The God Who Kneels

How I see it, it goes like this. You worship Him. You are in the position a person takes when they know they are in front of something greater than themselves. And then He gets up from the table, wraps a towel around His waist, and starts washing your feet.

And you're just like, wow.

I don't think there is any other god, or any other worship position, that does that in a way as encompassing as who Jesus is. There is something very particular about it. I want to say what I think that particular thing is. I also want to test it. A feeling of uniqueness can get lazy. It can turn other people's prayers into cardboard so that mine looks alive. If the claim is real, it should be able to stand next to those prayers as they actually are.

The posture

Worship, before it is a song or a Sunday, is a position. Something has been given the last word. A person is arranged toward it: body, attention, fear, hope, the thing they check when the room goes quiet. You can call the arrangement love, or loyalty, or ambition, or worry. The posture is older than the name.

In the Matrix the fourth coordinate is Orientation: among everything that could matter, what is presently governing? What is this person serving, or treating as ultimate? I used to call that the God Place. Worship is what you do with it. It is the soul's posture toward whatever is actually sitting there. (The "Four Affections" in that book are a map of how a person is configured. Later in this essay I use "affection" in the ordinary sense: the weather a worshipped thing sends back into the heart.)

Jesus, asked which mountain is the right one, moves the question off the map:

"Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth." (John 4:23–24)

The Father is seeking a kind of person. Paul pushes the same thing into the body: "offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship" (Romans 12:1). He says it "in view of God's mercy." I don't read that as a metaphor for religious feelings. Whatever your body is repeatedly given to, that is the worship, whatever the mouth is doing at the time.

David Foster Wallace told the Kenyon College graduates of 2005, in the talk later published as This Is Water: "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship." Anything else, he said, "will eat you alive." I think he was right about the description. Attention settles. Something gets the praise, even when the praise is panic.

Augustine prayed it at the start of the Confessions: God made us for himself, and the heart is restless until it rests in him — inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te. In the City of God he calls virtue "the order of love." "When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man." Worship is that ranking made visible.

James K. A. Smith, in You Are What You Love, says that "you are what you love" is synonymous with "you are what you worship." Loves are trained by liturgies, practices you return to until they carry a story of who you are. "These aren't just things we do; they do something to us." C. S. Lewis saw the same current from the side of joy. In Reflections on the Psalms, praise "not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation." What has my weight? What, if I lost it, would leave the day with no floor?

We become what we behold

The older writings I trust don't treat worship as a compliment paid to a distant object, after which the worshipper goes home the same. They treat it as a likeness. You lean toward a thing long enough, and the thing starts to show in the face.

"But their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell. They have hands, but cannot feel, feet, but cannot walk, nor can they utter a sound with their throats. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them." (Psalm 115:4–8)

Psalm 135 repeats it, and Jeremiah names the result: "They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves" (Jeremiah 2:5). The worshipper doesn't turn to metal. The mouth, eyes, ears, hands, and feet go quiet in the same way. A life stops being able to answer, because it has handed its answering to something that cannot answer back.

G. K. Beale's We Become What We Worship reads that pattern through Scripture, with Isaiah 6 as a lens. His thesis is that what people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or for restoration. One mechanism. Two destinations. Isaiah sees the Lord high and exalted, and says, "Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips." A coal touches his mouth: "Your guilt is taken away." Then the voice asks whom to send, and Isaiah answers, "Here am I. Send me!" (Isaiah 6:5–8). A false worship closes the senses. This one tells the truth about the mouth, cleans it, and gives it an errand.

Paul describes the closing:

"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened… They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised." (Romans 1:21, 25)

The exchange is the worship. The darkening is what the worship does. If I will not bear the weight of the Creator, I put it on something made, and the made thing shapes the mind that keeps serving it. That is a reading of the passage. I can watch a version of it in a week. I have not measured it.

The other direction is just as bodily:

"And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." (2 Corinthians 3:18)

The NIV says "contemplate," and notes that the word may be "reflect." I need both. You look, and you start to give off what you have been looking at. Smith would say the looking is usually a practice before it is a theory. You become like the thing your days keep rehearsing.

What the object gives back

The object gives something back. By affection, here, I mean the ordinary thing: the state of heart that starts to live in you because of what you treat as ultimate.

Timothy Keller, in Counterfeit Gods, calls an idol anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. The part I need is his next one: idols are almost never bad things. The very best things in life can serve as counterfeit gods. Paul had already named one: "greed, which is idolatry" (Colossians 3:5). Jesus names another: "You cannot serve both God and money" (Matthew 6:24).

Money. If you worship money and things, Wallace said, you will never have enough. The affection is anxiety. "Enough" keeps moving, so the future becomes a threat and other people become costs. Money can shelter a life and be given away. Loved as the last thing, a number can quiet a room or ruin one.

