It has been so good to reconnect and chat with Spiritual Director, Mika Roland recently. We need to share something from her blog! Maybe it is because Jill and I watched “The Chosen” as Jesus wanted to wash his disciples’ feet and they were nervously refusing to be served by Him. Maybe because it harkens back to McGuiggan’s book “The God of the Towel ? But, as soon as I saw what Mika put on her amazing blog on April 2, I knew we needed to ask her permission to share it. Enjoy! You may want to click through and add your email to receive her blog! 🙂
The Basin and the Towel – Strength of Love in Action – Sacred Moments by Mika Roland April 2
The world feels particularly heavy right now.
Love is called weakness. Welcome is labeled illegal. Simply being who you are, in your own skin, in your own body, can be declared sinful by someone who has never once sat at a table with you. We carry a lot of grief these days, and I don’t want to rush past that. Some things are genuinely wrong. Worth naming. Worth showing up for, even when it costs something.
But I’ve been sitting with a quieter question lately. One that doesn’t cancel any of that. It just runs alongside it.
What do we do with the people on the other side?
Not the systems. The people. The ones God also loves, even on the days we’re not sure we can.
Maundy Thursday keeps finding me this year. I keep coming back to that upper room. The basin. The towel. The smell of dust and travel on twelve pairs of feet.
Judas was in that room. And that fact alone makes me pause. Jesus knew, not suspected, not wondered about, knew, that before the night was over Judas would walk out into the dark and lead soldiers back with him. Peter was there too, loud and absolutely certain of himself, not yet knowing he would swear three times before dawn that he never knew this man. And the others, the ones who had walked every road with Jesus for three years, he knew they would scatter the moment things got frightening.
He knew all of it. And he still moved toward them.
He broke bread. He poured wine. He got on his knees with a basin of water and washed road dust off every foot in that room. Made himself completely vulnerable before people who were, within hours, going to fail him in every possible way.
And here is what I find myself thinking about, for anyone who has ever been told they are not clean enough, not sorted enough, not sinless enough to come to the table. Jesus didn’t wait for the room to be worthy. He knew exactly what was in that room and he served it anyway. He broke bread with a betrayer. He washed the feet of someone who was already planning to run. If that table had a cover charge, none of them would have gotten in either. Neither would I.
This is worth pausing on, because Jesus was not someone who looked away from hard things. This is the same man who walked into the temple and flipped tables. Who looked religious leaders in the eye and called them whitewashed tombs, clean on the outside and hollow within. Who told hard truths to people who did not want to hear them and didn’t soften the edges to make it easier to swallow. There was nothing passive about him. Nothing naive. Nothing weak.
So when he knelt on that floor, he wasn’t kneeling because he didn’t know better. He was kneeling because he did. He was the most powerful person in that room and he chose, from that power, to love anyway. That is a completely different thing.
That has been living in me lately. Especially now, in this season when it is so easy to harden. When the news makes it feel reasonable to write people off. When the distance between us and those who see the world differently feels not just wide but unbridgeable.
I am not saying we stop fighting for what is right. I am not saying we make peace with injustice or call harm something softer than it is. Jesus didn’t do any of that either. The man flipped tables. He also washed feet. He held both, and I think that’s the point.
What would it look like to hold both? To be clear-eyed about what someone is doing and still find a way to see the human in front of you. To tell the truth and still kneel. To know, the way Jesus knew, and still hand someone bread anyway.
I think about how many times I have been Judas in someone’s story. How many times I have been Peter, certain and then crumbling. How many times someone loved me through my own ignorance before I even knew I needed it.
That kind of love is not weakness. It is the hardest, most clear-eyed, most costly thing I can imagine. And I find myself just wondering at it. Wondering what it would look like to live even a little bit closer to it, in this world, in this moment.
And wondering where I need to bring my basin and towel today.
