THE REJECTED ORDINANCE by W. H. Littlejohn

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Oct 24, 1878

THE REJECTED ORDINANCE.

By W. H. Littlejohn

(Continued.)

IN the second place, we repudiate, as utterly untenable, the view that Christ was simply carrying out in what he did a practice of his time which was common on occasions such as the one in question, for the following conclusive reasons :—

a. Because it occurred at the wrong time.

The rite of hospitality was always attended to immediately after the guest had entered the house; since it was then that the circumstances of the case furnished the necessity for the ablution.

Feet-washing was purely utilitarian in its character, and owed its origin to the fact that the pedestrian in the dry and dusty East,—with his feet clad only with sandals, and his limbs below the knee frequently entirely bare,—as a matter of comfort to himself as well as respect to his host, universally resorted to the use of water almost immediately upon passing the threshold of the friend who was about to entertain him.

Had he delayed longer than this, not only would he have been unpresentable in his personal appearance, but he would also have been in danger of soiling the linen and the furniture with which his limbs might come in contact.

If, therefore, it can be shown that our Lord disregarded the important element of time in the transaction in which he figured so conspicuously on the evening of his betrayal, the inference will be legitimate, either that he was ignorant of the precise moment at which custom demanded that the rite should be administered, or else that what he did had no special reference to that usage of his time.

Turning now to the record, we read: “And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God, riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments, and took a towel and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.” John 13:2–5.

Here it is distinctly stated, first; that supper was ended, and, secondly; that he rose up from supper and commenced to wash the disciples’ feet.

As a consequence of this declaration, it is settled, beyond dispute, that the bathing of the feet did not occur for some time—perhaps several hours—subsequently to the entering of the disciples into the upper chamber where the passover supper was eaten.

This, however, as stated above, constituted a marked departure from a usage to which it is claimed he was seeking to conform.

Shall we conclude, therefore, that the variation occurred through ignorance on the part of our Lord as to what would have been proper under the circumstances?

We answer, No. This would impeach his intelligence respecting one of the commonest transactions of every-day life.

Not only so, it would show an utter disregard in point of time of the proprieties of the occasion.

If the washing of the feet needed to be attended to at all because of physical defilement, every consideration of taste, as well as comfort, demanded that it should have been done long before a sufficient amount of time had elapsed for the preparation of supper, so that the individuals themselves might have been ready to enter upon that meal in a condition of absolute cleanliness; since if there ever was a time when the persons of Jewish guests should have been scrupulously free from defilement of every sort, that time was when they were gathered around the table for the purpose of eating a meal. This was true of their hands, because it was their practice to dip all of them into a common dish, which was the receptacle of the food for the whole company. It was also true of the feet and limbs; because it was their habit to recline at meals on the same sofa or couch, so that the head of the one might rest on the breast of the other, the limbs of the two parties coming in direct contact with each other as well as with the material which covered the seat on which they reclined, and, therefore, in danger of soiling (unless scrupulously clean) both the garments of a friend at meat and the upholstery of the host.

With all of these facts and circumstances our Lord was well acquainted; and no doubt he was as desirous, to say the least, as the average man of his time that every consideration of neatness should be carried out.

What, then, we ask again, could have been his motive in delaying as he did the entering upon the work under consideration?

As we have seen, it could not have been through either ignorance or oversight.

Neither could it have been on account of indifference to physical uncleanness; for to suppose that this was the case up to the time of his rising from the table and taking the basin and towel, and that he was just at that moment seized with a sudden and inexplicable desire that all should be immediately purified by the use of water, would manifest an oversight or an unaccountable fickleness of purpose wholly incompatible with our ideas of his divine perception of the time when, and the place where, and the manner in which, everything in its due order should have been provided for.

What, then, we ask once more, was the purpose and object which he had in view while doing what he did? The answer is obvious.

It was something different from the mere desire to rid his disciples from bodily uncleanness through a resort to the rite of hospitality; since, had that been his purpose, he would have resorted to that rite in the earliest stage of the interview, instead of waiting until it was already too late to secure the principal objects for which it was employed on such occasions.

b. The language of Christ forbids the idea that this could be true. Said he to his disciples, “What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.” Now there is no rational interpretation which can harmonize these words with the view that the Saviour was at the time only administering the usual rite of hospitality. For, if this were the case, every one of the twelve apostles was perfectly familiar with the transaction which was taking place before them, having witnessed it scores and scores of times, since it was something which every dusty and foot-sore pedestrian had experienced, whenever, weary with his labors, he entered the house of a man of his time.

