The Towel and the Basin: How Jesus Influenced

The Man Who Refused Every Lever

Lesson 5.7 ended with a question I want you to answer before you read another paragraph: when you make a deposit in someone's account, are you doing it because the person is worth it, or because you have already calculated the withdrawal? Hold your honest answer, because we are now going to look at a leader for whom the question has an unusual answer, and the unusualness is the entire subject of this lesson.

Take inventory of what Jesus did not have. No office in the Sanhedrin, the priesthood, or the Roman administration. No army — the one moment armed force was offered on His behalf, He shut it down and healed the man who had been struck. No treasury, and the small common purse He did have was managed by the man who eventually sold Him. No writing that survives in His own hand. No institution, no building, no platform in any sense we would recognize. He worked inside a territory you could cross by car in a morning, for roughly three years, and it ended in an execution reserved for slaves and insurrectionists, with His closest followers scattered and one of them denying he had ever met Him.

Now take inventory of what followed. Within three centuries the movement had spread through the Roman Empire, and by the fourth century the emperor was calling himself a Christian. Be careful here, because this is exactly where teachers reach for numbers they cannot support. Rodney Stark's much-cited model in The Rise of Christianity estimates roughly forty percent growth per decade from a tiny base to several million by the year 300 — but that is an extrapolation from an assumed rate, the underlying evidence is thin, and historians have contested both the rate and the mechanisms. What is not contested is the shape: a movement with no institutional power at its founding outlasted the institution that executed its founder.

That is the paradox this module has to answer. For seven lessons you have been handed levers. Framing. Reciprocity. Credibility. Tactical empathy. Coalition math. All of them real, all of them defensible, all of them capable of being turned into weapons — which is why we spent Lesson 5.1 on the line. And now the capstone puts in front of you a life that used almost none of them and out-influenced everyone who did.

I am not going to assert the conclusion. Asserting it is what makes this material sound like a devotional instead of an analysis, and you would be right to distrust it. So we are going to work the method. Call it the Downward Method, and it has five moves: the Question, the Story, the Basin, the Open Hand, and the Twelve. Four of them are things He did. The fifth thing — the towel — is not a move at all, and by the end of this lesson you will understand why that distinction is the difference between a leader who serves and a leader who has learned that serving polls well.

One more thing before we start. This lesson will take the strongest objection to its own thesis seriously — Nietzsche's charge that everything in it is the morality of people who could not win, dressed up as virtue. That objection is not a footnote. It is the sharpest challenge the entire academy faces, and if it stands, this course is a training program in weakness. We will state it the way its author would and then answer it on the merits.

The Question and the Story

Start with the least remarked-upon feature of the Gospels: how rarely Jesus makes a direct assertion when a question is available. Martin Copenhaver counted the questions in the Gospels and reported three hundred and seven asked by Jesus, against three that He answers directly out of the many put to Him. Treat that as one careful author's count rather than an established statistic — the totals depend entirely on how you define a question and which parallel accounts you merge. But run your own eye down a single chapter and the pattern is unmistakable without any counting at all.

Mark 10 is the demonstration. In verse 36, James and John come asking for the seats on His right and His left, and He answers them with a question: 'What do you want Me to do for you?' Fifteen verses later a blind beggar named Bartimaeus shouts for Him from the roadside, and He asks the identical question: 'What do you want Me to do for you?' Same chapter, same words, two men who both want something, and He makes both of them say it out loud. He did not need the information. The question was for them.

That is what a question does that an assertion cannot. An assertion arrives as your conclusion and gets evaluated against the listener's defenses. A question makes the listener produce the material himself, and people do not argue with their own sentences. You already learned Voss's calibrated questions in 5.5 and commitment in 5.2. What is new here is a leader who used the method on people whose answers were going to embarrass them, and who let the embarrassment stand.

Now the second move. In Luke 10 a lawyer asks a question designed to limit his obligations: who is my neighbor? A direct answer would have been a definition, and a definition would have been argued with. Instead Jesus tells a story about a road, a beating, two religious professionals who cross to the other side, and a Samaritan — the outsider His listener would least want to admire. Then, at Luke 10:36, He asks a question that is not the lawyer's question at all: 'Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers' hands?' The lawyer had asked who qualifies for my love. He was handed back who acted like a neighbor, and he completed the replacement himself by answering it.

