Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 272 · September 29
Lord and Master
“If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.”
Thou shalt never wash my feet. Peter says it, and it is the only reaction in that room with any honesty in it.
John sets a strange sentence in front of it. Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God; He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. The knowing and the towel sit in one sentence, joined by a semicolon. Judas has already decided. The water goes into the basin, and the man carrying it round the table is the one John has just told you owns everything.
Luke reports what else was going on at that meal, and it explains the dirty feet. And there was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest. Twelve men are arguing about rank, which means twelve men have come in off the road and nobody has picked up the jug, because picking up the jug settles the argument in the wrong direction. So he picks it up. When Peter refuses, the answer skips humility altogether: If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.
Then the instruction, worded as a debt. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. Both titles stay in; the towel does not cancel them. Three lines later comes the promise, small and exact. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them. Happy is fastened to the doing, and the verse goes out of its way to say that knowing these things is not where it lands. You have known this one for years.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 272 is A Living Hope (1 Peter 1:3-4).