God of All Comfort

I was thinking of the Lord's Supper in the book of John today in chapter 13. There's not really much about the supper--just that they were in the middle of it when Jesus changes course and stands up. In the middle of the meal.  John meticulously records each action in slow detail savoring each memory.  It is burned into his mind.  He begins to love them "to the end." (1)  He takes off his outer garment and lays it aside.  He wraps a towel around his waist.  He pours water into a basin and then he stares at the feet that lay before him.  These feet are calloused and cracked.  They are dusty with skin falling off.  Some are bloodied.  Some have probably stepped in some animal feces along the way.  They smell human.  These feet are broken and beat up.


The disciples have walked hundreds of miles with Jesus over the years.  Maybe as Jesus stares at their feet, he remembers the scar when Andrew stubbed his toe in Cana.  Or the thorn that had to be removed from Philip's heel. 


It is silent in the upper room.  There is no mood music in the background.  They watch this one who had made their bodies and souls now kneel before each of them because it is the most important teaching he will ever do. 


Peter's response is quite natural.  He's proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah, but now the Messiah hovers in front of him wanting to do a slave's work.  It's humiliating.  Perhaps we think on the eve of the Passover that Jesus would be doing something with great power.  But instead we find him caressing the feet in abject servitude.


The God of all comfort makes Peter--makes me, feel uncomfortable.  That's what he came to do.


Peter doesn't understand yet, but none of them really do. 


They are to love people to the limit.  Whatever it takes.  However humiliating or embarrassing.  Servants of all and masters to none. 


The next day Jesus' outer garments would be removed again.  He would be bloodied and beaten.  His own feet would be washed in his own blood as they were pinned to the tree.  He loves to the limit, to the grave,  to the divine reach.  No matter how humiliating or debasing, Jesus shows what this new command is all about.  There is no length to which he won't go for those whom he loves.


And I suppose when we see his work with others at times it embarrasses us.  Working with those who seem to most disgust us.  The broken ones.  Those whose lives are line with scars of stubbed experiences.  And yet he sends us out to love them to the limit.  To interpret the gospel in such a way that it is visible and credible.  No matter how humiliating or debasing.  Love to the limit.  No matter how uncomfortable.  He is the teacher and we are the learners.  If we have learned anything, we certainly learn what love is in this.