He got up from supper, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around his waist — the physical actions are deliberate and shocking: Jesus, the teacher and Lord, descends from his place of honor at table to perform the servile work of a slave (footwashing was the task of servants or wives, not rabbis). The removal of his outer robe foreshadows the stripping at Golgotha; the towel anticipates the grave-clothes. Each gesture is a proclamation of humiliation and self-emptying, inverting all worldly hierarchy. This is Jesus' first "sign" of what love truly means—not instruction but embodied action, not authority wielded but authority relinquished.

COMMUNITY REFLECTIONS

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