And God Gave Them ...

1 Samuel 5:1-12
Holy Humor Sunday
April 12, 2026

William G. Carter  

     When the Philistines captured the ark of God, they brought it from Ebenezer to Ashdod; then the Philistines took the ark of God and brought it into the house of Dagon and placed it beside Dagon. When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD. So they took Dagon and put him back in his place. But when they rose early on the next morning, Dagon had fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD, and the head of Dagon and both his hands were lying cut off upon the threshold; only the trunk of Dagon was left to him. This is why the priests of Dagon and all who enter the house of Dagon do not step on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod to this day.

The hand of the LORD was heavy upon the people of Ashdod, and he terrified and struck them with tumors, both in Ashdod and in its territory. And when the inhabitants of Ashdod saw how things were, they said, “The ark of the God of Israel must not remain with us; for his hand is heavy on us and on our god Dagon.” So they sent and gathered together all the lords of the Philistines, and said, “What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel?”

The inhabitants of Gath replied, “Let the ark of God be moved on to us.” So they moved the ark of the God of Israel to Gath. But after they had brought it to Gath, the hand of the LORD was against the city, causing a very great panic; he struck the inhabitants of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them.

So they sent the ark of the God of Israel to Ekron. But when the ark of God came to Ekron, the people of Ekron cried out, “Why have they brought around to us the ark of the God of Israel to kill us and our people?” They sent therefore and gathered together all the lords of the Philistines, and said, “Send away the ark of the God of Israel, and let it return to its own place, that it may not kill us and our people.” For there was a deathly panic throughout the whole city. The hand of God was very heavy there; those who did not die were stricken with tumors, and the cry of the city went up to heaven.

 

Susan Sparks is a Baptist preacher and one of the funniest people I know. She tells of discovering our scripture text for the first time. It was a hot August Sunday in the Baptist church of her youth. Susan was just seven years old. Like the other overheated people around her, she was fanning herself as the preacher stood up to read the Bible passage for the day. He announced it was a text that tells us what God does to his enemies. And he read from the King James Bible,

It was so that after the Philistines had carried the Ark of the Covenant about, the hand of the Lord was against the city with a very great destruction and he smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had ‘emerods’ in their secret parts. (1 Sam. 5:9, KJV)

Susan said the fans stopped. People looked around. Even though the King James language was somewhat obscure, everybody knew what that meant. ‘Emerods’ was an old word for “hemorrhoids.” God smote them with hemorrhoids. Even though she was only seven years old, even though she had never actually encountered the affliction, she burst out laughing.

Her mother whispered, “Susan Grace! We don’t laugh in church. Jesus doesn’t like it!”[1]

That was the day she discovered that Christian people are just a little too uptight to enjoy what’s in their Bibles, and that they worshiped a God who punished people by giving them hemorrhoids. It was enough to push her to find out what kind of God we really have.

I mean, there is some Jewish humor here. The Rabbis recount the terrible judgment of God. Those blasted Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant. That was the big chest that carried the original Ten Commandments. It was carried on long poles so nobody could actually touch it. The Hebrew people believed it was super-charged with spiritual energy, for it contained the very words of God. It was as if God was present wherever his Commandments were located.

Those nasty Philistines stole the Ark! They stole it. Like the Nazis in an Indiana Jones movie, they took it as a spoil of war. And how did God respond? Not by melting their faces or blasting them with a holy laser beam. The Lord God smote them . . . and gave them hemorrhoids.

It is OK to laugh. That’s what the Jews would do. In Jewish practice, sarcasm is a prophetic trait. If you want to strike out against God’s enemies, make fun of them. You trust God will humiliate them in the most degrading way. In a day before Preparation H, that’s exactly what God did.

Oh, I know: our cultured versions of the Bible have tidied up the language. Three times in 1 Samuel 5, we hear the word “tumors,” not the word “hemorrhoids.” That is an unfortunate translation. The actual Hebrew word refers to small tumors of the tuchas. They are benign yet painful. And they were clearly sufficient to get the Philistines’ attention.