This is the older pattern in Scripture too. When Nathan confronts David in 2 Samuel 12 he does not open with the accusation. He tells a story about a rich man who takes a poor man's one ewe lamb, David's anger burns against the man in the story, and only then does Nathan say the four words that end the exchange: 'You are the man!' Matthew 21:45 records the same effect from the other side — 'When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they understood that He was speaking about them.' They did not understand it at the beginning of the story. That is the mechanism.

There is research here and I will report it with its limits. Melanie Green and Timothy Brock's work on narrative transportation, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000, found that readers absorbed into a story showed reduced counterarguing and greater belief change consistent with the narrative. The effects are real and replicated; they are also moderate in size and, critically, indifferent to whether the story is true. Narrative is a power tool, not a virtue — which is why Module 6 spends a full lesson on building one honestly.

Apply it to yourself right now. Think of the last three times you tried to change someone's mind. How many were assertions? How many were questions you actually wanted the answer to? And when was the last time you told someone a true story about your own failure instead of explaining their failure to them?

The Refusals

The third move looks like generosity and is actually a demolition of the engine underneath most influence.

Luke 14:12-14: 'When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, otherwise they may also invite you in return and that will be your repayment. But when you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, since they do not have the means to repay you.' Set that next to Lesson 5.2. Reciprocity is the most reliable principle in Cialdini's catalogue precisely because a gift creates a debt and debts get repaid. Here the instruction is to give where no debt can be created, and the stated reason is that the inability to repay is the point rather than a regrettable side effect. That is not reciprocity used well. That is reciprocity switched off.

The fourth move is harder, and it is the one modern leaders find almost impossible. In Mark 10:17-22 a man runs up, kneels, and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Verse 21 records that 'looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him,' and then names the one thing: sell what you own, give to the poor, come follow Me. Verse 22: 'But at these words he was saddened, and he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property.' A note on the familiar title — Mark calls him neither young nor a ruler; Matthew 19:20 supplies 'young man' and Luke 18:18 supplies 'a ruler,' and the composite comes from harmonizing the three.

Now look at what does not happen. There is no follow-up. No adjusted terms, no smaller first ask, no reframe, no appeal to sunk investment, no leaving the door open with a softer version. Every technique in this module could have closed that man, and several of them ethically. He was allowed to walk. If you want a single verse that separates influence from control in this academy, it is that one, because it establishes that the refusal of a free person is a real outcome and not a failure state.

The same refusal appears where the stakes are highest. John 6:15: 'So Jesus, perceiving that they were intending to come and take Him by force to make Him king, withdrew again to the mountain by Himself alone.' A crowd offers Him the throne and He leaves the room. In Luke 9:54-55, James and John propose calling down fire on a Samaritan village that would not receive Him, and He turns and rebukes them — the disciples reach for coercion and get corrected, not congratulated.

And the fifth move is a strategy no growth consultant would sign off on. Mark 3:13-14: 'And He went up on the mountain and summoned those whom He Himself wanted, and they came to Him. And He appointed twelve, so that they would be with Him and that He could send them out to preach.' Read the purpose clause in the order it is written. The first purpose is that they would be with Him; the sending comes second. He had crowds pressing in, and He kept walking away from them to spend three years on twelve men — one of whom betrayed Him and another of whom denied Him publicly. I will not soften that: depth over reach guarantees nothing. It produced a defection rate of one in twelve at the decisive moment.

Luke 22:24-27 puts all of it in one exchange at the last supper. A dispute breaks out about which of them is regarded as greatest, and Jesus answers: 'The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who have authority over them are called Benefactors.' That word is not incidental. The Greek is euergetai — an actual Hellenistic honorific that kings took as a formal title, Ptolemy III and Ptolemy VIII among them. The rulers of that world were literally branded as public servants while ruling by force. Then the contrast: 'But I am among you as the one who serves.' Service as a title, or service as a fact. The distance between those two is where most leadership careers are decided.

Knowing All Things, He Took a Towel

Which brings us to the scene the lesson is named for, and to the sentence that carries the whole argument.

John 13:3-5: 'Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He had come forth from God and was going back to God, got up from supper, and laid aside His garments; and taking a towel, He girded Himself. Then He poured water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel with which He was girded.'

