Jesus, Our Servant King, Thursday, Holy Week 2025

Passover week, this Holy Week, I've been thinking about Jesus' last supper with His followers. They had all come to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, The feast of Unleavened Bread, a precious and sacred remembrance of God's mighty deliverance from their slavery to the Egyptians. A slaughtered lamb, of each home with blood painted over the doorframe, kept God's Angel of Death from entering into their home and killing their child (Exodus 12). A foreshadowing of Christ's blood that saves us from Yahweh's holy judgment of our sin.

What must have Jesus been thinking as he poured the crimson red wine into the cups at the Passover dinner in the upper room where he sat with His disciples? As the wine spilled out of the earthenware jar into the clay cups resting on the wooden table did he have visions of His blood gushing out from His shredded body in the next hours to come? The time had come. Jesus knew.

Jesus washed our feet before he died to cleanse our hearts forever. What love is this?

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Jesus' humility stares my spirit of entitlement in the face and all I can do is bow my head in repentance and gratitude for His mercy and grace. Jesus was the perfect Lamb, the final Lamb - He knew He was about to be slain and poured out for the sins of the world. For me. For you.

John 13:1-7 MSG

Just before the Passover Feast, Jesus knew that the time had come to leave this world to go to the Father. Having loved his dear companions, he continued to love them right to the end. It was suppertime. The Devil by now had Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, firmly in his grip, all set for the betrayal.

Jesus knew that the Father had put him in complete charge of everything, that he came from God and was on his way back to God. So he got up from the supper table, set aside his robe, and put on an apron. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the feet of the disciples, drying them with his apron. When he got to Simon Peter, Peter said, “Master, you wash my feet?”

Jesus answered, “You don’t understand now what I’m doing, but it will be clear enough to you later.”

I can't help but imagine that Jesus saw the dirty, calloused, cracked feet of the disciples as I see a dear baby's feet - needy for provision, limited. Jesus knows our limitations. He knows that we are incapable of keeping the law. Jesus wasn't resentful as He prepared to bear the weight of the sin of the world and be utterly crushed by the wrath of God on our behalf - He was compassionate and merciful. What humility. What love is this?

Jesus washed our feet before He died to cleanse our hearts forever...and He loved and cherished us deeply as He did it. What is this love?

The hope of a Christian and life's expectations are not interchangeable. We expect certain circumstances to go this way or that way. But what happens when expectations are not met in life? If certain circumstances never change - do I still declare Jesus as my certain hope?

Jesus meets us with a certain hope despite expectations fulfilled and expectations unmet.

The Passover Lamb is sacrificed and the altar is soaked in blood which atones finally and fully for every sin, past and future. This blood-drenching atonement for our sin satisfies eternity past. The Passover Lamb laid down His life when He could have easily called more than 12 legions (1 legion was approximately 6,000) of angels to save him (Matthew 26:53). Jesus was not wrestled down to the altar as He strained His neck and arched His back trying to run free from the hell awaiting Him. He did not try and escape the wine of His holy blood being poured out for us, the undeserving. No. He walked up the altar steps and laid Himself down as a love offering because He adores us with a white-hot passion.

The Passover Lamb washed the feet of the sheep He came to shepherd with a hope that could never be tampered with by difficult earthly circumstances.

He washed our feet before He died to cleanse our hearts forever...Jesus looked out, not in.

The hope of the final Passover Lamb is a hope that is guarded and protected eternally by our Father in Heaven (1 Peter 1:5). Your circumstances can't alter that HOPE.

The Lord broke bread with His disciples at the Passover meal and remembered His deliverance of them from Egypt. Exodus was a picture of the deliverance He would bring our souls in the very next hours ahead...a deliverance that would crush Him in every way.

He washed our feet before He died to cleanse our hearts forever.

Jesus looked out, not in.

Whether that circumstance you have been praying for changes or not - the broken marriage, the wayward child, the resentful friend, the broken heart, the sick body, the financial strain - keep praying and resting in the hope of Jesus, which is certain, because it is being guarded and held in safe-keeping by God the Father.

We can abide in His love, the love of the upper room wash basins, the love of Calvary, and in so doing, perhaps we can wash the feet of those in our spheres because the Savior's love is the only thing powerful enough to cause us to look out and not in.

Let it be so, Lord. Amen.