Now, this is a graphic story to make a simple point: the Philistines should not have stolen the Ark. It contained the Covenant between Yahweh and the Jews, the two stone tablets as they were first given to Moses. The Covenant was not intended for the Philistines. It was not a prize from battle or the bottle that holds a good-luck Genie. The covenant was a special pact between redeemed slaves and the God who brought them out of Egypt. Yahweh is the Liberator of Israel, the God who has no equal. You’re not supposed to mess with such a God.

This is what the Philistines discover. They steal the Ark and take it into one of their temples. It was the Temple of Dagon, who was one of their Philistine gods. In the early days, Dagon was the god of fertility, so he had a lot of worshipers. By the time of our account, however, he had been demoted in popular imagination and was regarded as the god of good fishing.

The Philistines had built a house for Dagon and placed a statue of him inside it. That’s where they took Israel’s ark. They put it in the temple of Dagon and stood guard at the door. The next morning, when they opened the door, the statue of Dagon was tipped over on its face. So there! Told you not to mess with Yahweh!

The Philistines tipped their statue back up and shut the door. Next morning, Dagon’s statue was tipped over again – and the hands and the head of the statue were knocked off. See, you nasty Philistines! We told you not to mess with the Lord our God.

Well, that’s about the time that the Philistines started having their posterior problems. The storyteller says, “The hand of the Lord was heavy upon them.” They were terrified and, shall we say, “tumorized.” So, they moved the Ark to another place. They moved it from the town of Ashdod to the city of Gath. A few years later, Gath would become the hometown of Goliath, the giant warrior. The people of Gath said, “Bring the Ark here. We’ll take care of it.” No sooner did it arrive, and they were similarly afflicted. They said, “Get this thing out of here!”

So the Philistines moved the Ark of God from the city of Gath to the city of Ekron. But as they neared that city, the people of Ekron said, “Oh no, you don’t! We don’t want that poisonous artifact around us! Get that thing out of here. Take it back to the people of Israel.” They felt the heavy, heavy hand of God when the Ark was near. In the Philistine city of Ekron, as in Gath and Ashdod, the Ark caused all kinds of painful itching – along with many other indignities. For seven months, the Philistines had the Ark, shuffling it around from place to place. And they came to believe the thing was such a pain in the . . .  well, you know.

So eventually they put it on a cart pulled by two strong cows, put a bit of gold on the cart next to it, and then returned it to the Israelites. With that, their affliction disappeared.

Now, this is a really strange story. Nobody knows quite what to do with it. By the fourth century AD, when the Bible was translated to Latin, St. Jerome added a clarifying note. He said there were rats – that God released rats on the Philistines. That, he explains, was the reason for the so-called tumors and any corresponding illness.

The notion continued, and no less than Martin Luther preached a few sermons on the text. He thundered that the church leaders of Rome were the Bubonic Plague of humanity, and that God was perfectly within his right to afflict all enemies with illness.

The question, of course, is the same question that my friend Susan asked as a seven-year-old: is this the kind of God that we have? Does God send disease and discomfort upon people?

Maybe you remember that Far Side cartoon from many years ago. It’s entitled “God at His Computer.” The white-bearded Deity sits at his desk, computer screen before him. On the screen, a hapless slouch walks down the street. An upright piano dangles over his head. God reaches toward the keyboard to hit the SMITE button.

Is that how God is? Just waiting to hit the button? There are days when it seems so. As guitarist Mark Knopfler famously sang, “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”

There are seasons in our lives when it feels like the hand of God is fiercely against us – when things are not going well, where joy seems depleted, where the bad diagnoses pile up (so to speak), when all our luck is bad luck. Such moments come to us all, and it is worthy to wonder if we are bringing difficulty upon ourselves. Perhaps we are traveling in the wrong direction and God is trying to get our attention.

