All clean

There is a love out there that is completely wrong, completely shocking. It’s outrageous, it’s unwarranted. It’s extravagant, excessive. It is definitely not deserved. It’s not even asked for. Quite the opposite, you instinctively revolt against it, you insist that it’s taken away, or at least lessened.

            “No, teacher, not you…!”

This is up close and personal. It’s your turn. He settles down at your feet, gentle, unassuming. You try and meet his gaze but it won’t work. He is about to perform the most demeaning act of service that you could possibly imagine. More than that, he is about to humble himself to the lowest point that he could ever imagine, knowing full well who he is, and what’s ahead of him this very night. Knowing full well who you are, and that it is you who are responsible for all he will go through.

So you can’t quite manage it. You’re simply not able to meet the eyes of the greatest teacher and the greatest lover, because you’ve been shaken out of all “ability”, shaken to the core by the brutal inappropriateness of this love. It’s disproportionate. You do not deserve it. Fair enough perhaps. Easy enough to say. Of course you never deserve the blessing of unexpected love. But this is different, this is fundamentally unfitting. - it’s just plain wrong, disturbingly wrong, because you feel with a rising sense of shame and panic that you fully deserve the polar opposite. By rights, by nature, you are an object of wrath. Somehow, the unassuming yet magnetic presence of Jesus at your feet convinces you of that. Despite your carefully polished veneer of polite respectability, you are the enemy, you’re the rebellious child, when all is stripped away there is nothing good to be found in your heart. You are a perpetrator of wrong, of brokenness, a constructor of pathetic cracked cisterns that will never hold water, just lies, hurt, death - ultimately. You are not even remotely supposed to be in the same room as this man. And so a deadening sense of defeat roots you to your chair even as you wish that the floor could somehow open up and swallow you whole. You long for some form of escape, however futile...

But that’s the thing. He knows that you will always struggle to grasp “the full extent of his love.” That is the entire point of this, his parting lesson. “He knew that the Father had put all things under his power, that he had come from God and was returning to God, so…”

He shows you his love, one foot at a time. And as soon as he has your first foot, the only thing you want to do is get it out of his hands.

            “No!” – the cry comes straight from a deep-rooted outrage at this undoing of the right, the natural order of things. This is one more superb mismanagement of the Mega-King, Messiah job description… He is turning the world upside down. He is turning your world inside out, starting with your carefully insulated heart, cynicism-coated as it is to steel itself against some inevitable disappointment. He is washing your feet. It is weirdly intimate, profoundly personal. This is your “Lord and Teacher” showing you that he loves you, with a perfect love that casts out all fear, a love that heals you even as it tears you apart. A love that fills you up to bursting point even as it shows you that your own heart is empty in itself, is nothing by itself. His love brings a healing so deep that your heart is left scarred by the impact.

It is deeply uncomfortable for you to accept this love. This is awkward, amazing, liberating grace.
That is, awkward for you but perfectly suited to Him. And so you come to accept that this is a love that silences all your objections, all your apparently reasonable projects of self-protection. It shatters your default drive towards self-preservation at all costs. This love shows you who you are, and who He is, and the utter implausibility of Him ever associating with you. But somehow you cannot pull your foot out of his hands, and He will never let anyone get you out of his hands. It is ridiculously unlikely but it’s completely undeniable:

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

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