The body, and sex. Worship beauty and sexual allure, he said, and you will always feel ugly, and age will make you die a million deaths before they plant you. The affection is shame. The body is where I live, and desire can be a gift. In Giving or Taking I said love gives itself, while lust takes, or lets itself be taken. When sex has to prove that I am wanted, it comes back as emptiness. The Song of Songs can say "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine" and also say not to awaken love before it is time. Set up as a god, desire returns a body that cannot rest in its own skin.

Approval. Worship being seen as smart, Wallace said, and you end up feeling like a fraud, always about to be found out. Approval is wider than intellect. The affection is performance, and next to it envy: someone else is being seen, and that feels like erasure. A craft or a friendship can be loved. The moment it has to secure my name, it eats the attention the work needed.

Ideology. A cause can be just. People should be fed; the weak protected; the truth told. Asked to be a god, a cause returns contempt. Persons become proof or obstacles, and disagreement starts to mean betrayal. In Care and Control I asked whether what another person tells me can change the help I offer. A worshipped idea answers no. The worshipper grows ears that do not hear.

The self. Wallace's picture has stayed with me: lords of tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of creation. The affection is control, and under it a loneliness control cannot fix. I am a bad god of that kingdom. I get tired, I forget people, I cannot absolve myself. The glory I am managing does not arrive.

Augustine's miser is the pattern. The fault is the order, not the gold. Family, work, a country, a romance, a true idea: loved in their place, they can make a person more alive. Promoted, they eat, and they return a smaller soul — anxiety, emptiness, shame, envy, contempt, control — often as a weather you start to call personality. The test I trust is simple. If I lose this, does the rest of life feel hardly worth living? If yes, I have found the worship, whatever I call it on Sundays.

The God who kneels

Which brings me back to the table.

It was just before the Passover. Jesus knew his hour had come, to leave this world and go to the Father. "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end." The meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas to betray him. Then this:

"Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him." (John 13:3–5)

I keep tripping on so. He knew that everything was under his power, that he had come from God and was going to God, so he knelt. The knowledge of his height is the reason for the basin. The kneeling is what the height does.

He comes to Peter. "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus says Peter does not realize now what he is doing, but later he will understand. "No," said Peter, "you shall never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no part with me" (John 13:6–8). Peter's refusal feels like reverence. It is also a way of staying in charge. If I can be the one holding the towel, I still have a role that protects me from being the one with dirty feet. Jesus will not leave the worship in that arrangement. The inclusion is the kneeling.

And Judas is in the room. John has already said so. The feet being washed include the betrayer's. The Lord is on the floor in front of the man who will sell him.

When he sits again he asks if they have understood. "You call me 'Teacher' and 'Lord,' and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another's feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you" (John 13:13–15). He does not resign the titles. Teacher. Lord. Rightly so. The titles survive the towel. The towel tells you what the titles mean.

Paul gives the same shape as a mind to share. Christ Jesus, "being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant," and was "obedient to death—even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:6–8). Therefore God exalted him, that at his name every knee should bow. The bow is toward the one who would not spend his equality on himself. "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45). Luke pushes the picture on: the master who finds his servants watching "will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them" (Luke 12:37). The one you stay awake for is the one who waits on you.

Revelation sings it from the far end. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty," and the elders lay their crowns down (Revelation 4:8–11). Then a Lamb, "looking as if it had been slain," stands "at the center of the throne," and heaven cries, "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain" (Revelation 5:6, 12). The throne is real. The one at its center has wounds, and the wounds are why he is called worthy.

I hold that as a theological commitment. It can be false, and if it is false it is false as an account of God, not as a mood. I want it set beside other ways people have arranged the worshipper and the worshipped. I am outside most of these prayers. Who Is Jesus Among the Gods? is the longer comparison. The question here is only the position.

Feeding a god. In Enuma Elish, Tablet VI, Ea creates humanity and lays the gods' service on them, so the gods can rest from their toil. The Metropolitan Museum's essay on Mesopotamian deities describes the world that followed: humankind was made to ease the gods' burdens and provide daily care and food. The worshipper supplies the god. A lot of modern worship still rhymes with that after the statues are gone. You feed the career, the image, the cause, so that it will secure you.

Greek and Roman worship was not one religion. Civic cult honored the gods with sacrifice and often hoped for a return. Aristotle's unmoved mover is already complete, thought thinking itself, an object of desire, with no meal to need and no towel to take up. Other stories are real and I don't want them erased: Demeter searching, Zeus as protector of the guest, gods who suffer or love mortals. At the center I still don't find this confession, that the Lord's glory is to wash the feet of the man who will sell him.

