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Hello, I'm Mike. We're going to tell you a true story about Jesus by pretending to be some people from a long time ago.
I want to tell you about the most weird and amazing thing I think that's ever happened to me—the most awkward thing, really. Well, the more I think about it, the more I realize how amazing it really was.
I'm John, and I'm Peter. We were two of Jesus's very best friends when he was walking around on Earth. John even wrote a book about it so people would know what really happened.
The most awkward thing that ever happened to me happened in Jerusalem during the Passover Festival. It was absolutely packed with people—like all of Israel had moved to Jerusalem for the week. Every room in the city was full, there were campsites on every bit of available space, and the streets were full of crowds of people and animals. The crowds really, really wanted to see Jesus and listen to him. When we came in, the road was literally lined with people shouting and calling Jesus a king.
You can imagine we were really glad to get a bit of peace and quiet. It was Thursday night, the night of the Passover meal itself, and finally we got some time with just us and Jesus. We borrowed a room in someone's house so we could eat the Passover meal together—just Jesus and us.
But there was one really big problem. Because it was a borrowed room, there were no servants. And there was no one to wash our feet. That was really bad news.
We'd been walking around in the city streets all day in sandals. The streets were full of people and animals. By the end of the day, our feet were absolutely disgusting—we had stood in sheep poo, cow poo, goat poo. I think I even stood in some camel poo at one point.
Obviously, we took our sandals off and left them outside the room. But when we all lay down on our sides to eat, you could smell the circle of dirty feet all around you. There was no getting away from it.
The problem was, none of us were going to wash each other's feet. Washing people's feet was so gross that it was something only servants would do—not anyone as important as us. It would have been totally humiliating for any of us to do it. We were like: no way. I am not doing that. We just had to put up with it.
It was going okay—ignoring it at first—until partway through the meal, everything went horribly wrong.
John wrote this in his book:
Jesus knew that the father had put all things under his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God.
What that means is Jesus knew that he was way, way more important than any of us. He was the most important person who had ever lived, because he was the rightful King of the entire universe.
But then he got up from the meal. He took off his outer clothing and wrapped a towel around his waist. We were like: no way—he's not going to, is he? But he was.
After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with the towel wrapped around him.
Imagine that. Jesus himself comes up behind you and starts to wash your horrible, mucky feet. He starts to take all the horrible, disgusting, awful muck off your feet with his own hands.
When Jesus came to Simon Peter, Peter said to him:
Lord, are you going to wash my feet?
Jesus replied:
You do not realize now what I'm doing, but later you will understand.
Peter said:
You shall never wash my feet.
Jesus replied:
Unless I wash you, you can have no part with me.
Like I said, it was the most awkward moment of my entire life. But in the end, I let him.
Can you imagine it? Jesus himself washing your gross, disgusting feet with his own hands. I was just struck by how humble he was.
Here was Jesus—the King of the universe—and he was washing my feet.
Imagine if your head teacher, or your boss at work, came to your house wearing yellow rubber gloves and said: "I'm here to scrub out your dirty, disgusting, horrible toilet." You'd think: What are you doing? Why do they care for me this much? Why do they want to help me this much? Surely they're far too important for that.
But it was actually even more amazing than that. Because Jesus said to us afterwards:
Anyone who has seen me has seen the father.
In other words, he said: "If you want to see what God is like, just look at me. I'm God become a human being."
And that makes what he did with our mucky feet even more amazing. I don't know how you imagine God, but I bet it's not like this. Apparently, this is what God is actually like: so humble, so caring, that he knelt down and washed our mucky feet with his own hands.
Jesus shows us what God is really like.
Hello, everybody. I don't know if you know this about me, but I'm actually really good at football. You can tell—I'm holding a football and I've got a football top on! That's how you know I'm really good at football.
The thing is, I've played football for years, and I have always been one of the best in my team. I'm faster than all the others. When it comes to shooting, they never get it in the goal, whereas I sometimes get it in. When it comes to tackling and running around people—that's what I'm good at. Sometimes I get around two or three people, and they only get around one. So I'm actually really good at football.
When I look around at the other people in my team and compare myself to them, I think: Yeah, I got this. I'm better than average. I'm good at football.
But then, at the start of this year, Alicia joined our team.
Alicia is really good at football. She's so good at all the things that I thought I was good at. She's so good at those things that, in comparison to her, it makes me look not so good.
She's the fastest person I've ever seen. When she shoots, it always goes in the goal—it's amazing. She can pass really quickly and strongly and do all these amazing things. She is so good.
The thing is, I thought I was really good at football and could get away with not practicing, just because when I looked around at the other people in my team, I thought: Yeah, compared to them, I'm pretty good. I'm really quite good.
