Today’s beautiful weather in Ammon, Idaho. Isn’t it nice? No better place to live. Really.
And today, we began our study on the final evening of Jesus with his disciples before his crucifixion, the “lifting up” before all.
Again, this is one of the greatest privileges of my life: to work my way through chapters 13-17 with a group of loving, Christ-filled people each Sunday.
Look how the first verse in chapter 13 begins. It is about love.
Examine how the last verse in chapter 17 ends. It is about love.
Do you see it?
When you study verse 1, put the spotlight on the last phrase containing these words, “unto the end” (eis telos). I like the sense that the ASV (1901) places at the bottom of the page. The NEB picks up on this. The NIV follows suit. And the NLT paraphrases it also as the “full extent of love.”
How does Jesus introduce the full extent of love?
Footwashing.
(But make sure you make the distinction between louo and nipto for the washing in verse 10; the KJV obscures it. I disagree with the Codex Sinaiticus omitting, “save to wash his feet”, which the NEB translates accordingly.)
When I look at the life of Jesus, the preexistent One who came out from God, and notice what he did, it provokes me to live the life of a latter-day slave (lds) in my pursuit of following the Servant-Master.
Jesus in Idaho Falls 
I’m glad you posted this, Todd, on the heels of the previous post, concerning theosis in Orthodoxy. THIS is the path to union with God: the complete gift of self in love: kenosis. (Phillipians 2:5-11).
But this lifelong process of “putting to death the deeds of the flesh” is done, not as individuals, but as “members of Christ,” members Christ’s body, the Church: “without me you can do nothing,” as Jesus says in this section of John’s Gospel; “members of Christ” who have been crucified with Him in baptism (for he who is dead cannot live except he die), who have received “the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit” in chrismation, and who, in faith, feed on His Body and Blood in the Eucharist; “members of Christ” who ever make His life their own more and more by means of the great disciplines: prayer, fasting, and alms-giving and who, in the Mysteries of Reconciliation and the Anointing of the Sick, receive His healing touch. THIS is the Orthodox path of deification, “walking in the Spirit,” following the Servant Lord and Master in the emptying of self, who, in so doing, does only what He sees His Father doing for it is the Father’s primordial, eternal act of kenosis which generates the eternal, pre-existent Son and Word, and breathes forth the Holy Spirit. To the one God, Father, Son+, and Holy Spirit, be all glory, honor, and worship, in both worlds and uno the Aeon of aeons. Amen.
Very succinctly, from a Tradition-minded Roman priest:
“If we do not believe in miracles we do not ask for them”