Read verse 3 and verse 4 as one sentence, because grammatically that is what they are. The knowing clause is not scene-setting. It is the premise. The evangelist tells you the maximum possible claim about authority — all things given into His hands — and then, with no adversative and no explanation, the main verbs arrive: got up, laid aside, took, girded, poured, began to wash. Full authority and the slave's task, welded together. Every leadership instinct you have wants a 'but' between those verses. There isn't one.

The Greek rewards attention here. The verb in 13:4 for laying aside the garments is tithemi; in 13:12 He takes them again, lambano. Those are the same two verbs John uses in chapter 10 for the shepherd who lays down His life and takes it up again — 'I lay down My life so that I may take it again' (John 10:17), with the explicit claim in 10:18 that He has authority to do both. Commentators widely note the echo. Label it honestly: a defensible reading of a verbal parallel, not demonstrated authorial intent. What is not in doubt is the social meaning of the act. Foot-washing was the work of the lowest servant in the household, and John 13:16 uses the word: 'a slave is not greater than his master.' The Greek is doulos. NASB 1995 renders it 'slave'; other translations prefer 'bond-servant,' and the choice is genuinely disputed because ancient slavery does not map cleanly onto modern categories. The dispute does not touch this scene. Whatever range doulos carries, foot-washing sat at the bottom of it.

Now put Mark 10:42-45 beside it. 'You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great men exercise authority over them. But it is not this way among you, but whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.'

Four Greek words carry that passage. 'Lord it over' is katakyrieuo. 'Exercise authority over' is katexousiazo. 'Servant' in verse 43 is diakonos, the ordinary word for one who waits on others. 'Slave of all' in verse 44 is doulos panton. And here I have to be honest in a way popular teaching on this passage usually is not: katakyrieuo is not an intrinsically wicked word. The Septuagint uses it in Genesis 1:28 for the dominion God gives humanity over the earth. The pejorative force in Mark 10:42 comes from the context and the contrast Jesus draws, not from the prefix. Build your point on the verb and a critic who knows Greek will take it apart in one sentence. Build it on the contrast, which is unassailable: whatever the Gentile rulers were doing, it is not to be done this way among you.

Notice also what verse 43 does not do. It does not abolish the desire for greatness. 'Whoever wishes to become great among you' — the wish is left standing. The road is changed. That is a redirection of ambition, not an amputation of it, and you will need that distinction in about ten minutes.

Philippians 2 states the same movement as a pattern to be copied. Verses 5-8: 'Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.'

Two Greek words, both contested in ways worth stating plainly. 'Emptied Himself' is heauton ekenosen, from kenoo. The text never says what He emptied Himself of, and the old kenosis debates that assumed divine attributes are reading in a claim the sentence does not make; the participle that follows — 'taking the form of a bond-servant,' morphen doulou labon, doulos again — most naturally explains the manner. He emptied Himself by taking. The second word is harpagmos in verse 6, which NASB 1995 renders 'a thing to be grasped.' Scholars divide: Roy Hoover's 1971 study in the Harvard Theological Review argued the idiom means something closer to 'something to be exploited for one's own advantage,' which is why several modern translations render it that way. Both readings support the same executive point, so I can give you the dispute without hedging the lesson. Status was held and not clutched, and the exaltation in verse 9 is something God does to Him. The promotion in this passage is granted. It is never seized.

Nietzsche's Objection, and the Towel a Mayor Has to Pick Up

Now the objection, stated as strongly as I can state it, because a weak version would be an insult to you and to him.

In On the Genealogy of Morality, published in 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that our moral vocabulary is the product of a revolt. The strong originally called themselves good and the weak bad — a description of vitality, not a verdict. The weak, unable to win by strength, took revenge in the only arena available to them: they invented a new scale on which their own incapacities counted as virtues. Powerlessness became meekness. Inability to retaliate became forgiveness. Cowardice became patience. Nietzsche calls the engine of it ressentiment, and in the first essay's image of the lambs and the birds of prey he makes the sharpest form of the charge: the lamb calls the eagle evil and calls its own weakness a choice, when in fact it has no talons.

Apply that here and it draws blood. The towel, Nietzsche would say, is the most sophisticated power move ever executed. The servant becomes unassailable, because to criticize a man who is washing feet is to look like a monster. Moral capital accrues to visible service. The one who kneels acquires a debt from everyone watching, and the debt is heavier than any a king could impose because it cannot be repaid or refused. And then look at what the institution built on this teaching actually did with power for fifteen centuries. Slave morality, on his account, is not weakness. It is domination that learned to kneel.

