The Servant of the Rest

“If one of you wants to be great,” said Jesus, “you must be the servant of the rest; and if one of you wants to be first, you must be the slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served; he came to serve and to give his life to redeem many people.”

“If one of you wants to be great, you must be the servant of the rest.”

We’ve heard those words so often that they tend to just skim over us, don’t they? We know that Christians are supposed to be the servants of all; we know that Jesus told us to wash one another’s feet; we know that he is identified with the suffering servant that we have just read about in Isaiah.

Yet we never believe them. We don’t obey them. We never have, right back to the earliest days of Christianity. Right back in the book of Acts, within days of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, they were squabbling about who got precedence at the dinner table. The Greeks complained they were being neglected in favour of the Jews. This was back in the days when the church was small enough they could all live together, and I expect you remember what happened. The elders of the church said, “It is not right for us to neglect the preaching of God's word in order to handle finances. So then, friends, choose seven men among you who are known to be full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, and we will put them in charge of this matter. We ourselves, then, will give our full time to prayer and the work of preaching.”

One thing to specially notice is that the men who were chosen to serve dinner had to be men known to be full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom. The elders knew, if the people didn’t, that to be great, the helpers, often known as the first deacons, needed to be servants of all.

St Paul, a few years later, is horrified by the way the Christians in Corinth are behaving. “None of you” he says, “should be looking out for your own interests, but for the interests of others.” This is in the context of whether one could, or should, eat meat that had previously been offered to idols – and it was difficult to buy meat that hadn’t been – or whether if you did, it was participating in the ritual. Paul leaves it up to you, but he points out that if you say: “Why should my freedom to act be limited by another person's conscience? If I thank God for my food, why should anyone criticize me about food for which I give thanks?” then you aren’t really giving glory to God because you aren’t looking out for other people’s faith.

And when it comes to the way they behaved when they went to Holy Communion, he was appalled: “Your meetings for worship actually do more harm than good. In the first place, I have been told that there are opposing groups in your meetings; and this I believe is partly true. (No doubt there must be divisions among you so that the ones who are in the right may be clearly seen.) When you meet together as a group, it is not the Lord's Supper that you eat. For as you eat, you each go ahead with your own meal, so that some are hungry while others get drunk. Don't you have your own homes in which to eat and drink? Or would you rather despise the church of God and put to shame the people who are in need? What do you expect me to say to you about this? Shall I praise you? Of course I don't!”

But it wasn’t just the people of Corinth who kept on putting themselves first. St James, our Lord’s brother, has to point out that it’s seriously no good saying you have faith if your faith doesn’t lead to action. If you know someone at Church doesn’t have enough to eat, or doesn’t have enough money to pay for heating, you won’t do much good by just saying “God bless you, stay warm and well fed!”

And on and on down the centuries. Right down to us, today – we’ve all heard the egregious stories coming out of the United States, where some so-called Christian men seem to covet power to the extent of wanting to have it over women’s bodies, even. And where Christianity seems to be linked to right-wing politics in a way that we on this side of the Atlantic cannot understand.

However, having said all that, there are, of course, masses of exceptions. Just last Sunday, Archbishop Romero was made a saint – he, of course, was renowned for his work among the poorest and most marginalised people in El Salvador. He didn’t espouse the liberation theology that was so popular at the time, but he did believe that the then government needed to respect human rights. In a famous speech, he denounced the persecution of those members of the Church who had worked on behalf of the poor, commenting at the end: “But it is important to note why [the Church] has been persecuted. Not any and every priest has been persecuted, not any and every institution has been attacked. That part of the church has been attacked and persecuted that put itself on the side of the people and went to the people's defence. Here again we find the same key to understanding the persecution of the church: the poor.”

Archbishop Romero wanted the church to remain united. He denied that there was one church for the rich and another for the poor, despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. He was, if you like, the servant of all the rest. And he was martyred for it, shot while celebrating the Eucharist in a hospital chapel.

But Archbishop Romero was only one of many Christians down the years who has spent his life in the service of others. Think of all the many, many missionaries who felt called of God to leave their homes and their home countries and to travel to distant lands to share God’s love, either through direct preaching and teaching, or perhaps through showing God’s love through ministering to the sick. But even they, sometimes, forgot that they needed to be servants of the rest. They assumed, often wrongly, that their own culture was the best, and tried to impose it on everybody else, often with disastrous results. Sometimes they assumed that they were the only ones who knew anything, and nobody from the local culture was fit to lead a church. The ideal missionaries, of course, were the ones that worked themselves out of a job, but so few of them were ideal. Many of them, probably quite unconsciously, enjoyed the power they had and wanted to cling on to it.

As it seems that James and John did, in our Gospel reading. They asked Jesus whether they could have the places of honour in his kingdom, to which Jesus replied that even if they could suffer as he was about to, those places weren’t his to give. And, “if one of you wants to be great, you must be the servant of the rest.”

It must have turned their world upside-down. The servants – the poor, marginalised ones who had to work for other people instead of being their own masters. They were to be the great ones? I’ve said before that the stories Jesus told about the Kingdom of Heaven, about God’s country, were apt to make people wonder, and here was another aspect of it! And, as we have seen, it wasn’t one that came easily. Although there were many, many people who did believe it and obey it. There were the women, many of them not even named in our Bibles, who followed Jesus, and who, I am sure, made sure that everybody had something to eat, and a blanket to sleep under, even if that night’s bed must be under a hedge. We see them in our churches today, the ones who get on with things – making coffee, washing up the cups, sweeping the floor, often the first to arrive and the last to leave. And doing it without drawing attention to themselves, too. And those who work quietly in the community, doing what they can to help the poor and marginalised, even if that’s only an occasional donation to the food bank, and perhaps a smile at a harassed supermarket cashier.

So many of us – probably most of us – find it hard to be the servant to the rest. We pay lip service to the necessity, but I don’t know about you, but I find it really hard to put into practice. And the trouble with this sort of sermon is that you end up feeling guilty, and thinking that you must be a terrible person for not being as willing as you might to put yourself last – even if you almost always do put yourself last! Or perhaps especially if!

But, as so often when it comes to Christianity, it’s probably not a thing we can learn how to do by ourselves. Some years ago now, I had one of those epiphanies that come all too rarely in our Christian lives, when a couple of verses strung themselves together in my head. The first was from our reading today: “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve.” And then I thought, “And the Son of Man does only what He sees His Father doing.” Does that mean, think you, that God, too, wants to serve us, to give us good gifts, not grudgingly and unwillingly, but gladly, pressed down and running over! I think it does. And one of those gifts, as we know, is God’s Holy Spirit within us, filling us to overflowing, making us more like Jesus. And part of that will be making us more able to serve one another without making a great big noisy fuss about it. Part of it will be making us less enamoured of power and status, and more willing to settle for being just another person. And part of it will be, for some of us, God whispering “Well done, my good and trusty servant!”