Yet it’s never as easy as that. In the Gospel text from the 9^th chapter of John, Jesus sees a blind man in Jerusalem. Everybody knows him. He has become a fixture on the street corner, begging for a hand-out from all the passersby. The friends of Jesus ask, “Rabbi, who sinned to make this man blind? Did he do something wrong? Or did his parents grieve the Lord?”

Jesus says, “None of the above. Neither he nor his parents sinned. He was born blind, that’s all. If anything, he is an example of how God works in human lives.” With that, he made a salve, rubbed it on the man’s eyes in the manner of all the healers of that time, and told him to go and wash it away. The blind man came back seeing.

Now, that seems to be the work of God – the work of the kind of God that I want to believe in. Jesus goes to a man blind from birth, doesn’t bother to ask if he wants to be healed, and then heals him anyway. That’s the kind of goodness and mercy that doesn’t wait to be asked. It is aggressive grace. Jesus heals the man almost randomly because that is who he is – the healer – and that is how he works – out of the goodness of God’s heart.

The only way that I can make any sense out of that story where three cities of Philistines get hemorrhoids is that it is a satire – a caustic, sarcastic judgment on anybody who tries to steal God for their own purposes. The Philistines plundered the Ark to get what Israel had, yet they would not live with a covenant that was not intended for them in the first place. They believe if they can grab a hold of Yahweh, then he will be forced to bless them and give them success. It’s the same insistence of many counterfeit pilgrims have, that if they keep repeating the old religious words, it will actually make them religious.

Ah, either we live as if God loves us or we do not. Either we live by the Torah’s instruction to be a blessing to others or we do not. Either we honor God with everything we do, or we end up grabbing for what it not ours.

What the Philistines painfully discovered is that the one true God, the God of Israel, is strangely indifferent to all of our striving. It is possible to grab for a big piece of holiness and miss it entirely. People still do that.

Meanwhile, the deeper purpose of Yahweh is revealed. God shows steadfast love to all who honor him. God remembers those who do the commandments and not merely cart them around. God comes to us in Jesus to forgive all iniquity, to heal every disease, to lift life right out of the Pit. God is the One who crowns people with love and mercy. God alone can satisfy every hungry heart with overwhelming goodness, provided, of course, that the heart is willing to be satisfied with what God provides.

So that’s it. I’ve been trying to figure out how to end a sermon like this, but I don’t know how. I’m just going to stop. Some of the Philistines have been sitting for entirely too long. Now it’s time for all of us to stand and sing.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Susan Sparks, Laugh Your Way to Grace (Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2009) 32.

They Did Not Yet Understand

John 20:1-10
Easter
April 5, 2025
William G. Carter

 

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’s head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.  Then the disciples returned to their homes.

 

This is the story of how it all began. Behind the pretty flowers, beyond the joyful music, beneath the alleluias is the discovery that Jesus is not among the dead. His tomb had been opened. The stone had been rolled away. Jesus wasn’t there. He wasn’t where everybody expected him to be.

 

It was shocking news. It prompted a lot of running around. Mary Magdalene ran to Simon Peter. Simon Peter and another ran to the tomb. It became a footrace. Who can get there first? The unnamed disciple bends down, looks in the grave, sees the grave clothes, but no Jesus. Peter arrives, a bit breathless, and barges in. He sees the grave clothes – and realizes they have been rolled up. Then the other one goes in, sees and “believes.” That is, he thinks it could be true.

 

For John spells it out. “They did not understand.” Not yet.

 

To be fair, who does understand? Think of someone you loved, someone you trusted, someone who was snatched away from you. Someone who died and was buried. And you discovered, much to your shock and dismay, their grave was busted open. Would you immediately rush to believe your loved one was alive again? Probably not.

 

Mary Magdalene says, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb.” Who are the “they”? First people to accuse would be Joseph of Arimathea and the pharisee Nicodemus. They were the ones who put him in the tomb. Both were “secret disciples,” afraid of the religious authorities. Did they change their minds? Get bribed? Mary doesn’t know. She’s traumatized, so she figures there must be some conspiracy. That’s a completely understandable reaction to the trauma. Try to make some sense of it. Create a different story. She didn’t understand. Not yet.

