JOHN 13:14 — KING JAMES VERSION 0
“If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.”
So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet — the command moves from indicative to imperative: having seen this, the disciples must now practice the same love toward one another. The logic is not that they must become servants in humiliation but that they must receive and enact the love Jesus has modeled. The mutual form (one another) creates a community bound not by hierarchy but by reciprocal service, where each member is both agent and recipient of love. This is the social revolution of the kingdom: the last become first not through status reversal but through universal commitment to other's welfare.
Church Fathers on John 13:14
Our Lord, mindful of His promise to Peter that he should know the meaning of His act, you shall know here after, now begins to teach him: So after He had washed their feet, and had taken His garments, and was sat down again, He said to them, Know you what I have done to you?
Know you, is either interrogative, to show the greatness of the act, or imperative, to rouse their minds.
Mystically, when at our redemption we were changed by the shedding of His blood, He took again His garments, rising from the grave the third day, and clothed in the same body now immortal, ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father, from whence He shall come to judge the world.
Read all 26 entries in the readerCatena Aurea · St. Thomas Aquinas, tr. J. H. Newman · public domain
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