The Servant Savior

The Servant Savior

Read: John 13:1-17

“You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

John 13:7

“Love and humility are the highest attainments in the school of Christ.”

—John Newton

IN WORD Many commentators see a parallel between the foot-washing Jesus gives His disciples and the Incarnation as described in Philippians 2:5-11. In that passage, Jesus is said to have been in His very nature God, but made Himself nothing, taking the nature of a servant instead. His obedience even to the point of death is the ultimate expression of that servanthood.

Here in John 13, Jesus gives us a visual illustration of the divine descent to our needy planet. He removes His normal clothing and wraps Himself with the garment a slave would wear (v. 4), just as He left the radiance of God to put on a human body. He performs the most selfless of tasks— a menial service that shocked those who called Him “Lord”—for the sake of His beloved disciples. And when He was done, “he put on his clothes and returned to his place” (v. 12), just as the Son of God put on His resurrected body and returned to His place of exaltation.

No, of course the disciples did not understand what He was doing. Though He had predicted His own death and resurrection several times, they kept trying to figure out the symbolic language they were sure He was using. It had still not registered with them that His execution would be a literal event. They had not yet considered that the Lord, the Messiah, was—at the very heart of His mission—a servant.

IN DEED It’s hard for us to grasp, too, isn’t it? The Lord of all creation at our feet? We treat Him that way in a casual sense sometimes; our prayers often seem to imply that He exists for our glory, that He ought to do what we ask Him to if He really loves us as He says. But that is a servanthood we mistakenly feel entitled to, not a real recognition of the incredible condescension God undertook in order to meet our most profound needs. Jesus left the glories of heaven in order to wash our feet. We still don’t realize entirely the magnitude of what He did. But later we will understand.