Thou shalt never wash my feet. — For the word “never,” comp. Note on John 8:51. The incidental touches of character where individual apostles are named in this Gospel are in striking agreement with the more fully-drawn character of the other evangelists, and the value of their evidence for the authorship cannot be over-estimated. They are perfectly artless, but are beyond the most consummate art. We feel that it is the loving, impulsive, but self-confident Peter of the earlier Gospels who is speaking here. He does not wait for that after-knowledge which our Lord promises him. He sees no ground on which our Lord’s act can possibly be one which he can permit. Note that the emphasis is on the negative. The pronoun “my” is again not to be emphasised, nor is “Thou” in this passage. “Thou shalt never wash my feet.”
If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me. — Our Lord has already intimated (John 13:7) that His deed was symbolic, and He now refers to the truth underlying the outer act. The key to His meaning is to be found in His own words in John 13:13-17. By the act of washing their feet, He, their Lord, taught the spirit of self-sacrifice and love in opposition to the spirit of self-seeking and pride which ruled even in the Apostles’ hearts. That lesson every servant and apostle of Jesus Christ must learn, for the servant is. not greater than the Lord, nor the Apostle than the Sender. That lesson Peter was refusing to learn in the pride of his own impulsive will, which seemed to be humility. But unless he learns to accept the love of Christ’s humiliation, and is so cleansed by its power that he yields his human will wholly to the divine, and learns in self-sacrifice what the spirit of Christ really is, he can have no part in Him. The lesson is a hard one, but it is necessary; the sacrifice of will may be harder than that of life; but the strong man must become as the little child before he can enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
For the phrase, “Thou hast no part with me,” which is again a Hebrew thought in Greek dress, comp. Matthew 24:51, and Luke 12:46. It is frequent in the Old Testament. See, e.g., Deuteronomy 12:12, “He hath no part nor inheritance with you.”