Dear Friends,
This is the tenth in a series of messages on the events and people significant to my spiritual life and growth as a follower of Jesus Christ. I write these messages a flawed man who has discovered grace. I am sharing the discovery in the hope and prayer you will go look for Jesus present in your life experience.
Everyone is going to encounter the need for forgiveness–to receive it or to extend it. There are many books on the topic, so many in fact, one gets the idea the authors are looking for loopholes and excuses to avoid giving or seeking forgiveness.
Either way is tough because to forgive involves writing off a debt someone owes us for violating our lives and injuring us. To ask for forgiveness means to own up to that debt as our responsibility.
Our pride insists on self-righteousness and self-justification. Pride would rather be “right” than maintain a relationship. The divorce courts are full of people proving this point.
Sometimes, disputes are unavoidable. When one has to take a stand on principle it usually involves standing on the very place where someone else is standing in resistance against that principle. Stubborn pride fuels the situation. Principle refuses to back down. Resistance refuses to yield. Feelings, reputations, and relationships are damaged as a result, perhaps beyond repair.
Jesus realizes this cycle of pride and self-righteousness can snare even the most devoted of his followers. He desires his children to be at one with him and at one with each other as a loving family. Over and over in the Gospels, he urges us to forgive each other and turn over to him the things dividing us. With his last breaths on the cross, Jesus asked the Father to forgive his murderers.
On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus showed his disciples that God isn’t above touching the grit and grime we pick up walking through the day, cleaning them up and soothing the cuts, blisters and bruises caused by the frictions and stubs we encounter on rough roads. Luke tells the powerful story–
It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him 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 evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. 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. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” “Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!” Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.” For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not every one was clean (Luke 13:1-11).
I learned this story as a child. I watched the adults in my congregation wash each others feet, men with men and women with women. After I was baptized at age ten, I participated myself. It seemed like a quaint, old ritual–a relic of a time gone by.
Then, one day footwashing came alive for me when the Holy Spirit moved in a surprising, but powerful way to transform my relationship with an adversary. This is the story I call “The Washing.”
. . .
Dr. Conroy (not his real name) was a controversial physician in my town. He was an intelligent well-trained, competent physician, beloved by his patients. But he was arrogant.
He refused to take measures to permit his terminally-ill patients to breathe or to resuscitate patients in heart failure. He didn’t follow the policies of the medical staff governing care within the hospital when he did this. He knew the policies, but he disagreed with them. Following the policies required tests, procedures and medical opinions taking time and money. Dr. Conroy thought he knew best what his patients needed, so he made his own decisions and carried them out without regard for the law and the medical staff policies governing delivery of care within the hospital.
The medical staff executive committee comprised from his physician peers objected to his actions. There was an investigation and Dr. Conroy was charged with unprofessional conduct and endangering patient safety. If the charges were found to be true, he would be dismissed from the medical staff.
Dr. Conroy was deeply religious–a pious but proud man who insisted that he was being persecuted because he was a better Christian than his accusers. He claimed his superior intelligence and exemplary devotion justified his conduct and showed up the spiritual deficiencies of his peers who resented him for his abilities and virtues.
The physicians challenging him were also intelligent and well-intentioned. They had the law and medical staff rules on their side. Dr. Conroy refused to yield to the authority of the medical staff executive committee. The differences were irreconcilable and the conflict was bruising.
The medical staff executive committee held a hearing. Afterwards, the committee voted to dismiss Dr. Conroy from the medical staff. He appealed to the hospital board and lost. Local newspapers ran with the story because the life and death issues were sensational. The controversy was discussed throughout our community.
Dr. Conroy sued the hospital to keep his privileges to admit and treat his patients there. The medical staff hired me to defend its interests.
At trial, I began my opening statement by clarifying the issues in stark terms: “Your honor, Dr. Conroy wants to quibble about the hearing procedures. I am here to talk about him killing people.”
The court ruled against Dr. Conroy. His dismissal from the medical staff became final. The staff of another nearby hospital also expelled him. He no longer had the privilege of admitting his patients for hospital care. His practice was limited to the patients that he saw in his office and a local nursing home.
The damage to Dr. Conroy’s reputation was so great that his practice had lost its value according to brokers he consulted. The physicians he had sharply criticized in defense of his conduct were glad that he lost and remained angry about his attacks on them. Dr. Conroy was humiliated, a pariah.