 

And the two men, Simon Peter and the other one. They seem more interested in racing one another than figuring out what happened. An adolescent response, equally a distraction. “I ran here faster than he did.” OK – but to see what? An empty tomb?

 

Taken by itself, an empty tomb is underwhelming. It doesn’t mean much. As Frederick Buechner wrote,

 

You can’t depict or domesticate emptiness. You can’t make it into pageants and string it with lights. It doesn’t move people to give presents to each other or sing old songs. It ebbs and flows all around us, the Eastertide. Even the great choruses of Handel’s Messiah sound a little like a handful of crickets chirping under the moon.[1]

 

So, the tomb was empty. They did not understand. Many people do not understand. Some of them populate the pages of the Gospel of John. Nicodemus did not understand when Jesus spoke of the Spirit blowing freely like the wind. The Samaritan woman did not understand when he explained that God is not bound to her religion. The people around the miracle pool in chapter five, they didn’t understand that God would heal apart from their religious rules.

 

And the disciples, those closest to Jesus, there was plenty they didn’t understand. They didn’t understand when he chose a donkey on Palm Sunday (12:16). They didn’t understand when he knelt to wash their feet (13:7). So, they certainly didn’t understand when he said early on that the temple of his body would be raised on the third day (2:22).

 

On Easter, three friends race to the empty tomb. John tells us they did not yet understand “the scripture.” OK, which scripture? John doesn’t tell us. We have to go looking for it. That sounds confusing, too, until we realize he is giving us a lesson in spiritual education. The lesson is called “faith seeking understanding.” It’s been called that since the medieval scholar Anselm of Canterbury, who cribbed it from Saint Augustine. The lesson goes like this: God does something, you perceive it, and then you seek out the meaning of it all.

As Anselm confessed, “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand.”[2] This impulse prompted the early circle of Christ followers to hit the books. Specifically, the books of their Bible, which was the Hebrew Bible.

They went to the prophet Hosea, chapter six, verse two, where it was written: “After two days, he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live in his presence.” And they discussed among themselves, “Is the prophet speaking of himself, or about us, or is he giving us a clue about Jesus?” And they left the conversation open.

 

Then they went to the scrolls of Isaiah. There are a lot of words in those scrolls, but they found a long poem in chapters 52 and 53. Much of it sounded like the crucifixion, and then they found this verse: “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see shall prolong his days.”[3] And they discussed among themselves. The servant of God will suffer for our sins, yet he has a future. And they kept thinking about this.

 

And then, somebody remembered the story of Jonah. Remember that story? Jonah was swallowed by a big fish and stayed in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.[4] And they remembered that Jesus quoted that story, and had told them, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”[5] It was an odd analogy, but Jesus had said it. So, they kept thinking about this.

 

And then they opened the hymnal. You remember what their hymnal was? The Book of Psalms. And they turned to Psalm 110, and the first verse: “The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” With this, they looked at one another. That sounds like Jesus: raised to the right hand of the Father until everything acknowledges his rule. That verse became the most quoted Hebrew verse in the Christian scriptures.

 

And then they went to the hymnal again. They remembered a verse that explained to them the empty tomb. Psalm 16, verse 10: “For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, nor will you let your holy one see decay.” There is no clearer revelation of the God of life. No greater confirmation that love holds us even beyond death.

 

The point is any of those verses could spark interest. Yet when we start holding them together, the case becomes clearer. Jesus, the Holy One, had to be raised from the dead. God was not going to let him slip away. Jesus was too good, too true, too righteous to be abandoned by the God who gives life. And when you understand this, it becomes the key to an otherwise locked door.

 

And the witness of our faith is that it was the plan of God to lay our sins on his shoulders, where they could be taken away. And then God raised him to life so that he could continue to give us life. All we have to do is trust that. And if we read the scriptures deeply, they will confirm what we trust to be true.