But when I compare myself to her—someone who's really, really good at football—I've realized I've still got quite a lot to learn. She does. It is a good thing, actually, that she's on our team. We've started winning a lot more games, so that's really good. And she's really nice—she shares the ball with us. She doesn't hog it, so actually we all have a better time.
But the thing is, I've been comparing myself to the rest of the team. And when I compare myself to her, I can see that I'm not quite as good as I thought. But she said she's going to teach me, so I'm going to go off to training now, and she's going to teach me how to be better.
Did you notice that how good Rachel thought she was at football totally depended on who she was comparing herself to?
Something similar happened with Jesus's friends—like Peter and John—that night that John wrote about. We saw that by washing their feet, Jesus shows us what God is really like. But also, by washing his friends' feet, Jesus really shows his friends up.
Imagine his friends that night. As they ate the meal, they would have all been looking around at each other, comparing themselves to each other, and thinking: Well, it can't be that bad that I'm not volunteering to wash other people's feet, because no one else is doing it.
But then, when Jesus volunteered, they would all have known that Jesus was far more important than any of them. And they would have realized: Oh my goodness, I should have volunteered to do this ages ago.
Jesus being so humble showed up how arrogant they were being. Jesus being so generous and loving showed up how selfish they were being.
And actually, Jesus does the same thing to all of us.
Jesus being so amazing shows up how rubbish we are. Jesus being so humble and loving shows up how arrogant and selfish we are.
It's a lot like Rachel and her football. If she looked around at the other not-very-good people on the team, she thought she was pretty good. But when she met someone really good, she realized that she had a lot to learn.
It's like that with all of us. How good we think we are depends on who we're comparing ourselves to.
We all tend to look around us—at the other people in our class, in our family, or maybe in our workplace—and we're all really good at noticing all the ways in which other people are silly, annoying, or bad. So we look at everyone else and think: Wow, compared to them, I'm definitely above average. I'm definitely, on balance, a pretty good person.
That's what we think. But then Jesus turns up.
When Jesus turns up, it turns out that humans were actually made to be loads more loving than we ever thought.
Here's what Jesus says we're all made to be:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
That means we were made to love God completely—to give him everything we have—and to love everyone around us selflessly, to care just as much about them as we care about ourselves.
Jesus said that's what we should all be like all of the time.
Now, we probably all hear that—grown-ups included—and think: Well, that just doesn't sound realistic, does it? No one can actually be that loving, humble, or generous all the time. Come on, it just can't be done.
But that's exactly the point. Jesus shows us up, because Jesus turned up and actually lived like that for his whole life.
When I read one of the accounts in the Bible of Jesus's life—of what he said and what he did and how he treated people—and then I think about how I treat people, I realize that I am nowhere near what I should be. Jesus was showing us what we were actually all made to be like, what we should be like.
So Jesus being so humble and loving shows up how arrogant and selfish we are.
But the great news is: we don't have to hide that. We don't have to be worried or scared, and we don't have to pretend that we're perfect. Because Jesus loves us so much that he wants to forgive us completely.
How can you tell if someone really loves you?
Is it that they are willing to do hard, nasty things to help you? Is it that they forgive you even when you've wronged them really badly? Or is it that they want to spend time with you?
I think that everybody is right. All of those things—especially when they're all together—show us that someone really loves us.
Jesus shows us how much God loves us. Our memory verse this morning is all about how Jesus shows us how much God loves us:
God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
And what Jesus did when he washed his friends' feet was to show them what that really means.
Jesus said to Peter:
Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.
That means: no part with me means you can't have a relationship with me, you can't be my friend, you can't be in my family.
Why did he say that to Peter? I don't think it was just that Peter's feet were so stinky that if he wasn't allowed to wash them, he didn't want to be anywhere near him. I think he meant that the washing was a picture to explain something else.
Because Jesus said to Peter:
You don't realize now what I'm doing, but later you will understand.
What he meant was: This foot washing is a picture to explain what I'm about to do by dying on the cross.
When you know that you've done something wrong, do you feel clean or dirty? When we've done something wrong, we feel dirty.
That's what Jesus is using the dirty feet to explain. The dirt on Peter's feet was a picture of how we've all done things wrong. As we were saying before, Jesus shows us how loving we really should be, and none of us are like that.
So it's not just that sometimes we feel a bit guilty. It's that we actually are guilty before God. And that dirt is a picture of our guilt.
When Jesus saw how dirty his friends' feet were, did he tell them to go away, or did he go to them and wash their feet?
He didn't send them away. He went to them and washed their feet clean.
And that is what Jesus does with our guilt, with all the wrong stuff inside us and all the wrong things that we do. He doesn't get angry at us and shout at us and tell us to go away. He actually moves towards us and offers to forgive us.
But how does that work? How does Jesus forgive us?
