On my allotment, there’s a wooden compost heap covered with old carpet. Every week we take down our vegetable peelings, used tea bags and egg shells and add them to the pile. It’s not a pleasant ritual, to be honest – it’s smelly, dirty and always make me feel a bit nauseous. But I do it because of what will happen to all that waste several months or so into the future.

When I pull back the carpet to add my latest potato peelings, underneath is a writhing mass of insects getting stuck into what I’ve thrown away – woodlice, millipedes, worms, slugs, mites, and centipedes. It’s a wriggling, vibrant, hot, chaotic, churning mass of bodies, muck and decay that assaults your senses. But turn it over every so often, leave it a year, then pull back the carpet and what you will find is crumbly, beautiful, compost with a wonderful earthy smell, and hardly an insect to be seen. They’ve processed all they can and have moved onto the next load of rotting food, leaving behind rich, life-giving compost full of humus.

The word humility has the same root as the word humus - the stable organic matter that won’t break down any further, that improves your soil and nurtures your plants. So to be humble is to have an internal stability in our understanding of who we are before God. It’s to stand before God without any illusions - knowing that we are created by God, that we are loved by God, and that we’re broken and in need of God.

Read John 13: 1-17

Just before Jesus died, he deliberately held this last supper with his friends, a time when he tried to communicate to them all that they would need in the coming days when their world would be turned upside down. At the start of that meal, Jesus took on the role of the lowliest servant, doing the task that none of the rest of them were prepared to do for each other. John tells us: ‘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.’

Often, I find my sense of self is all over the place. I swing between trying to boost it by reminding myself of my achievements, and then beating myself up and grovelling before God because of the mistakes I’ve made. Jesus’ act of humility in serving his friends came from a measured understanding of who he was before God. He knew that he was powerful. He knew that he had come from God and was returning to God. He knew what was about to happen. But he didn’t use that knowledge to persuade, to coerce or to benefit himself; he used it to serve. His internal stability and understanding of who he was enabled him to serve his disciples in a way that opened their eyes to truth.

‘Now that I have washed your feet, said Jesus, ‘you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.’

There are many things we can do for others that are the contemporary equivalent of foot washing, but we should imitate the source of Jesus’s humility, that rock-solid knowledge of who he was and whose he was. That’s true humility.