 

It’s the difference between knowing and knowing. The New Testament uses two different words. “Eido” is knowing a fact. “Ginosko” is having a relationship. We can know a tomb has been cracked open (that’s “eido,” knowledge of the head). And we can know the One who has been raised from the dead (that’s “ginosko,” wisdom of the heart).

 

We can see the flowers blooming and say it’s spring again. That’s the knowledge of the head. And we can understand that life is the power of God, grace is the glue for the universe, love is the ultimate destination. That’s the knowledge of the heart. It is the move between seeing an open tomb and knowing the One who is now free from it. And then we understand Easter.

 

Someone was telling about pastor he knows named Mark. A man in Mark’s church was dying, and he asked Mark to stay close to his teenage son following his passing. So, the pastor reached out to the boy. They had an awkward conversation over a couple of Cokes. The teenager asked, “How will I know my dad will be OK after he died.” Mark fumbled for a response, then blurted out, “I promise you will know.” Immediately he regretted saying that.

 

They gather for a private graveside service after the father died. A butterfly landed on the casket. Mark said, “I made eye contact with the son as if to say, ‘Hey look! I told you you’d know.’” The boy looked back at the pastor with absolute scorn. He was probably thinking, “A bug landed on my dad’s casket, and you think it means something? You’re disgusting.’” When the service was over, the boy bolted and walked away. No words.

 

Mark went home. He was beating himself up from the gaffe. The phone rang. It was the boy’s mother. She said, “Please come to our house right now. There’s nothing wrong, but you need to get over here.” 

 

When he got to their home, she took him downstairs to the boy’s room. He could hear sobbing – and then laughing, and again. They opened the door and the room was filled with butterflies. The boy was sitting on the bed laughing and crying at the same time. Butterflies continued to fly in through an open window.

 

We could take that as fact of nature, perhaps even a coincidence. But pastor Mark spoke in faith when he told the boy, “You will know.” By faith and by trust and by living into the light God has given us, the boy was free.[6] Even the darkness of grief could not extinguish the light.

 

Coming to the empty tomb of Jesus, “they did not yet understand.” But in time, their faith would be informed by scripture. And they would know, in their heads and in their hearts, that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead. May that be so for all of us. Happy Easter.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Frederick Buechner, whistling in the Dark: An ABC Theologized (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 2008), 42.

[2] Anselm of Canterbury, "Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam." Online at https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/anselmproslogion.html#capi

[3] Isaiah 53:10.

[4] Jonah 1:17.

[5] Matthew 12:40.

[6] Told by Mark Yaconelli in https://pcusa.org/news-storytelling/news/2026/3/31/churches-can-change-their-stories-anxious-hopeful

Unless I Wash You

John 13:1-11
Maundy Thursday
April 2, 2026

William G. Carter  

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already decided that Judas son of Simon Iscariot would betray Jesus. And during supper  Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from supper, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.”

It took some preparation, but all of you made it to worship tonight. Even in the evening shadows, it looks like you all clean up pretty well. There’s a good chance some of you took a shower today. If not today, sometime over the past couple of days. Or you took a bath. If nothing else, you scrubbed with a washcloth and ran a comb through your hair. Or should have. After all, you’re out in public. Others will see you. Or sniff you. It’s good to be clean. So, one way or another, we wash up.

But when was the last time somebody washed you? I’m not looking for answers, just a moment of reflection. Not when was the last time you washed yourself, but when was the last time somebody washed you?

It is a deeply personal question. Most of the time we take responsibility for our own appearances. Unless you have a masseuse or makeup artist, you do your own work. We don’t want a stranger touching us, much less wiping us down. It’s uncomfortable to entertain the idea.

For over three decades, I’ve gotten my hair cut at the same establishment by the same haircutter. Before she cuts, she rinses my head. “Is this too warm?” she asks, usually a bit late. Then she puts three squirts of shampoo into her palms and rubs it in. She’s quite enthusiastic about it. Her fingers do the walking. Then there’s a rinse, this time too cold, and she begins again. After all this time, I trust her. Even if I had already shampooed myself two hours earlier, I welcome her scrubbing. It’s the only time all month that I have let somebody wash me.