Islam refuses the hungry god. Sahih International renders 51:56–57: "And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me. I do not want from them any provision, nor do I want them to feed Me." Worship is the creature's dignity before a Lord who needs nothing. A contrast that paints this as cold, and Christianity as the tradition that discovered kindness, is false. Surah Al-Ikhlas says he is one, and that "He neither begets nor is born" (112:3). Compassion is spoken of at length, and there is a nearness that is not incarnation. Muhammad is a messenger. The position guarded is high: the creature bows, and God does not become the servant. A Muslim can hear John 13 as ranks that should not be mixed. I hear the mixing as what the rank is.

Bhakti is the near one, and I feel it. Hindu tradition is not one thing. In Vaishnava devotion, love for Krishna can take the shape of servant, friend, parent, or beloved, and the Gita seats him as Arjuna's charioteer. When the universal form appears, Arjuna asks pardon for that ease — the jokes, the shared rest, the meals (11.41–42, Prabhupada's translation). The intimacy was real, and the glory makes it feel like something to be excused. In John 13 the kneeling is the way in. Some bhakti theology goes further, a Lord moved by his devotees' love, and I would rather leave that standing than flatten it. My reading of the difference: in the Christian telling the towel and the cross are not a visit's costume. He took the servant's form through to death, and the name above every name belongs to that one.

Buddhism is easy to misname. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, in "Refuge," writes that the Buddha is not a god, and that taking refuge is not a request for him to step in and protect you. It is trust in his awakening, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, toward release from greed, hatred, and delusion. Bowing, across a great deal of practice, is respect and recollection. The Mahayana bodhisattva vow, an awakened one who does not abandon beings, is a real picture of service. From the outside the pictures still differ: I don't find a creator there kneeling before the people he made. I may be missing the interior. I would rather under-claim it.

So the particular thing, said as a Christian and not as a finished survey, is this: the one who is worshipped is the one who serves, and the service is what his authority does. He knows all things are under his power, and so he picks up the towel, betrayer and denier included, and then tells the others to go do the same. The claim might be wrong. Beauty is not proof. I only want it this specific, held where the other prayers can answer it.

What it does to a soul

If worship makes you like what you worship, then this worship is trying to make a particular kind of person. I am not that person in any settled way. I can see the outline on the days I stay in the room.

Humility, without humiliation. Peter's refusal is a way of staying above his own dirt. Humiliation shrinks a person and leaves them on the floor. Isaiah says "I am ruined," and then he is sent. This worship tells the truth about the feet and keeps you at the table. You are lowered, and you are not discarded. The shame is touched. It is not allowed to become your name.

Freedom, where the other worships consume. I believe Wallace about the eating. What follows is a commitment, not a measurement: this God does not eat the worshipper. The body is offered "in view of God's mercy," and the sacrifice is living (Romans 12:1). The Qur'an and the gospel agree that God does not need your food. The gospel then says the rest. He washes you, and that is how you have a part with him. In Whose Love Is It? I thought his love becomes ours by being received and given. Worship is the receiving. Make even Jesus a status to extract, and you are taking again. I know that move. Peter makes it a moment later, asking for his hands and his head as well.

And then the neighbour. "You also should wash one another's feet." Philippians 2 puts the same mindset "in your relationships with one another." If contemplating him forms his image in us, and the image is the towel, then love of neighbour is what this worship starts to look like in a body. In God's Grace I trusted a sequence: awe, worship, surrender, participation. The basin is that sequence made practical. You are washed. You are sent to wash.

I still worship smaller things before lunch. Anxiety, the checking of the room, the grab, the contempt dressed up as discernment: those tell me who is actually on the throne that hour. The way back, when I take it, is a return to the one who, knowing who he was, knelt.

The questions I want to keep:

• What am I treating as ultimate this week, whatever I say I worship?
• What affection is coming back from it: anxiety, emptiness, shame, envy, contempt, control, or a life that can be given?
• Can I let him wash my feet, or do I need to hold the towel so I stay in charge of the mercy?
• If this worship is forming me, who besides me is being served by it?

The God I worship is the one who kneels. I don't think I have gotten over it.

Scripture quotations from the NIV (2011). Also named here: David Foster Wallace, "This Is Water" (Kenyon College, 2005); Augustine, Confessions I and City of God XV.22; James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love (Brazos, 2016); C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms; G. K. Beale, We Become What We Worship (IVP, 2008); Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods (Dutton, 2009); Enuma Elish, Tablet VI, and the Metropolitan Museum essay "Mesopotamian Deities"; the Qur'an, Sahih International; Bhagavad Gita 11.41–42, Prabhupada's translation; Thanissaro Bhikkhu, "Refuge."