And Yet, He Still Knelt

Hear this sermon about Jesus and Judas and the rest of us based on John 13

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Transcript

Sermons from 

Mission Hills UCC

San Diego, California

Rev. Dr. David Bahr

david.bahr@missionhillsucc.org

March 15, 2026

“And Yet, He Still Knelt”

John 13: 4-15, 21-30, 34-35 – Common English Bible

Jesus got up from the table and took off his robes. Picking up a linen towel, he tied it around his waist. 5 Then he poured water into a washbasin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel he was wearing. 6 When Jesus came to Simon Peter, Peter said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

7 Jesus replied, “You don’t understand what I’m doing now, but you will understand later.”

8 “No!” Peter said. “You will never wash my feet!”

Jesus replied, “Unless I wash you, you won’t have a place with me.”

9 Simon Peter said, “Lord, not only my feet but also my hands and my head!”

10 Jesus responded, “Those who have bathed need only to have their feet washed, because they are completely clean. You disciples are clean, but not every one of you.” 11 He knew who would betray him. That’s why he said, “Not every one of you is clean.”

12 After he washed the disciples’ feet, he put on his robes and returned to his place at the table. He said to them, “Do you know what I’ve done for you? 13 You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and you speak correctly, because I am. 14 If I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you too must wash each other’s feet. 15 I have given you an example: Just as I have done, you also must do. 

21 After he said these things, Jesus was deeply disturbed and testified, “I assure you, one of you will betray me.” 22 His disciples looked at each other, confused about which of them he was talking about. 23 One of the disciples, the one whom Jesus loved, was at Jesus’ side. 24 Simon Peter nodded at him to get him to ask Jesus who he was talking about. 25 Leaning back toward Jesus, this disciple asked, “Lord, who is it?” 26 Jesus answered, “It’s the one to whom I will give this piece of bread once I have dipped into the bowl.” Then he dipped the piece of bread and gave it to Judas, Simon Iscariot’s son. 27 After Judas took the bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus told him, “What you are about to do, do quickly.” 28 No one sitting at the table understood why Jesus said this to him. 29 Some thought that, since Judas kept the money bag, Jesus told him, “Go, buy what we need for the feast,” or that he should give something to the poor. 30 So when Judas took the bread, he left immediately. And it was night.

31 When Judas was gone, Jesus said, “Now the Human One[b] has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. 

 34 “I give you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other. 35 This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.”

In 1862, Union soldiers marched into Nashville, Tennessee and took control of the city.  A boy named George Marion McClellan, born into slavery just two years before, was among those whose families were emancipated – a proclamation made official when he was five years old. The Civil War ended and for a moment, it felt like a whole new world was being born.

But such hope rarely arrives without resistance and often backlash.  Just down the road in Memphis, a white mob carried out what came to be known as the Memphis Massacre. For three days, Black neighborhoods were terrorized, dozens of residents murdered.  And one of their specific targets was schools and teachers.  Schools were not random targets.  They were the source of intellectual promise.  Education was dangerous.

During the Civil War, as Union troops advanced, teachers and missionaries followed right behind, turning open fields and abandoned army barracks into classrooms for those newly freed.  A huge number of those teachers came from Congregational churches in the North, our spiritual ancestors in the UCC.  

There’s a little piece of our UCC history I want to share.  Those teachers were sent by an agency of the church known as the American Missionary Association, Christians devoted to the abolition of slavery.  The massive scale of their efforts is hard to fathom.  In the years both during and immediately after the Civil War, they started more than 500 schools across the South.  They employed thousands of teachers. And during the Reconstruction era alone, they educated well over 100,000 Black students.

Among those schools, they founded Fisk University in Nashville in 1866, still connected to the UCC.  Ambitious from the beginning, Fisk was not just dedicated to reading, writing and arithmetic, their curriculum was Greek and Latin and science and theology.

An interesting story about Fisk, early in its life, the school nearly ran out of money. Students formed the Fisk Jubilee Singers and began traveling to raise money through concerts. Many audiences were confused, however.  They were used to only seeing Black performers in minstrel shows – actually, white actors in blackface who mocked Black life for entertainment.

So, when a group of young Black students walked onto stage at one early concert, a disappointed audience grew agitated. The students hesitated.

Then one of them calmed the room with a song: “Steal Away.”  And by the time the song ended, the audience was in tears – touched by music that carried both the sorrow and hope of a people who had survived slavery only a few years before.  Fisk Jubilee Singers introduced the world to the spirituals we know today.

They not only saved the school, their travels throughout the US and Europe raised enough money to build Jubilee Hall. 

 [PHOTO of Fisk] 

A five-story brick building with a tower reaching 100 feet. It was the first permanent structure built specifically for Black higher education in the South.  Standing like a proclamation on the skyline.  

