families additionally keep rubber slippers or clogs just outside the door to wear around the yard or to the outhouse. 

The outside and inside of the house are separate surfaces and must be kept that way. You don’t take your shoes off, then step on the ground outside with your socks and then walk into the house–  now your socks are dirty, and you’ve contaminated the floors inside (even if you can’t really see any dirt or dust). I was reprimanded several times for taking one shoe off and using my sock, still on my foot, to polish the dust off the top of my other shoe, because I was making my sock dirty (and then, perceptually, the floor). 

That evening in the village as I got ready to go inside and started to take off my shoes on the concrete steps leading up to the house, the girls surprised me by pulling out a plastic basin and a jug of warm water. They wanted to wash my feet, as they would often do at night before going inside, and they told me to stick my feet in the basin. (I should also mention that there is no indoor plumbing in village houses. Whatever washing you do before you enter the house is all you’re going to get. They have low-pressure showers outside the houses in separate little cement rooms, but in the fall and winter it’s too cold to bother taking a shower every night. People just focus on washing the trouble areas, like dirty hands and feet.) 

I was instructed not to sit on the steps, because they were a dirty surface that would contaminate whatever I sat on later inside the house, so I stood there and balanced on one foot at a time as one girl poured warm water over my feet and washed off the dirt from the day. I tried to protest, because no one had every washed my feet like that before and somehow it seemed like a shameful job to do, but the mother of the family hushed me, saying, “this is something we do for guests.” They wanted me to be comfortable and clean inside their house.  

That experience helped me picture Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. It’s not just that he’s putting himself in the lowly role of a servant to do some random humble task. He is serving them, yes, but he’s also showing them honor and taking care of them. He’s making them clean so they can be accepted inside the house. 

His interchange with Peter in verses 6-11 makes a little more sense to me now, too. Peter is embarrassed to have Jesus do something so menial for him, because it should be his role to honor the teacher, not the other way around. But when Jesus says “If I do not wash you, you have no share with me,” Peter understands that Jesus is also offering acceptance and inclusion in his house. That’s why Peter asks Jesus to wash all of him. Jesus starts talking about who is clean and who isn’t. It’s still hearts that make us clean, not externals, but he has shown them an illustration of cleaning their feet as if he were welcoming them into his home. He says they will understand these things in the future. 

When Jesus says “the slave is not greater than his master, nor is the one who is sent as a messenger greater than the one who sent him,” we usually understand that to mean something like this:  “I, who am actually God, just got down on my knees to humbly serve you. So you, who are only humans, should definitely serve each other.” I still think that interpretation is true, but I think there’s another layer of it as well.

He’s also referring to himself, the ultimate “sent one.” he did this because “he knew that he had come from God and was going back to God” (verse 3). I think in addition to the above paraphrase, he might also be implying something like this: “I am the messenger sent by my Father to welcome you into his family. Now you, who are also insiders in this household, should definitely welcome one another.”

How can we welcome one another better? Scroll up or down to leave comments!