Years passed. I experienced spiritual renewal in Christ and joined the same congregation where Dr. Conroy attended. Each week, I saw him there in the back pew with his wife.
I was eventually appointed the local head elder. From time to time, the pastor and I discussed reconciliation with Dr. Conroy. Our pastor served on the hospital board at the time of the dismissal. The physicians who led the medical staff investigation also attended the church. None of us talked to Dr. Conroy because the feelings still ran high and he had never apologized or reached out to us. We figured his stubborn pride and self-righteousness would never allow us to come together.
Then came a quarterly communion service. This meant footwashing, what our denomination calls “the ordinance of humility.” Footwashing is the great divide of our communion services. Many members get up and go home at this point in the service, unwilling to join in what they think is an awkward and archaic ritual. And so it was with me. I hadn’t participated in footwashing in years.
On this particular day, my wife was occupied with our little son, so I thought, “Well, I’ll go wash feet. After all, I’m head elder.” I walked down the hall to the room where the men were gathered to wash each others’ feet. I saw Dr. Conroy standing in the doorway as I approached. Through the entire lawsuit and the years that followed, he and I had never spoken one direct word to each other. Now there was no way to pass without speaking to him.
I said, “Good morning, Doc.”
“Do you have anyone to serve you?” he asked me.
“No.”
He motioned me to sit down. He got a basin of water. I sat down and removed my shoes and socks. He knelt down before me and washed my feet and dried them. When, he was through, I obtained fresh water and knelt down and washed his feet.
It was a moment in which I experienced true reverence. Emotions swept through me of awe and humility, brokenness and tenderness, and thankfulness for a Savior who could break down the walls and restore this man and me to a kind and loving relationship.
After I dried his feet, I sat down beside Dr. Conroy. I told him, “This is amazing considering everything that has happened between us.”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve watched you and I’ve seen how Christ has changed your life.”
I replied, “It’s blessed me that you’re here worshiping week after week after all that you’ve gone through.”
He patted my arm. “I made mistakes and there have been misunderstandings, but the same Jesus who changed you has sustained me these past five years.”
Then I said, “I’m sorry for all the pain this has caused you and your family.”
Dr. Conroy and I stood and embraced. Truthfully, the hug was the last thing any one who knew us would have expected.
We remained friends to the day he died and we prayed for each other. At his funeral, I testified to the power of God’s love to make friends of enemies through forgiveness.
A few days after the footwashing, I told the story to the surgeon who had presented the charges against Dr. Conroy to the medical staff. “That’s amazing,” he said. “I never would have believed it could happen.” Within a week, he reconciled with Dr. Conroy and sponsored his readmission to the medical staff ending his professional and personal alienation from his peers.
The real story in this is Jesus Christ who proved to be a larger and more generous Savior and Lord than either Dr. Conroy or I could imagine. “What is impossible for people,” Jesus said, “is possible for God” (Luke 18:27).
So it was that a physician and a lawyer, the professional equivalent of “cats and dogs;” the prosecutor and the prosecuted; a man whose livelihood was attacked and the attacker; washed each other’s feet and embraced. For the rest of my life, if I am ever asked if I’ve seen a miracle I will tell about this. Such a thing is possible, but only in Christ and through Christ whose love makes its difference when it encounters the unlovely, the unlovable and the unloved (Matt 5:43-48).
But such love is not reserved for the extraordinary and the miraculous. There isn’t one of us who doesn’t pick up the dust and grime of walking in the streets of every day living. We all are bruised and blistered from the frictions and collisions of walking those streets together. Each of us knows someone needing cleansing and refreshment with the love and forgiveness supplied to us from the limitless resources of Jesus Christ. What we do with that knowledge of need was Jesus’ final word in the footwashing story as told by Luke.
When Jesus had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place at the table. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “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. Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them” (Luke 13:12-17).
It is about this time in my spiritual life when I realized Jesus doesn’t exceed my expectations. Thinking that way gives credit to my expectations as a measurement of the immeasurable. No, Jesus washes away my expectations, devastating them with a flood of grace and mercy. He uses the space to make his life mine. It is his promise to do the same for you. “Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.”
“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8).
Under the mercy of Christ,
Kent
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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.
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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.
Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.