Young George could watch it being built as a teenager and after high school, he enrolled himself.  More than architecture, Jubilee Hall was a promise that even in a world where hope was threatened by violence and betrayal, courage and faith could build something that would last. 

[PHOTO of George]

Upon graduation, he went north, preparing to become a Congregational minister at Hartford Seminary before serving his first church in Kentucky and going on to teach at Howard University – another school founded in the Congregational tradition.  Born during slavery, George’s childhood was shaped by hope and betrayal living dangerously side by side. 

[PHOTO OFF]

For a moment it seemed the world was changing.  But then the federal government withdrew and allowed the former enslavers to terrorize those who dared to live free.   A pattern we still see repeating itself today: hope and progress, followed by backlash and violence. Yet their story didn’t end there, and ours isn’t finished either.

When he wrestled with today’s text, Rev. McClellan felt the weight of such betrayal.  Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. Inspiration hit when he realized this: Jesus washed the feet of them all. Even Judas.

He wrote this famous poem:

Christ washed the feet of Judas!

The dark and evil passions of his soul, 

His secret plot, and sordidness complete,

His hate, his purposing, Christ knew the whole.

And still in love he stooped and washed his feet.

And not just Judas.  James and John too – who had argued on the road about who was the greatest.  Peter – who inserted his own recurring flare for the dramatic with “well, then, wash my whole body.”  Not to mention, every one of the remaining 11 abandon Jesus on the cross except disciples who were women.

The Gospel is telling us something important. Jesus already knows what is coming – the betrayal and the kiss in the garden.  And he knows the night will end with soldiers and torches in the garden.

And yet, he still knelt with a towel and a basin before Judas.

He still knelt to serve all of them and said, “I have given you an example: Just as I have done, you also must do.”  This is the example for all my followers from this day forward forevermore.

Before we go any further, there’s something important to notice. In the Gospel of John, this is the Last Supper. John does not repeat the Eucharist meal itself, but shows its meaning by example.  All the other gospels tell the story of a Passover meal that we now celebrate as a sacrament. 

But in John, this last meal is very different.  Jesus teaches them to remember him:  by serving one another.  

• Loving and serving not only when people deserve it.
• Loving and serving not only when people behave well.
• Loving and serving even when loyalty breaks and trust fails.

• Not because it’s easy or even works.
• But because it reflects who Jesus is.
• And, in Christ, love is always who we are striving to become.

Not because it’s easy or even works.  And yet, what is the alternative?  Who we would become otherwise?  For example, Howard Thurman asks: What happens to the soul of people who become consumed with hate?  Or apathy.

Thurman was a huge influence, known as the grandfather of the civil rights movement, especially through his small but powerful book Jesus and the Disinherited, a book Dr. King is said to have carried around in his pocket. 

Thurman taught that injustice and humiliation tempt people toward hatred. He warned that hatred ultimately poisons the soul of the one who carries it.  But it starts in much smaller places.

I think of Ben and Lucy who had attended the same church for years. They were neighbors who shared tools, gardening tips, and the occasional gossip. But as has happened across the country in recent years, Ben felt compelled one day to put up a yard sign declaring his beliefs. The next day Lucy put up a sign with a contrasting sentiment.  Each one was incensed by the other, so they stopped being neighborly.  They each thought “That’ll teach ’em.”  Eventually Betty across the street asked, “Don’t you realize what you’re doing? You’re drinking poison and expecting the other one to get sick.”

Jesus refuses to let that kind of poison define his followers so, he told them, “I have given you an example.”  He is showing us how to reject the power demonstrated by the world.

 Or in other words, he shows us what it truly means to be neighborly.  And being neighborly is more than simply getting along. It means coming together to build a different kind of world together.

This is what George McClellan later realized as he watched a building rise up on the Nashville horizon.  If our hearts are poisoned by rage, revenge, or apathy, the only way to resist that poison is to build something that restores dignity instead.  So stone by stone, story by story, that building meant the children of slavery would learn and lead and shape the future. In it he saw a people rising.

But within that vision: 

• When Jesus got up from the table and took off his robes…
• When he picked up a linen towel and tied it around his waist… 
• When he poured water into a washbasin and began to wash his disciples’ feet…  
• He did not skip Judas, nor did he excuse his betrayal.  

That kind of love is not easy to live with, especially in a world like ours.  I honestly struggle with this every morning – seeing a daily betrayal of the values we claim to hold.  

Even so I know this to be true:  Whether easy or hard, even in our exasperation and exhaustion about the state of our world, angry and divided, let us remember every single day:

• In a world where being neighborly is conditional, Jesus loves.
 • In a world where betrayal demands revenge, Jesus serves.
 • In a world tempted to humiliate, Jesus kneels.

How could we not want to learn from his example and follow him?