As you walk quietly through the stillness of Lent, there comes a moment when your steps stop before John 13. This chapter is not merely a paragraph that records an historical episode; it is a spiritual abyss where love and betrayal, light and darkness, glory and shame converge at a single point. As David Jang (Jang Dawit) meditates on this passage, he repeatedly fastens his heart to two expressions in particular: the declaration that Jesus “having loved his own who were in the world, loved them to the end,” and the word, “The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet.”
At the threshold of tragedy called the Last Supper, the death that Jesus Christ faces is not simply a natural dying (死), but a violent killing (殺) inflicted by the hands of others. Yet even at the door of the darkest suffering, the Lord chooses not self-pity or rage but the completion of love. In that phrase “to the end,” the tremor of Lent is already present.
Recall Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. At the center sits the calm face of Jesus; on either side the disciples are startled, whispering, questioning one another, gesturing in commotion. Among faces scattered into private interests and emotions, the air of betrayal slowly thickens. The scene of actual history as Pastor David Jang (founder of Olivet University) portrays it is not much different. The devil had already planted in the heart of Judas Iscariot, son of Simon, the thought to betray Jesus; and at the same time, within the disciples, an unspoken competitiveness—who was the greatest—began to stir. An enemy sits at a holy table, breaks bread within it, and the one who will sell Jesus is seated at the heart of the Eucharistic place. This is the naked face of human existence seen not only through da Vinci’s brush, but under the searching light of the Holy Spirit.
Pastor David Jang reads this tragic stage through a single perspective: “Even in the very moment when the shadow of death lay thick and the peak of tragedy drew near, Jesus did not abandon love.” Jesus’ death is not a passive resignation to fate. It is an event of “killing” woven from plots, religious power, the crowd’s ignorance, and a disciple’s betrayal. Yet in its center, the Lord does not sink into the cruel destiny that will be forced upon Him; He pours His entire being into “loving his own… to the end.” This tension—stubborn, patient, and resolute love—changes the very air of Lent at its root.
John records: “The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas… to betray him.” A thought that divides disciple from Lord, an imagination that should never lodge in a disciple’s chest, one day quietly takes a seat in the heart. The most fatal crisis of faith is never merely persecution from outside; it is the seed of betrayal that grows in secret within the inner life of one who stood closest to the Lord. Judas heard the words at Jesus’ side, witnessed miracles, shared bread and cup. Yet he failed to discern the thought the devil sowed, and he did not honestly lay it bare before the light of the Spirit.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4V5KmHPbGWI
At this point, David Jang summons the terrifying expression of Romans 1: “God gave them over.” Between the grace by which God holds a person, and the judgment by which—amid repeated refusal and stubbornness—God finally “gives them over,” there is a gap as stark as a threshold: like the difference between inside a door and outside it, between home and the street beyond. Judas is the one who rejected the love that sought to hold him to the end, and thus walked at last into the night of being “given over.” When John writes, “After receiving the morsel of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night,” the sentence is not mere time information; it signifies the density of darkness covering an entire soul. In Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, there is a moment when the instruments suddenly sink low, and a hush like extended silence descends. In that stillness we feel at once how tragic human betrayal is—and how tender, even painful, is the love of God that refuses to let go.
What becomes even more chilling is this: when Judas rose from his seat and walked out into the darkness, none of the other disciples sitting beside him sensed the gravity of what was happening. They did not understand why he was leaving, nor did they perceive what was unfolding in the depths of his soul. Pastor David Jang diagnoses this as the disciples’ dullness of love, their indifference toward a brother, their numbed spiritual sensitivity. If we illuminate the Last Supper in reverse light, one side reveals the Lord’s desperate love—breaking bread, pleading with, and trying to hold even the betrayer to the very end—while the other side exposes disciples who quarrel, and who cannot feel at all what is happening to the soul of the brother seated right next to them. Lent interrogates us sharply at this point: “Are you one like Judas? Are you one like the disciples—unaware, or perhaps aware yet pretending not to know? Or are you one who participates in the love of the Lord who held Judas to the end?”
