LET HIM — PRAYER, GRACE, AND WASHING
This essay is going to fall short. Leave something to be desired. It’s a personal confession of my difficulty accepting grace but is packaged as an essay about prayer. It’s written by me, a Christian, but I hope it speaks to anyone regardless of beliefs about the person of Jesus. For my friends who aren’t familiar with the Christian tradition, there will be some words and ideas that may be new. And for my friends in the Christian tradition, there may still be some questions at the end. If you want to talk about it, I’m happy to; if you want to share and talk about it with a friend, that’s great too. It’s essentially my repentance that I one day decided to publish because I thought maybe it could help some people who found themselves in a place like me. I hope it does something.
Part of the danger of sin is its cunning ability to distract. The problem with distraction is that it holds our attention hostage. With our attention focused to all of the wrong messages about who we are, our worth, or our standing with God, we will lead lives that feel like they’re slowly killing us. We need something that refocuses our attention.
This is what prayer is for me.
If sin is a distraction from God’s love, prayer is attention to God’s love. The Love who is most worthy of our attention. God knows this, and so is willing to ask us to enter this kind of prayer. Not because God is attention-hungry. Because we are Love-starved.
It’s when we get into the quiet – with no objective except to let God love us – that we start to be transformed by the reality that we are His beloved. If you think this sounds soft or wasteful or childish, I don’t blame you. For a long time, it did to me too. With so much to do and our innate American belief that our doing is equal to our value, it can feel actually blasphemous to simply let God love you extravagantly.
It sounds too easy. It sounds cheap.
Maybe that’s how it sounded to Peter too.
On the night Jesus was arrested, Jesus ate a meal with His apprentices, His companions, His friends. (If you’d like to read the account, it’s preserved in the Gospel of John starting in Chapter 13.) At some point in the festivities, Jesus gets up from the table, changes into servant’s clothes, grabs a bowl of water and begins to make his way around the table, washing each of his apprentice’s feet. One by one. While there’s a lot to unpack in this story, let’s focus on his interaction with one apprentice named Peter. Jesus approaches Peter, bowl in hand, and reaches for Peter’s feet.
“What do you think you’re doing? Lord, do you wash my feet?” asked Peter.
“I don’t expect you to understand now, but you will soon,” Jesus responds.
Peter refuses and takes the noble road. “You’re not allowed to wash my feet.” In other words: I won’t let you serve me like that, Jesus. I won’t let you stoop to that level. You are my Rabbi, and I’m pretty sure you’re the Messiah too, so absolutely not. I should be washing your feet.
“Good job Peter, you passed the test; you should be serving me. Here’s the bowl, and don’t stop until I say so. Really get in there, those Jerusalem roads do take a toll on the footbed.” Jesus could have said that.
Except that’s not how He responds. Instead, He cuts back with: “If you don’t let Me wash you, you have no part with Me.”
Put another way: If you don’t let this all begin with My love for you, and receiving that love, I don’t think you get it. And I’d rather you didn’t associate with Me or do work for Me because it does not align with My message. If you cannot accept My love, you will miss life entirely.
And the record is clear: this lavish display of affection doesn’t happen as a reward for all of Peter’s hard work. Instead, it comes on the heels of and as a harbinger of Peter’s dramatic failures, past and future. In fact, all of the people sitting at the table having their feet washed (except John) are mere hours away from abandoning the Lord who washes their feet. And, knowing this, Jesus does it anyway.
This broke me one September night.
Someone I trust had encouraged me to do this very thing, to sit and simply allow God to release His extravagant love over me. I did it, skeptical of appearing to have relaxed my fervent compulsion to please God with my works. And after a few minutes of sitting, I had an image of Jesus at my feet, starting to scrub. Soon after, Peter began to respond from inside of me. And as the words choked on their way out of my throat, I crumbled into sobs because of how completely I had forgotten the heart of God. How had I missed this Love? How had I allowed myself to claim anything but His abundant love for me? How had I ever thought I could earn something so beautiful?
Candidly, dear stranger, grace is hard for me. I only recently saw that. It’s hard for me because it’s actually not what I want. I want my relationship with God to be on account of my merit because if God all of a sudden decides one day to get flaky on me, I want to be able to hold up my report card and say “wait a minute, sir, I earned this relationship and worked hard to get to this place.”
God have mercy on me.
What that belief and desire reveals is a deep distrust in God’s character. It’s a bone-deep skepticism of God’s disposition and the very fiber of who He is. It is a malformed view of my Father shaped by my culture, my experiences, and my self-hatred.
God have mercy on me.
Grace is a problem for me – and all of us love-starved people – because it requires that I relinquish all my best efforts to make God love me and be pleased with me. I can only forsake that when I truly accept that God has been more in love with me than I could imagine this entire time. Accepting grace requires me to trust and lean on the character of God, His mercy, compassion, and love, in a way that feels irresponsible and incompatible with my broken views of His magnificent heart. You can have faith in your ability to earn God’s love or you can have faith in the heart of God. But you cannot hold both, because they both require all of you. You must lose your life in order to receive it.
God have mercy on me.
Julian of Norwich famously said, “Some of us believe that God is almighty and can do anything, and that He is all wise and may do anything; but that He is all-love and will do anything— there we draw back. As I see it, this ignorance is the greatest of all hindrances to God's lovers.”
Now we come back to prayer. I say all of this to say: this is why this kind of receiving prayer is so important. It’s coming home to Love. It’s, as I heard it so beautifully said, “looking at Love that is always looking at me.”
It’s Moses hidden in a rock with all of his attention focused on the One whose goodness is about to make Itself known. It’s Elijah giving his attention to the Gentle Voice that makes Its way to his lowest of lows. It’s Mary sitting at Jesus’ feet awestruck and being praised for it as her sister busies herself in an effort to impress Jesus. It’s John, head hidden in Jesus’ chest listening to his heartbeat while reclining at the dinner table. It’s Peter with a confounded and almost-blasphemous-feeling surrender as his Rabbi-soon-to-be-Messiah begs for permission to wash his feet.
This is the heart of prayer, and in our world full of the distractions of sin, self-reliance, and just plain old noise, nothing is more valuable than remembering who we are and what God thinks about us, even before we started listening.