What Jesus Knew and What We Know

A sermon on John 13:1-17, 31b-35

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Art:  Lavement des pieds de Saint Pierre par Jésus; Artist unknown. Public Domain]

One of the self-care activities that has been bringing me a sense of accomplishment and grounding in recent months has been practicing Italian through a language-learning app.

(Fun fact: building competence in an activity that interests you can contribute significantly to mental health!)

Anyway, the app I use helps me to build my proficiency through themed units, and the recent lessons have included a lot of exercises that distinguish between the different Italian words for “know” apply in different situations.

To describe a fact that is known, you use sapere, but if it is a person who is known, you use conoscere.

Maybe this linguistic emphasis on what is “known” is the reason why I noticed a repetition on this same theme in tonight’s gospel.

Over and over in this scene John makes a point of drawing our attention to what is and is not known.

At first, he focuses our attention on Jesus and his unusual foreknowledge: all the things that Jesus knew which informed his unexpected actions.

Now, I have never really given much attention to these editorial asides about what Jesus knew before this week, but now that they have drawn my attention, I can see why they are relevant to the story.

John opens the scene by telling us that Jesus “knew his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father.”

It’s a knowing the reminds us of the impermanence of Jesus’s time on earth and his awareness of that impermanence: His death is approaching, but so is his release.

That certainty about where he is headed gives a very different reference point than the classic question: “If you knew you only had one more day on earth, how would you spend it.”

In the hypothetical, the focus is all on the final hours of life, but John reminds us that Jesus has a different viewpoint. He knows what he is going TO, not just what he is leaving.

In such a position, we might expect him to be starting to pull away, to brace himself for the trauma of his arrest and execution by detaching from his earthly relationships and setting his sights on his return to glory.

But John tells us that Jesus does the opposite: “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

Even knowing his earthly time was almost over, he did not pull back. Instead, he leaned in. He loved his people to the end.

Next, John describes Jesus’ knowledge that God “had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God.”

It’s a reminder of Jesus’s status and power that encompasses his heavenly home, but this knowledge adds his authority over “all things.”

As the kids would say these days, that’s quite a flex.

But Jesus’s actions immediately following the claim that he knows his own omnipotence is the OPPOSITE of a flex.

He interrupts his meal to kneel and his followers’ feet and wash them.

The action of a servant. Of one without power, whose status in society is predicated on those whom they serve.

The action in itself sends a profound message, but that message is underlined by what John says about Jesus’s knowledge… knowing that he was above everyone Jesus set that aside to offer an example of the love that he was committed to embodying to the end.

And then, as Jesus argues with Peter about why this act of love and service is necessary (because Peter finds it incongruous too), John makes his last pronouncement about what Jesus knew: “He knew who was to betray him.”

It’s offered as a tagged-on explanation for why Jesus talked about not all of the disciples being clean, but it’s a profound claim.

While Jesus is leaning into love for his last hours of life with his disciples…

while he is setting aside his own power and glory and humbling himself by washing his followers’ feet…

while knowing exactly who he is and what is coming and doing all of this…

he also knows that one of those whose feet he is bathing in love is about to betray him.

That is a flex, I think: a flex of just how serious Jesus is about the example he is setting, about the kind of love he is modelling.

It is a love that will not be deterred by either his inestimable worth or by the unworthiness of the one who is offered love.

And Jesus is setting this example in full awareness of just how profoundly counter-intuitive it is.

But before we get to Jesus’s command that we follow his astonishing example, Jesus has a few things to say about what the others in the scene do, or do not know.

When Peter objects to Jesus washing his feet, Jesus comments that Peter does not know now what Jesus is doing, but later he will understand.

It’s a call to learn into trust:

to accept the discomfort of being a bit confused by the reversal of his expectations because it will make sense in the end, once he gets to see the bigger picture.

Next Jesus asks a question of the whole assembled group: do you know what I have done for you?

He is pushing them to confront the discomfort of what has just happened… to admit that this feels wrong to them.

He reminds them that they know he is “above them” according to human rules… they are right to call him teacher and Lord…

and because of that he also has the right to challenge their assumptions by setting them a disorienting and unexpected example.

The disciples may not understand what is happening, but the do know… they know who Jesus is, and they know what he just did.

So, when Jesus issues them a “new commandment” it is crystal clear what he is commanding his followers to do, even if there are lots of arguments they could offer about how this does not make sense.

This is not about what they UNDERSTAND; it’s about what they KNOW, and – I have to say it – it’s about what WE know as well:

Jesus – one who has the authority to do so – issues an unequivocal mandate (that’s what Maundy means, by the way, “mandate”)

And this is the mandate: you are to love each other just as I have loved you… meaning you are to love each other to extremes that you will find ludicrous.

You are to love each other with acts of service, in ways that cost you status and power…

You are to love each other when you have your own problems to deal with…

You are to love each other even when you know that the love, and care, and service you are giving is being given to someone you have a right to rebuke and scorn.

Because all of that describes the way that Jesus loved his disciples on the night he issues this command.

And even if we don’t understand why, he commands us to lean into uncomfortable trust and love each other anyway, just as he loved us.

This account is not the first time in his ministry that Jesus talked about the command to love.

When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus named two: To love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

And when challenged to define the neighbor we are called to love, Jesus named the Samaritan (an enemy to his listeners), effectively saying there are no limits to the category.

But here, Jesus describes the call to love as a new commandment because of how he is anchoring this mandate.

He is anchoring it in what his followers KNOW.

And here that Italian distinction is actually super helpful, because really he is anchoring it not in WHAT we know but in WHO we know.

We know HIM. We know how He loved.

And if Jesus is our guide… if we take seriously the command to love the way that he loved:

With humility, and self-sacrifice, and forgiveness, and trust in a way of living in love that violates all the rules of self-protection and reasonableness that would try to argue us out of following Jesus…

If we truly love the way that he loved…

Then by this everyone truly will know that we are his disciples.

And then , the name of Christian will again represent the way of love.

Thanks be to God.