At the end "Jesus Didn't Teach Hate" flashes on the screen: "He Washed Feet." The gospel reduced to seven words. Simplistic though this message is, certain latter-day Pharisees have said the millions spent on the ad could have fed the poor immigrants at the border, housed the homeless person, or paid for the education of the pregnant woman's child.

Some traditions have just celebrated the feast of the Transfiguration when atop a mountain outside of Jerusalem Jesus' clothes "became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them" (Mark 9: 3 NIV). The ancients didn't have chlorine bleach (the process wasn't discovered until the time of the American Revolution), and any whitening of fabric or filaments was done by "fuller's soap," a mixture of soda ash, olive oil and alkaline salt (see Micah 3:2). It took months.

I thought of that long-ago association on hearing Sunday's gospel. "What good can come out of Nazareth?" asked the skeptical Nathaniel sitting under a fig tree when Philip approached him to meet the one "about whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth." In the northern district of Galilee, Nazareth was known for insurrection, poverty and not very good wine.

The water of baptism of course dries off (if it isn't blotted), and the oil of chrism doesn't survive the next bath or shower. How then to tell whether a person has been baptized; has renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil; and has promised to follow Christ as his Savior and Lord? No external markings, no contemporaneous professions, perhaps no sealed document to attest to the new Christian's faith.