Image: A fist raised in solidarity holds a towel.
Credit: painting by Emme Schreiner, a youth from Pasadena Mennonite Church, USA
Peace sunday 2026
From a position of power over to power with
In John 13, Jesus and his disciples recline around a table before the Passover festival. Suddenly, Jesus breaks rank as the host and teacher: he disrobes, ties a towel around his waist and begins to wash his disciples’ dirty feet.
That he would stoop to wash their feet in this way is shocking! This action flips accepted norms and
hierarchies upside down.
Washing guests’ feet was a servant’s task at that time. Only subordinates would serve in this way and wash the dust off of feet dirty from walking in sandals on unpaved roads in Palestine.
The disciples feel the dissonance of their leader humbling himself like a servant. Peter protests at first, saying, “You will never wash my feet” (v. 8) before he finally accepts.
Sometimes our different mixtures of power and vulnerability mean that we need to have our feet washed. And sometimes we need to wash others’ feet.
Katerina Gea
A call to solidarity
We often hear this biblical passage as a call to service, and that is one way to understand it. Indeed, Jesus does encourage his disciples to seek the role of a servant, humbling themselves through the act of foot washing.
Yet I think Jesus is calling his disciples (and us today) to something more reciprocal than service. He instructs them to wash one another’s feet – to be part of a circle giving and receiving love, a circle of mutuality and compassionate care. The closest word I know to describe it is solidarity.
As meaningful as serving others can be, understandings of service are often one directional: one group of people, often those with more power, gives to those who have less. And sometimes service can reinforce an us/ them dynamic that sets us apart from those “in need.”
A posture of solidarity is about mutual relationships that see one another’s struggles,
hear one another’s cries, and understand one another’s grief (as God does for those enslaved in Exodus 2:23-25).
The mutuality of solidarity
My understanding of solidarity grew when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents occupied Los Angeles in 2025, arresting more than 14 000 people in the region that year alone. One morning last June, I woke up to the sounds of our neighbours crying out in distress. Masked men who carried assault rifles and drove unmarked vehicles came to our neighbourhood and abducted several of our immediate neighbours as they left for work. It was a very scary time for our neighbourhood.
My spouse and members of our community took turns throughout the months on unarmed patrols as part of rapid response teams to alert the community if ICE returned. We believe many cases of unjust detention and family separation were likely prevented
because of these rapid response networks.
During that harrowing time, generosity and mutual aid abounded. People started dropping off food and other donations next door for the families of migrants detained and others who were too scared to leave home.
Our neighbours knew we had a baby, and started offering us diapers that were donated to them. As a pastor who is so often in the role of giving to others, I was struck by their kindness to my family as a recipient of aid in the form of much-needed diapers! This is the mutuality of solidarity; the “us/them” divisions fade, and we come into a new sense of wholeness as Beloved Community.
The vulnerability of solidarity
When we seek solidarity, we recognize that our safety and our liberation are bound up together. Our needs, our interests and well-being are interconnected with the needs,
interests and well-being of others, especially those seen as vulnerable.
Jesus embraces vulnerability with love when he kneels to tend to his disciples’ dirty feet. He gets uncomfortable and messy. His power as host could keep him separate and above his disciples, yet he actively chooses to shift his body toward vulnerability.
Sometimes our different mixtures of power and vulnerability mean that we need to have our feet washed.
And sometimes we need to wash others’ feet.
When we practice solidarity, we consciously move from a position of power over (or under) others to power with
others.
This is what God does in the incarnation, as described in Philippians 2:5-11. Jesus doesn’t
consider divinity (equality with God, v. 6) as something to be exploited. Rather, he joins humanity in solidarity, even to the point of death on a cross. His tender footwashing action foreshadows his final act of self-giving love. Rather than a show of might and domination, he chooses the humbling way of the cross, the way of solidarity with those who are vulnerable or oppressed.
Jesus journeys the way of the cross because he is one with the God of Exodus, the God of liberation who says, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings” (Exodus 3:7). God sees, hears, knows and, finally, comes down (v. 8).
The direction of solidarity
This is the direction of solidarity: power moving with compassion toward those who are oppressed.
As we read these passages today, one area of struggle for Anabaptist interpreters may be Exodus 3:8, where God describes the land of promise, “a land that’s full of milk and honey, a place where the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites all live.” The land is already inhabited by other peoples.
We know that the story of Exodus doesn’t end with one people’s rescue and liberation; it continues with the destruction and annihilation of the inhabitants of the Promised Land. Osage theologian Robert Allen Warrior, in his essay “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians,” challenges us to read the Exodus story through “Canaanite eyes,” and recognize that those who are oppressed can also turn to oppress others. He laments how a God of deliverance can so quickly become a God of conquest.
Liberation for oppressed and oppressor
We seek to read these passages through the lens of Jesus’ nonviolent life, death and resurrection as Anabaptists. Many of the Hebrew scriptures that Jesus would have heard offer alternatives to stories of conquest, and no doubt shaped Jesus’ liberating message for all peoples.
For example, in Amos 9:7, God entreats Israel, “Are you not like the Cushites to me?…
Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” Amos offers a wider view of God’s solidarity, compassion and liberation for those seen as Israel’s enemies, whom the prophet argues have their own exodus stories.
As Christians who seek to practice solidarity with the oppressed, we might reflect on how God’s liberation and love must ultimately extend to those we view as oppressors and enemies, lest the spiral of oppressed and oppressor go on forever.
Katerina Gea is a member of MWC’s Peace Commission. She serves as pastor of Pasadena Mennonite Church on traditional Gabrielino/Tongva lands, California, USA.