It can be a deeply personal moment, if only because I’ve seen some of you there, too. We all have our secrets. Who is getting touched up? Who is naturally curly and who is not? Who is getting something covered up? And I could go on but won’t. The point is, if you let somebody wash you, or wash some part of you, you have allowed them in pretty close. They know you pretty well.

This is a way into this strange moment in the Gospel of John. Jesus washes his disciples. Like so many episodes in this Fourth Gospel, he does not ask permission. He just does it. And it is enough for him to wash their feet. Those feet have been trudging along dusty streets. Those feet were most likely in sandals, not high-top sneakers. Some of those feet have callouses, bunions, or unkept toenails. Jesus sees each one. He comes close enough to scoop up soapy water in his hands, pour it upon the toes, wipe them with a towel. Rinse, repeat. Then he moves to the next one in the circle. It is slow work. He is not in a hurry.

Simon Peter was flinching. This is not the work for his Master. It is more appropriate for a house servant. As someone reminds us, the roadsides were not paved with asphalt. There were animals underfoot. There’s no telling what you might have stepped in or what needed to be scraped away. Simon says, “Jesus, I don’t want you to do this.” It was filthy, disgusting, ugly work. Jesus did it anyway. Simon wiggled his soapy toes and said it again, “Master, please stop.” It was dirty work, too intimate, too invasive, too close.

We heard what Jesus said. “If I don’t wash you, you don’t have a piece of me. If I don’t scrub you, you can’t participate in me. If I don’t rinse everything away from you, we can’t live with one another.” By now, I hope we understand he’s not talking about feet. He is talking about the relationship he has initiated with everyone he loves.

In his Gospel book, John reports this relationship in a variety of ways. Sometimes he uses the verb “abide,” as in to stay with Jesus and have him stay with you. Sometimes he speaks in terms of intimate knowledge, not merely “head knowledge” but “heart knowledge,” a spiritual intimacy as with soul mates. And sometimes, he speaks of the power of grace, which for Jesus is the cleansing power of God. He speaks the truth that sets us free. He invites us into his complete acceptance. He lays down his life for all whom he loves. That’s grace.

And at each move, it is his work. His initiative. To paraphrase what he says to Simon Peter, “If you let me do this, if you permit me to cleanse you, you are living with me.” That’s his mission. That’s his work.

Our work is to welcome his work. To allow him to come that close, just as some of us let haircutters wash our hair. There will always be distractions, evasions, and excuses.

“Lord, this is beneath you. We don’t expect you to do this.”

“Lord, we don’t want you to get too close.

“Lord, we are ashamed of where our feet have wandered.

“Lord, we can manage this on our own.”

Yet Jesus insists. This is his mission. It is the reason he has been sent by the Father. If he doesn’t let him wash us, it will not get done. And as we will hear tonight, one of his friends has had his feet washed, but refuses to be clean. As someone comments, “To be unclean is not to be unwashed, for Judas (Iscariot) belongs to the circle of those whose feet Jesus washed. Rather, to be unclean is to turn away from union and intimacy with Jesus… In order to have one’s share with Jesus, one must choose to accept the gesture of love that Jesus makes in the foot washing.”[1]

The Bible says, “He loved his own… he loved them to the end.” Tonight, after supper, the shadows darken and the story unfolds. The harmony will become dense, even painful. Yet the refrain continues: “Jesu, Jesu, fill us with your love, show us how to serve the neighbors we have from you.” No matter what happens, his cleansing love has the last word. It always does. It always will. Because his love is the love from God, the love that sent Jesus into the world, the love that sends him back to us again, the love that restores our souls.

Are you going to let him love you so much that he will wash you clean?

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Gail O’Day, The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke, John (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995) p. 724.