The scene is the night before the crucifixion. John 13. The teacher gets up from the meal, ties a towel around his waist, pours water into a basin, and starts washing his students' feet. It was the lowest job in the house, reserved for the least servant in it. Peter is horrified, which is the point. The kingdom Jesus kept describing ran on an inverted status system, and he chose the last night of his life to demonstrate it.
He had already said it plainly: the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve. Greatness, in his telling, is measured in the direction of service. Giving is not an occasional transaction layered on top of a life. It is the posture of the whole life.
Then there is the instruction that sounds almost modern. When you give, do it in secret. Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Do not perform. The warning was never against generosity being seen. It was against generosity becoming a performance, because the performance quietly replaces the joy. Every anonymous name on this platform is downstream of Matthew 6.
And the accounting is upside down. Watching the crowds give at the temple, Jesus points not at the large gifts but at a widow dropping in two small coins, worth almost nothing, and calls hers the largest gift of the day. Giving is measured by what it costs the giver, not by what it counts up to.
Measured by what it costs the giver, not by what it counts up to.
Invite the people who cannot repay you, he says in Luke. And the line Paul remembered him by may be the oldest recorded claim about the joy of giving: it is more blessed to give than to receive. Blessed, in the original sense, meaning happier.
Empires from that era left marble. The towel and the basin outlasted all of it.