He Took The Towel And It Was Worship

She went looking properly, which is what makes the result so discouraging.

This was not a vague feeling. In January she actually did it: she took a week and she watched her own life to see where the sacred part was, because she had begun to suspect there was not one and she wanted to be fair about it.

Monday: work, three loads of washing, her mother's phone call, dinner, an hour of a program she does not even like.

Tuesday to Friday: broadly the same with different meetings in it.

Saturday: the shop, the bathroom, somebody's birthday thing.

Sunday: church, which she went into hopefully and came out of thinking about whether there was anything for the packed lunches.

And at the end of the week she wrote one sentence in the back of a notebook, which was: there is nothing in here.

She is not depressed and she is not faithless. She has believed for twenty years. She simply could not find, anywhere in a full and decent week, a single thing that a reasonable person would call holy.

If you have run that survey, come and sit down. Nothing on this page is going to be added to your week.

On the last night He had, He did the worst job in the room

Here is the scene, and the thing to notice is what He chose to do with the time.

It is the last evening. He knows it. John says so explicitly a few verses earlier: He knew that His hour was come. This is a man with a small number of hours left and complete knowledge of that fact.

And what He does with the time is wash twelve pairs of feet.

If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet.John 13:14

Foot washing was not a gesture in that world. It was the job given to the lowest servant in a household, and there was a good reason for that: those roads were filthy, people walked in open sandals, and animals used the same roads. The water in that bowl at the end was genuinely disgusting.

That is what He did with an evening He would never get back.

And notice He does not say it was a symbol. He does not perform it as an illustration and then move on to the real content. He says: you ought to do this, to each other, and He means the actual task.

So on the last night He had, the holiest man who has ever lived chose the least dignified job available and did it twelve times.

You are looking at the sacred, and it was already a bowl of dirty water, and it always has been. John 13:14 is where that sits, in an evening that could have been spent on anything at all, and the same Spirit who moved John to record the towel rather than the teaching is the one who reaches a woman with a week in a notebook.

The survey was accurate, the instrument was wrong

Now let me deal with the week she wrote down, because her observations are not in question.

She is right that there was nothing set apart in it. There was no moment in that week that looked like anything, and if she had recorded another eight weeks the result would have been identical, and I am not going to tell her she overlooked a sunset.

The trouble is what she was scanning for. She was looking for a category of activity: a thing that is holy the way an object is red, identifiable by inspection.

That category exists in most religions and it does not exist in this one, and John 13 is where it goes to die. Nothing in that room was of a holy type. A basin is a basin. Feet are feet. What made it the most sacred hour in the Gospels was who was doing it and who it was for.

Which means her Monday was not empty. Three loads of washing done for people she loves is structurally identical to the thing in that room, and the reason her survey did not detect it is that her instrument was calibrated to look for a type of activity rather than for a direction.

You have been doing it all along, and it was already the thing, and the survey simply had the wrong setting on it. He promised it, in the sentence about a cup of cold water given in His name not losing its reward (Matthew 10:42), and His Spirit does not sort a week into holy items and ordinary ones.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing in this article asks anything of the people in your house. Nobody has to be told, nothing has to be rearranged, and nothing here should make an evening harder for anybody living with you. A practice that costs the household is the wrong practice.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by what anybody's week contains.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.