If our opponents, therefore, are correct, the Lord was wrong in inferring that the apostles did not comprehend his movements, and intimating that it would be necessary that they should be explained to them thereafter.

c. What Christ did furnishes so marked a departure from the course pursued ordinarily in his age by those who were entertaining guests, that it becomes apparent that he was acting independently of their example, and, therefore, that his motives were different from theirs.

He in person took the basin and the towel, and, with his own hands, washed and wiped the feet of the disciples. In doing this he varied from the custom of his generation in just so far as he did the work himself. All that they did was to furnish to the individual water and the needed appliances, leaving him thereafter to perform the work of washing his own feet. This is manifest from the language of the Saviour in his conversation with the Pharisee at whose house he was stopping at the time at which the conversation in question took place. He said to him, “Simon, I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet; but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head.” From this it appears that the Lord reproved the Pharisee, not for having failed to wash his feet, but for having neglected to furnish him the water with which to do it himself. It is clear, therefore, as to what the practice was. It is also clear that the Lord so far deviated from it at the time of the passover supper as to make his action incompatible with the notion that he was doing to the apostles only that which he expected the Pharisee to do to him. So radical was his departure from the customary practice, that it proves indubitably that he either designed to create an entirely new institution, or else to transform the old one so far as to make it subservient to the inculcation of entirely new ideas. It matters not which horn of this dilemma the objector may take; for either one of them will impale the theory that the Lord was simply acting the part of the host to his disciples, they, in the meantime, sustaining to him the relation of guests.

d. The deportment of Peter also furnishes conclusive evidence that the action of Christ was altogether unusual, and had never been witnessed in him before.

How could this have been true, however, if Christ was merely acting the customary part of host? This was the fourth passover that Jesus had attended. Is it not probable that in each of them he had sustained the same relation to the twelve that he did on that occasion? If this be so (our opponents being right), then custom would have demanded that he should do on the three previous occasions just what he did at that time. But this could not have been the case; else Peter had witnessed the same occurrence before, and would not have been so perfectly overwhelmed by the extravagance of the Lord’s humiliation. Why said he, “Thou shalt never wash my feet.” This proves that he had never done so formerly, and that it was a sight to which the apostles were wholly unaccustomed. If this be the case, however, as it certainly must be to explain Peter’s action, then it is evident that the Master there inaugurated something which they had never witnessed in him before, and for which their minds were wholly unprepared by anything in his life or the usage of their time. But concede this point, and we are again compelled to admit that the familiar rite of hospitality will not furnish a suitable explanation of the scene in that upper room where the Lord and his followers were assembled.

e. If the language of Peter is irreconcilable with the accepted view, the reply of Christ utterly demolishes it, once and forever.

Said he to the recalcitrant apostle whose extreme modesty and veneration forbade the thought that the maker of worlds should so far humble himself before him as to wash his feet, “If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.”

The scope of this declaration is simply overwhelming. According to the statement which it contains, the only alternative left to Peter was submission or separation from the household of Christ. Let him but have persisted in refusing to submit to the ordinance, and this refusal would have cost him the loss of eternal life. How

prodigious, therefore, the consequences which hung upon the decision which he there made. But will any one say that for a trifling cause the Saviour would have cast off this tried disciple, who had been so long a faithful companion in his labors and sufferings?

Would a simple refusal to submit to a rite of hospitality, which had in it no religious element, have been sufficient to call forth from the Lord such a terrible denunciation of punishment in case of a failure to comply?

Such a hypothesis is simply preposterous.

The washing of feet, as it was then practiced, from the stand-point of hospitality, was never compulsory, but always a matter of free choice. The individual might indulge in it or not, according to his inclination or the necessities of his condition.

