It was just before the Passover Feast (John 13:1).

This week the world is remade.  By God, not by us. God’s kingdom is coming on earth as it is in heaven—but this king will be crowned with thorns and his coronation will take place upon a cross, outside the city.

This world-remaking week now begins with what we call Palm Sunday.  Jesus rides a donkey into Jerusalem, accompanied by a large and noisy crowd.  Jesus is enacting a prophetic promise: Israel’s messiah, their savior-king, would arrive seated on a donkey, a servant animal, not a warrior’s mighty stallion.

Then that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday: increasing excitement, increasing tension and conflict between Jesus and some of the key Jewish leaders: “Who do you think you are—what authority do you claim?  Should we pay taxes to Caesar?” And the Romans are there, alert to the first signs of civil unrest.

It is the week leading up to Passover.  Passover: Israel’s great freedom celebration, remembering, year by year, how God had delivered his people from their slavery in Egypt.  With Jesus arriving in the way he has, with all that he has said and done, could this be the time for a new Passover, a new liberation?

Our four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) focus the majority of their attention on this one week of Jesus’ life.  For Mark, it’s about a third of his whole book; by the time we get to John, nearly half. This is the week God makes all things new, they’re telling us.  Pay attention—pay the closest attention. Everything about this week matters more than everything that has filled all the other weeks the world has ever known or will know.

Our passage this week, John 13:1-17, takes place, as best we can tell, on Thursday evening.  Jesus’ final evening with his friends. We know from the other three Gospels that this was the night Jesus gave to his people the Lord’s Supper (communion) – yet John, strangely, doesn’t mention it.  He focuses on what happened “as the evening meal was being served.”

John provides us with the longest continuous block of Jesus speaking found anywhere: chapters 13 through 17.  But this “final discourse,” this rich and deep passage that has nourished Christians for twenty centuries, opens strangely.

The “evening meal is being served,” we’re not sure by whom.  But something has not happened, something that should have, something that was as ordinary as ordinary can be: the guests’ feet have not been washed.  This usual and accustomed act of hospitality was, understandably, entrusted to the lowest servant on the totem pole. Is there anyone who looks forward to volunteering to wash dirty, smelly feet?

Jesus does.  The disciples’ discomfort is palpable, as is ours.  If you have ever participated in a foot-washing ceremony, you understand: it is both humbling and strangely intimate.

In these days when we must not touch one another, remember how central touch was to how Jesus went about his Father’s business: he touches lepers, demon-harassed people, people crippled by accident or injury, people sick with infectious diseases.  He will shortly touch and heal the severed ear of one of the company coming to arrest him.

Now, here, he touches the feet of the disciples.  Our feet. Washing them: a sign of cleansing and refreshment; of welcome and acceptance; of a pattern to be imitated, a way life is to be embraced and lived.

This week—this troubled, tense, anxious week—allow this passage to wash you each day.  Spend time each day in it, noticing, attending to, imagining.  Be surprised by what captures you each day—maybe the same thing, perhaps something different. This week, God is making all things new.