I started Japanese sword training three months ago — that’s right, the stuff of Kill Bill and The Last Samurai. Wasn’t really my idea. My 14 year old son has long been enamored of all things Japanese — it’s a Godzilla thing. So we’ve been training to become samurai warriors together, and I’m told this is the pinnacle of the martial arts. My son’s good at it. I’m horrible. My sense of my body-in-space is so not Japanese — and as my sensei keeps saying, “Looks are everything.” (Even folding your uniform “just so” after class is part of the class! Actually, I’m getting pretty decent at that.) Overall, it’s been a humiliating experience so far.

My whole life I’ve worked hard to avoid just such circumstances. The lowly place doesn’t become me. I don’t like feeling people are looking at me thinking, “Loser.” I’m a lot more comfortable in my own classroom where students ask me questions to which I generally have at least a half-educated guess. I don’t especially care to be on the other end of the learning curve: having to figure out if my next question is going be so inane as to get nothing but a shrug and a sigh in reply.

I realized how good the sword class is for me a couple of weeks ago, however. I was watching my seminary students do a footwashing service in a worship class. (Click here for a footwashing liturgy.) There’s just no slick way to wash somebody’s feet. It’s not even functional in our culture, especially when it’s been planned for, and everybody’s wearing clean socks! But even at this cultural remove, it’s easy to understand Peter’s incredulous protest: “Lord, you’re washing my feet?! … Never!!” There was something upside down about what Jesus was doing. And Peter instinctively felt ashamed to allow it to be done to him.

As John recounts the footwashing scene in the 13th chapter of his gospel, the scandal of the Bible’s lead storyline leaps off the page. The footwashing embodies the amazing parabola of redemption that Paul unforgettably narrates in his letter to the Philippians (ch. 2) —the pre-existing, majestic Son of God not only clothed himself with the fragility of our humanity, but endured the utter abasement of a Roman cross, only then to be raised to an even greater glory than was his in the first place. And all that for us.

It’s one thing, though, to see it on the page. Somehow we seem to have to go out of our way to get it pressed into our lives. That’s why footwashing is a good exercise. And that’s why I’ll keep letting my son keep me in a discipline that makes me look so bad.