So far as Peter was concerned, also, the occasion of his hesitation was not an unwillingness to submit to the purifying process, but it was a deep sense of his own unworthiness and of the exalted character of the Son of God. There was in his motives nothing which was unworthy of the man, but rather everything which should have commended him to favor. He, therefore, who would argue that the Master, when there was nothing at stake but the mere matter of the ablution of a portion of the person, in accordance with a usage of the times, would have insisted upon carrying his point, even at the cost of Peter’s salvation, does a gross injustice to the heart of Christ.

Let it be admitted, however, that the occasion was one on which a new Christian ordinance was in process of erection, and the whole affair takes the complexion of high religious duty, and justifies the action and the words of the Saviour. This is so, because Peter would have been found not simply setting at naught a conventional arrangement of little consequence, but absolutely and persistently refusing to perform a solemn religious duty.

f. The theory that the affair was wholly secular in its character is very unsatisfactory in another particular; i. e., it teaches that Christ sought to enforce a thing for which there was no earthly necessity. In other words, that he required Peter to submit to the washing of his feet, when, according to his own statement, they needed no cleansing whatever.

His declaration was: “He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit; and ye are clean, but not all. For he knew who should betray him; therefore said he, Ye are not all clean.” Manifestly these words imply that in the case of Peter there was no physical necessity for the application of water. This being the case, there was no good reason why the customary rite of hospitality should be administered to him; since that was designed to be employed only by persons whose feet had become soiled by travel, or otherwise, and needed to be cleansed. Christ said to him, distinctly, “Ye are clean.” His statement was of course true. And, being true, it furnishes positive proof that his object was not the purifying of the body according to the manner of his time, but must have been something entirely different. He emphatically sets forth in words the fact that even though the whole person were perfectly free from everything like external pollution,—having been washed, so that he was clean every whit,—still it would be required that he should submit to the washing of the feet. It mattered not if—as was perhaps true in the case of Peter—the individual had not passed out of the house subsequently to the taking of the bath, it was still required that he, though “clean every whit,” should submit to the ordinance in question. But this being so, there is no further need of debate. The subject is at once freed from all of its difficulties, and the evidence that Christ had in view a higher and nobler object than the mere carrying out of a social formula instituted solely for the purpose of physical cleanliness, is overwhelming to that extent that we cannot see how a candid person can longer doubt.

Pausing, therefore, for a moment in order to present in a brief summary the points made thus far, we will leave this branch of the subject. That summary will run as follows: The transaction which we have been contemplating was not identical with the ordinary custom of feet-washing as administered to guests in the lifetime of our Lord, as proved by the following decisive considerations:—

1. It occurred after supper; whereas, in order to make it appear to be one and the same with the rite in question, it would be necessary to prove that it was administered immediately upon entering the house, and before the eating of the meal of which the disciples partook in company with the Lord.

2. It was something with which the disciples were not familiar, as shown by the language of Christ; whereas every one of them had been acquainted with the ordinary rite of hospitality from childhood, having witnessed it again and again, and, doubtless, having themselves been refreshed by it times without number.

3. Christ himself washed the feet of his disciples; whereas, had he followed the practice of his time,—and the one which it is claimed he sought to imitate,—he would simply have provided them with water, and allowed them to do the balance of the work for themselves.

4. It was something which the Lord had never done to his followers before, as proved by the language of Peter; whereas, if it had been the habitual bathing of the feet as practiced by the contemporaries of Christ, the latter must have administered it to the disciples at least the three passovers which preceded the one which they were then celebrating, as in all of these passovers he doubtless sustained to them practically the same relation which he did on that night.

5. The refusal of Peter to allow the Lord to wash his feet would have cost him the loss of eternal life; whereas a refusal on his part to submit to the ordinary custom of feet-washing would have been followed by no punishment whatever, and would only have subjected him to the inconvenience attendant upon a condition of uncleanness as it regarded his lower limbs.

6. Christ emphatically declared that the washing which he administered was compulsory, even when the feet were entirely free from soil of any and every nature; whereas the sole and only object of furnishing the traveler with the appliances necessary for the washing of the feet was to enable him—from considerations of both health and comfort—to enjoy a condition of perfect freedom from bodily defilement, and, therefore, was never resorted to unless such defilement actually existed.

W. H. LITTLEJOHN.

(To be continued.)