[PASSION] 2. Foot Washing (POJ 5.1)

Seeing Jesus with Paul Miller

Paul, Jon, and Liz continue their discussion of Jesus’ humility, looking at the foot washing scene in John 13.

"This scene reads like a YouTube video. John gives us every move of Jesus, and the effect of it is riveting… especially since he does it all in silence. John's writing this probably 60, 50 years later, from what Eusebius tells us, and he remembered every single move Jesus made because he wasn't talking. It just sealed it in his mind – like the scene itself was a visualization of the mind of Christ."

"Foot washing is Jesus’ glory. It’s where his beauty shines."

"Jesus is acting out his atonement. He's showing us that the example of his dying love leads to the atonement. It's a beautiful balance between what we might call 'the example of Jesus' and 'the atonement of Jesus.' And it's just so important how we constantly need to bring them together and not pull them apart. Liberalism tends to sit on the example and our conservative churches, while they really do both, tend to weigh the atonement above the example. And it’s true, you never get at the example unless you have the atonement. But that makes it easy to miss the foot washing. But the sheer physicality of the gospels shows us Jesus' beauty."