Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, March 1, 2026
by Rev. Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: We can rely on the persistent love of God when we fall short and not let our shortcomings stand in the way of rising anew to serve one another.
No doubt you are familiar with the adage, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” The meaning is simple: when we let someone who has already proved themselves untrustworthy get the better of us, we really have only ourselves to blame. At first, it seems odd that John would go out of his way to make it clear that Jesus already knows that Judas intends to betray him. Is it really a betrayal if he knows it’s going to happen? Why not call him out more directly? Undoubtedly, Jesus’s awareness fits within the larger pattern of how John presents Jesus as always being in the know and willing everything to happen surrounding his crucifixion. But there is still a human Jesus to approach in John’s account, and we are not wrong to wrestle with these questions, even if they feel more at home in the Synoptic.
One approach to this element of the Last Supper in John is to highlight the pastoral dimension of Jesus’s actions in light of his knowledge. Often, we wonder if those who love us only do so because they do not know the real us, and that if we were to be our true selves, we would not be as lovable to others. A constant theme in scripture is our effort to hide our sinfulness from God, ignoring that this has never worked since Adam and Eve first tried hiding from God in the garden of Eden. Here, in this crucial moment of Jesus’s life, he affirms that his decision to serve us through the cross was not one made in ignorance of our sinfulness and outright rejection of God. That Jesus persists in following the servant’s path, stooping to wash the feet of his betrayer, is a clear declaration that there is nothing about us which will change God’s mind about loving us. The decision to so love the world (John 3:16) is not one made even in spite of our brokenness but because of it.
This is as much a word of comfort as it is a challenge. The consolation that God has chosen to love us to the end (v.1) both clothes us with the righteousness of Christ and strips us of our pretense that our brokenness excuses us from serving one another. Just as Jesus knows he is about to lay down his life for sinners, so too he knows that it us sinners whom he is charging to serve one another. His words, “servants are not greater than their master,” carry a double meaning: that we are both not greater than Jesus and (therefore) also not above the type of service which he shows.
Here we find an invitation apropos to the Lenten season: to lead not from our perfection but our brokenness. What would it look like to encounter the world as broken people rather than better-than? How often has the proclamation of the gospel been stifled by the impression that being a Christian means thinking yourself holier than thou! The humility of service is not a form of piety but a form of confession that we are captive to sin and cannot free ourselves. If we know these things, we are blessed if we do them.