In that moment, thick with grave tension and spiritual numbness, Jesus quietly rises from the table and lays aside His outer garments. He wraps a towel around His waist, pours water into a basin, and begins to wash the disciples’ feet one by one. For people in Palestine who traveled rough, unpaved roads in sandals, washing feet upon entering a home was a basic act of courtesy. But the one who performed it was always a servant. Sometimes a rabbi’s disciple would wash a teacher’s feet, but in every case the one washing was the “lower” person. Yet the One who said, “You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am,” takes off His garment and sits in the place of a slave. This is not a mere gesture of humility; it is an act that overturns the world’s structures of authority and value from the roots up. In the Kingdom of God, true authority is not pressing down from above, but supporting from below through service.
Then Simon Peter blurts out a confession filled with human emotion—and also with deep misunderstanding: “Lord, do you wash my feet? You shall never wash my feet.” It sounds like humble reverence, but David Jang reads Peter’s ignorance here. All through His public ministry, Jesus had already been washing the disciples’ “feet.” Every act of healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and seeking the lost was the love of service by which He washed their lives and their very existence. Peter, not yet grasping the continuity of that love, recoils at a single visible act as though it were unprecedented. So Jesus says, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but afterward you will understand.” In those words there is both a stern exposure of a disciple’s limitation and, at the same time, the Lord’s trust and hope that Peter will one day cross beyond that limit.
The next declaration—“If I do not wash you, you have no share with me”—does not aim at etiquette, but at salvation, belonging, and the essence of relationship. Pastor David Jang explains these words by pointing to the cultural background of Palestine. Those invited to a banquet would, before leaving home, wash their whole bodies and change their garments. But on the way to the host’s house, dust and mud would again dirty their feet. Therefore, once at the door, there was no need to wash the entire body again; washing the feet was enough. This is the background for Jesus’ words: “The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet.”
David Jang interprets this as a spiritual structure of “regeneration and daily repentance.” Bathing happens once: a thorough new birth, a rebirth in the Spirit, an ontological rupture before the cross. The act of being submerged in the waters of baptism and rising again symbolizes the death of the old self and the birth of the new. A rabbinic saying even expressed it in extreme terms: “A convert is so completely new a person that he could even marry his own mother.” Pastor David Jang uses such a reference to stress that regeneration is not merely a change in emotion or a shift in religious preference, but a radical turning of the whole being. One bath—one total surrender, one collapse before the cross—is the gateway that welcomes us as guests to the banquet of the Kingdom.
But then comes the problem of life after that. Even the one who has bathed must still walk dusty roads. Though original sin is fundamentally dealt with in the cross and in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, actual sins—the sins we commit with our feet as we live—still defile us. When Paul laments that human “feet are swift to shed blood,” he exposes how quickly we run toward sin, how deeply the habit of sin is etched into us. David Jang does not hide this severe reality; he makes us face it. We are born again people, and yet we remain people with feet still quick to sin. Therefore, Lent’s invitation is not “Bathe again,” but rather: “As one who has already bathed, wash your feet every day.”
What does it mean to wash the feet? It is concrete repentance and cleansing. Even those who have become God’s children must, after sinning, come before the Lord and extend their defiled feet. We must not hide where our feet have gone, what dust and blood they have picked up. We must show it without concealment. And then Jesus lays aside His outer garment again, wraps the towel again, and washes our feet with the heart that loves to the end. We often treat repentance as shame, but the Lord receives our repentance with joy. Like a mother who washes a child’s clothes again and again when the child keeps soiling them—yet still, in the end, dresses the child cleanly—the Lord washes our feet each time we fall, each time sin stains us. The “spirituality of foot-washing” that David Jang speaks of is precisely this repeated experience of mercy.
At this point he re-emphasizes the place of the cross. A church must have a sign. Just as on the night of Passover, the fate of households was divided between those whose doorposts were marked with the lamb’s blood and those that were not, the church must clearly display its distinguishing mark from the spaces of the world. But a sign alone is not enough. At the center of the church, the cross must be erected. This is not only the wooden cross hanging from a sanctuary ceiling; it includes the “invisible cross” engraved upon each believer’s heart. The cross is the symbol of thorough self-denial. Where the cross stands tall, sin cannot lie down in comfort; self-justification and pride find no soil to root themselves in.