Concede what is true, because a great deal of it is. Much of what markets itself as servant leadership in the modern world is exactly what he describes. There is the leader who serves conspicuously and cashes the moral credit at review time. There is the one who uses his own sacrifice as a weapon — after everything I have done for this organization — which is a debt collection wearing a humility costume. There is the resentment of the passed-over dressed as principle. Nietzsche's diagnostic instrument works, and if you are honest you have watched it work on somebody you know. Possibly recently. Possibly in a mirror.

Here is where the objection fails, and it fails at the level of the text rather than at the level of sentiment. Ressentiment requires an agent who could not have taken power. The whole mechanism depends on incapacity being revalued as choice. John 13:3 blocks that at the premise: the evangelist specifies that He knew the Father had given all things into His hands, and then He took the towel. Philippians 2:6 has the descent beginning from the form of God. Whatever else you make of those texts, they are not the literature of people rationalizing a defeat; they are the literature of capacity declining to use itself. The Gentile rulers in Mark 10:42 are not envied. They are described accurately and then set aside. And Mark 10:43 leaves ambition standing — 'whoever wishes to become great among you' — which is precisely what a life-denying morality of the resentful cannot afford to do.

Nietzsche has a reply available and intellectual honesty requires me to hand it to him: he could say the Gospel writers constructed that framing specifically to immunize the claim, that a movement inventing a story about voluntary descent is doing exactly what ressentiment would do with better literary instincts. That reply cannot be settled inside this lesson, because it turns on whether those texts are historically reliable, which is a Module 4 question and not a Module 5 one. What I will not do is pretend the answer is easy. And I will add one more piece of fairness he is usually denied: his sister Elisabeth edited and repackaged his unpublished notes after his collapse, and the political movement that later claimed him is not one he endorsed — he despised German nationalism and antisemitism in print. Do not answer him with a slur about what was done in his name.

Then there is the honest counter-history, and skipping it would make everything above propaganda. When Christians got hold of the levers Jesus refused, they used them. Forced conversions. Crusades preached as pilgrimage. Inquisitions. Churches in this country that owned people and wrote theology to justify it, and churches within living memory that defended segregation from the pulpit. The towel has been betrayed far more often by the people carrying it than by the people mocking it. I hold Scripture as the highest authority, and one consequence of holding it that way is that Scripture judges the church rather than the reverse. Mark 10:42 is a description of what Christian institutions have repeatedly done, and it was already a prohibition when they did it.

So what does any of this mean for someone who intends to hold an office? Three things, concretely. First, service before status changes what you tell the truth about. A mayor who needs to be the man who fixed the subway will misrepresent his own authority, because the MTA is run by the state and always has been; a mayor who is not competing for credit can say that out loud and then fight for the thing he actually controls. Second, stewardship before power changes your appointments. The highest-leverage decision a chief executive makes is naming commissioners, and only a leader who is not competing with his own cabinet will appoint people who are better at their jobs than he is. Third, the towel changes what happens when service stops paying. It will stop paying. There will be a Tuesday where the right thing costs you money, standing, or a relationship, and nobody will be watching and no one will ever know. That is the only moment that actually tests which of the two things you have.

Because here is the distinction this whole lesson has been building toward. Four of the five moves in the Downward Method are techniques and can be learned by anyone, including people who should not have them. The towel is not a technique. John 13:3 is an identity clause before it is an action clause — He knew who He was and where He came from and where He was going, and the towel came out of that knowing. Which returns you to Module 1, where this course started and where it has been heading the whole time: we are who God says we are, and once that is settled you stop working to become someone and start leading from being someone. A leader who picks up a towel as a strategy will put it down the first time it costs more than it returns. A leader who is a servant has nothing to put down.

That closes Module 5. You have learned the line between influence and manipulation, the science of persuasion, how minds actually change, credibility, listening, framing, and how to move people when you hold no authority at all — and you have now been shown a life that outperformed all of it by going down instead of up. Module 6 takes up communication, and the order matters as much here as it did between identity and character. Clarity is a weapon in the hands of someone who wants to win the room and a kindness in the hands of someone who wants the listener to actually understand. You have just spent a lesson deciding which of those you are. Now we make you good at it.