STINKING FEET

In Kenya, many feet stink. Perhaps it has something to do with the heat, the dust and the fact that some people sweat a lot. Some people just have medical conditions that cause their feet to sweat more and thus stink more.

My football playing friends don't wash their socks often. Socks are used many times before they are washed. Because of the conditions of the football fields, there is always some mixture of soil, sweat and skin in those socks. Feet stink. And then there are some people who just don't care about socks at all. So they wear closed shoes in hot weather without socks and the result is a catastrophe.

Whenever I invite people to my house, I ask them to keep their shoes on. No matter how clean the house is. You can always clean a floor, but cleaning the air is something else.

At some point I lived in a place near Nairobi called Ongata Rongai. This place still has donkeys, goats, sheep, cows, stray dogs, chicken, open sewage flowing and lots of dust. There's also smoke from the really old cars, people burning plastic in the open, the smell of fries and chicken from nearby shops and the smell of dust all over.

When it rains, all these things come together in the mud and people walk through this.

So I have a rough idea of what it was like to live in Jesus' days. They mostly had open shoes and they walked through such conditions, or worse (definitely without the cars). At the end of their journey, they would get into somebody's house and the custom was that the lowest of the slaves was supposed to wash the feet of the people there.

For Jesus to wash such feet, he had to overcome not only the conditions that made the feet stink, he also had to overcome the idea that He, the master, was doing the job that the lowest slave was supposed to do. If the disciples were alone with Jesus, which of them would have washed his feet? We are told elsewhere in the bible that they were busy fighting for positions of power in the coming kingdom. Mothers even got involved trying to find good positions for their sons. Jesus did what no one else would have willingly done. No wonder Peter didn't want it to happen.

And Jesus did this already knowing that Judas was going to betray him. Judas spent time with the master, and yet left his presence to go do something evil. Being in the presence of God doesn't guarantee holiness. There are still decisions to be made in life. Transfigurations nd miracles are not the highlight of a Christian's life; transformation is.

Looking at the current generation of Christian leaders, I see many who genuinely want to serve God and also many who love to be served, to have the best seats, the best suits and to be treated like royalty. I pray that we would all take the attitude of Jesus and instead of turning away our noses, we would stoop down to wash stinking feet.