The Basin His Son Is Holding

The basin is the green enamel one from the back porch and his son has filled it too full, the way he fills everything too full, and there is a wet ring on the tiles already.

The kitchen is warm. The kettle has just gone off. There is a towel over the arm of the chair, folded, and it is the good towel from the airing cupboard, which means his son went looking for it rather than grabbing the one on the hook.

His son is thirty-four and is crouched down on the tiles with one hand on the rim of the basin, looking up, waiting.

He has said no twice already. Not sharply. He said it the way you say it, with a laugh in it. Get away. And then, I am not that far gone yet. His son laughed too, both times, and did not move, and is still there on the floor with his knee in the wet ring.

The truth is that he cannot reach his own feet anymore. Not properly. He can get to them if he sits sideways and holds the table and takes his time, and he has been taking his time about it for eleven months and telling nobody. It is not the reaching. It is that somebody has noticed the reaching.

And it is this floor. That is the thing he cannot get past. On this floor, on tiles that were newer then, he sat on a stool with this boy between his knees and taught him to tie a lace, and it took a whole winter, and the boy cried about it twice. He knows exactly where they were. About four feet to the left of where the basin is now.

He has a third refusal ready. It is a good one. It is funny, and it will land, and his son will laugh and take the basin to the sink and pour it away, and they will have tea and talk about the car, and nothing will have happened, and everybody will be comfortable.

Somewhere behind him his daughter-in-law says something at the table and laughs at her own thing.

He is looking at the top of his son's head. There is a bit of gray at the crown that he had not seen before, because he has never once looked down on him from this angle.

The water is going to go cold.

The most loving refusal in the room

Let me name it before I say one word about strength, because you will not name it and the joke you have ready certainly will not.

You are not proud in the ordinary way. You have spent your whole life on the giving end and you are good at it, and the reason you cannot sit still while somebody kneels on your floor is not that you think you are above it. It is that you have never once been on this side and you do not know the etiquette. There is no move. You know exactly what to do when you are the one with the basin. You have no idea what a man does with his hands when he is the one in the chair.

Nothing is wrong with you. Nobody ever taught you this half, because nobody teaches it. It is only ever learned in a kitchen, badly, on an ordinary evening, by a person who is not ready.

Now here is the line I want under you.

Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.John 13:8

Hear how good Peter's refusal is. That is not a man being awkward. By every rule Peter has, he is right. Foot washing was the work of the lowest servant in a house, the job nobody gave to anyone they respected, and the man kneeling in front of him is his Lord. Peter's never is made of reverence. It is the most loving sentence anybody says in that room all evening.

And Jesus does not argue with the etiquette. He does not say Peter has misunderstood the social order. He says one thing, and it is about what the refusal costs: if I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.

Not punishment. Share. A part with. Fellowship runs both directions and Peter has been trying to hold it open on one side only, and Jesus tells him plainly that a door held open on one side is not open.

You are welcome on the receiving side of the room, and you were never meant to live your whole life on one side of it. That is not me being soft with you. It is what is written in John 13:8, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about a basin in Jerusalem and sets it down on a kitchen floor with a wet ring on the tiles.

You have a part with Him that includes being served, and it is already yours and does not need earning back. The written word puts the towel in the Lord's own hands, and the Spirit of God is the One who lets a man in a chair believe that without arguing about it first.

Dignity and independence are not the same word

Now let me be careful, because there is a version of this that would wound you and it is the version you are braced for.

I am not going to guilt you for being independent. Your independence is not a character flaw and it did not come from vanity. It came from forty years of being the one people could count on, and a great deal of good has come out of it, and some of that good is currently kneeling on your tiles with his knee in a puddle.

But look at what happens in that upper room, because the whole question is answered there and almost nobody notices. Jesus takes the towel. He kneels. He washes twelve pairs of feet, including one pair belonging to a man who is going to sell Him before morning. And He gets up, and He is not one inch smaller than He was before He knelt.

The kneeling did not demote Him, and being knelt in front of did not promote the disciples. The basin moves nobody up and nobody down. It is not a scoreboard. It never was.

You are not being reduced by the water on that floor, and you were never the sum of what you are still able to do for people. John 13 has the Lord Himself on the tiles and no loss of stature anywhere in the chapter, and the Holy Spirit is the One who separates a man's dignity from his mobility, which nobody else in the room can do for him.

And I will say the other thing plainly, because it is true and it needs saying. Not everybody has a son on the floor. Some of you are reading this with nobody kneeling and no basin and no good towel, and I am not going to write as though a helpful person is standing by, because for many people none is. The washing in John 13 is not first about a family member. It is Christ's own hands, and that part is not conditional on who is in your house tonight.

And I am not handing you a new way of being. I have nothing to say about the next eleven months. What I have for you is this one evening: the water while it is still warm, the towel over the arm of the chair, and the top of a head with more gray in it than you had noticed.

You have strength for one evening of being served, and it is His and does not have to be repaid. That is John 13:8 in the present tense, and it is His Spirit who carries it off the page into a man who has a third refusal loaded and ready.