“With a Towel and a Basin” - Fr. Pete's sermon for Maundy Thursday (Witnesses Along the Way series), April 2, 2026

John 13:1-17

I thought I knew how this night would go. Passover always follows a rhythm. You prepare the room. You gather at the table. You recline together and remember the old story of deliverance. You bless the bread and share the cup, telling again how God brought our ancestors out of slavery and into freedom. That’s Passover, and we know it well. 
 
After everything that had happened earlier this week—the crowds in the streets shouting Hosanna and throwing cloaks and palm branches, the tension building in the city—I expected our meal to carry a special weight. Perhaps he would explain what’s coming next. Maybe he would tell us how the kingdom he’d been preaching about would finally come.

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After everything that had happened earlier this week—the crowds in the streets shouting Hosanna and throwing cloaks and palm branches, the tension building in the city—I expected our meal to carry a special weight. Perhaps he would explain what’s coming next. Maybe he would tell us how the kingdom he’d been preaching about would finally come.

I expected him to teach us. I did not expect him to kneel in front of us.

We had barely settled around the table when he stood up. I thought he was about to begin teaching. Instead, he removed his outer robe. Then he wrapped a towel around his waist. Slowly, deliberately, he poured water into a basin.

At first no one spoke. The room felt suddenly smaller, as if we had all been pulled into something we did not yet understand. Then he knelt.

This was not how teachers behaved. This was not how rabbis treated their disciples. This was the work of a servant—the kind of work usually given to the lowest person in the household. But we had no servant present. So he began to wash our feet.

I watched as he took the feet of the first disciple in his hands. The road dust colored the water. His hands moved gently, carefully, as though this small act mattered more than any talk he might have given. The room remained silent except for the sound of splashing water.

One by one he moved from person to person. I could see the discomfort on the others’ faces. No one knew how to respond. Gratitude felt too simple. Protest felt too bold.

When he reached Peter, the silence broke. “Lord,” Peter said, pulling his feet away, “you will never wash my feet.”

It sounded like reverence, but it was really resistance. Because if the teacher knelt like this, if the master took the place of a servant, then everything we thought we understood about authority would collapse.

Jesus looked up at him calmly. “Unless I wash you,” he said, “you have nothing to do with me.” That stopped Peter immediately. He swung from protest to eagerness in a heartbeat: “Then not my feet only, but my hands and my head as well.”

But, bless my friend Peter, that was not the rabbi’s point. The point was not the washing itself. The point was what the washing revealed.

When he had finished, he returned to the table and looked at us quietly. “Do you know what I have done to you?”

Of course we wanted to say yes. We wanted to believe we understood. But the truth was that we were still trying to make sense of what we had just experienced.

“You call me Teacher and Lord,” he said, “and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

It would have been easier if the lesson ended there—if this moment remained something beautiful but unique, something we could admire but not imitate. But he did not leave it that way. “I have set you an example,” he said, “that you also should do as I have done to you.” That was the moment I realized how unsettling this night truly was.

Because it meant that love was no longer just something we spoke about. It was something we were meant to do. Not in grand gestures or heroic acts, but in the small, humbling ways that bring us close enough to one another to see the dust on each other’s feet.

Later in the meal he broke the bread and passed the cup, and those words felt familiar to us. We’d blessed bread before. We’d shared meals together many times. But now I see the basin came first for a reason.

Before the bread. Before the cup. Before the command to remember. He knelt.

That is how he chose to show us the heart of God. Not by claiming power, but by giving himself away. Not by standing above us, but by kneeling among us.

Now we remember that moment: the towel, the basin, the quiet shock of seeing our Lord take the place of a servant. But we also remember the words that followed.

“I give you a new commandment,” he said, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

The basin was not only an example. It was a revelation. It showed us what that love looks like. Love that kneels. Love that serves. Love that gives itself away without counting the cost.

And then he said something even more unsettling:
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Not by our words. Not by our certainty. Not by our strength. But by a love that looks like this.

Because once you have seen the Son of God with a towel around his waist, washing the dust from the feet of his friends, you can never again pretend that love is simple, or distant, or safe. You begin to understand that this is the shape of the kingdom he came to reveal— a kingdom where greatness kneels, where authority serves, and where love, poured out without reserve, becomes the clearest sign that God is near.