When we look back through history, whenever human beings try to evade this uncomfortable cross, they manufacture religious substitutes: circumcision, rituals, customs, the language of success and prosperity—anything to file down the cross’s rough edges into something round and manageable. David Jang calls this stream “a different gospel” with unmistakable firmness. The reason Bach’s St. Matthew Passion continues, across centuries, to draw tears from countless people is not only because of its dazzling musical technique. It is because the central axis running through its majestic chorus and delicate lines is always the “inescapable cross.” The music finally sets us before the silence of Golgotha. Before the cross, no one can boast in his own righteousness; only the one who denies himself and clings to Christ’s grace remains.
In Philippians 2, Paul summarizes the mind of Christ: “He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant… he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death.” David Jang reads this alongside John 13’s foot-washing, laying the texts over one another. The Lord is King of kings, and yet He became servant of servants. The paradox becomes a bodily gesture: only when truly emptied does one become full; only when truly lowered does one become truly exalted. The world’s power dominates by pressing down from above, but the Kingdom’s authority arises from the love that serves and supports from below. Just as a mother who holds and raises her child is, in practice, the child’s servant, so also the church’s true authority is formed in the place where we wash a brother’s feet.
On the other side of this contrast stands Judas. He was invited to Christ’s table. He received bread and cup by the Lord’s unilateral grace, though he had no merit. Yet he was one who had not “bathed.” The world of regeneration—dying and rising within love—never opened in his inner life, and he did not awaken to the truth that he existed only because of Christ’s love. He is the type of person who floats on a river of love without recognizing it as love, who breathes the air of grace without realizing it is grace.
By contrast, Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son unfolds a completely different scene. When the son who squandered everything returns and collapses on his knees before the father, the father wraps him with both hands and embraces him. To the one who knows how to receive love, to the one who kneels and admits his sin, a new beginning is always granted. That path was open even to Judas. As David Jang consistently emphasizes, Jesus loved him to the end and tried to hold him to the end. But Judas rejected that love to the end—and chose the path of vanishing into the night by his own decision.
The same question lies before us as we live Lent today. Who are we? Are we those who, having already bathed, wash our feet daily and renew fellowship with the Lord? Or are we, like Judas, not yet bathed—yet satisfied simply to sit at a religious table? Or are we like the disciples, absorbed in arguing about greatness while the deepest tragedy unfolds before our eyes, unable even to notice, let alone wash, one another’s feet?
In this sermon, David Jang says that the forty days of Lent are not merely one segment in the church calendar, but a season that reorders the arrangement of our entire life. As we deeply contemplate the love Christ showed—laying aside His garment, wrapping the towel, washing our feet—we must nail our lusts and desires, the impulses of the flesh, to the cross. As Paul says, those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. When the cross is driven deep into the center of the heart, we can no longer receive sin as a sweet temptation. Feet that once ran toward sin suddenly see the shadow of the cross falling over the instep—and stop.
This sermon also urges us not to forget the Lord’s command: “You also ought to wash one another’s feet.” Just as the Lord washed us, we must wash our brothers and sisters. This is not merely a symbolic gesture of humility; it is the real labor of love—actually forgiving, waiting, embracing, and caring. To wash the feet of someone who feels like an enemy, someone who misunderstood you, slandered you, left you deeply wounded—to pray for them with tears and repay evil with good—this is the most painful and yet the most blessed path of a Christian. This is also why Bach’s passion music ultimately ends not in despair but with the glow of hope. The cross is the climax of tragedy, and at the same time, the victory of love.
In the middle of the journey from Lent toward Easter, David Jang’s sermon demands a clear decision. Will we live as those who have already bathed, or will we cling to filthy old garments? Will we wash our feet daily and renew communion with the Lord, or will we hide defiled feet and deceive ourselves? Will we choose the servant’s road of washing a brother’s feet, or remain within the world’s logic of competing over who is greater?
The Lord who loved to the end still comes today into our tables, our worship gatherings, and the most ordinary spaces of daily life—quietly laying aside His garment. And He speaks to us: “The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet.” In these words there is firm comfort and also a trembling challenge. We are those who have been washed by grace, and yet we remain those who still have feet that gather dust—and sometimes blood. Lent is the time to extend those feet to the Lord; it is the time, strengthened by that cleansing, to rise again and go wash the feet of others. As we come, even little by little, to resemble the heart of Christ who refused to withdraw love even from Judas, we are finally prepared to meet the true dawn of resurrection.