When Jesus washed their feet, did Jesus just click his fingers and make the dirt vanish?
No. The dirt didn't just vanish. Jesus got down on his knees, and he got his own hands dirty. Think of that towel that was wrapped around him, the one he was drying their feet with—it would have been totally disgusting at the end. To get them clean, he had to get dirty himself.
And actually, that's how all washing works.
When you wash yourself with water, does the dirt disappear? No. Water cleans us by absorbing all of our dirt into itself and carrying it away.
And that is exactly what Jesus did on the cross for anyone who asked him for forgiveness.
Jesus takes all our dirt, all of our guilt. He takes it off us, and he absorbs it into himself. He lets all that guilt crush him and kill him on the cross. And then he buries it forever. He rises up to new life.
Just like water makes us clean by absorbing our guilt into itself and carrying it away, Jesus forgives us by absorbing all our guilt onto himself and carrying it away forever.
I used to think that was really weird. I didn't get why God couldn't just forgive me. Why would Jesus have to die for that?
But someone explained to me that that's actually how forgiveness always works.
When someone has done something that really upset you, and they are sorry and they ask you to forgive them—is that easy or hard?
It's hard, isn't it? Forgiving someone is painful.
Why? Because when someone does something wrong, they create pain. And we can't just click our fingers and make the pain vanish. The choice we have is: am I going to push all of that pain back onto them—maybe by being mean to them or by freezing them out—or am I going to take that pain onto myself instead so that I can forgive them?
Forgiveness is hard because it's taking the pain that they've created and taking it on yourself rather than pushing it all back on them.
And that is what Jesus does for anyone who asks him to. He takes the pain of everything we've done wrong to other people and to God, and instead of pushing it back onto us, he takes it onto himself.
It's like we've got ourselves horribly dirty. Imagine that one person stands for us and another stands for Jesus.
Because Jesus loves us, he comes and he offers to come to us. He takes all of that dirt off us and he puts it onto himself as he dies on the cross. He suffers all of that pain instead of us.
And so we know that our guilt is finished. It's all dealt with. It all stays buried forever in Jesus's tomb. And then he came back to life so that he can love us forever and we can be with him forever.
So let's come back to our first question, but be more specific: How can we tell that Jesus really loves us?
He did the hardest thing ever. He died on the cross, taking all of our pain instead of us, for our sake. He did that so that he could forgive us completely.
But why? Why did Jesus go through all that?
Well, it's because he wants to spend time with us. He wants to wash us clean and forgive us so that we can be his friends and he can love us all the way through our lives and then forever.
Jesus shows us how much God loves us by dying for us. That is what our memory verse means:
God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Now, here's the final question: Is being a Christian easy or hard?
It's tricky, isn't it? I think the answer is both.
It is easy to be a Christian because Jesus doesn't come to us and say: Right then, you better clean yourself up before you can come to me and we can have a relationship and be friends. No. He says: I see all of your dirt, all of your guilt, and I am going to come to you. And if you'll let me, I will wash you clean myself and forgive you so that we can be friends forever.
So, brothers and sisters—whether you're little or grown-up—we never, ever, ever need to let that feeling of feeling dirty because of what we've done wrong get between us and Jesus. We should never let it trick us into thinking that we can't come to him.
Because actually, if we'll just ask him, Jesus has already suffered all the pain that we've created on the cross. He's dealt with it all already. It's finished, and so it can't hurt him anymore.
And when we do things wrong, all he feels now is that he is eager to come to us and forgive us and wash us clean and be our friends.
So it's easy to be a Christian.
But at the same time, it's really hard to be a Christian. Because asking for forgiveness is hard. It's hard to admit that we need it, to admit that we can't wash ourselves clean, but we need Jesus's help.
For people like me, this is really challenging. I tend to compare myself to all the other people around me rather than to Jesus. And so I just sort of assume that I'm a pretty good person on average. But the truth is, I actually have dirty feet. I really am guilty. I really need to ask Jesus to forgive me.
And I need that every single day. Just as much as I would need to wash my feet every day if I was walking around in sandals in a whole load of poo.
We have to ask Jesus for forgiveness every day.
So it's hard to be a Christian because admitting we need forgiveness is hard. But it's easy to be a Christian because Jesus is always eager to forgive us because he loves us.
Let's talk to God together.
Jesus, thank you so much that you have shown us how much God really loves us by dying for us on the cross. That means that we don't have to ever let our feeling guilty and dirty stop us coming to you, because we know that you love us and you want to forgive us and wash us clean and be our friend forever.
We are so sorry for how often we refuse to ask for forgiveness because we think we're really good. Jesus, forgive us for that. Help us to admit that we need you to forgive us, and to remember that you are eager to forgive us.
Amen.
