Well, we are here in the middle of October already. Last time I was with you, I was still preaching from the Summer Sermon Series. This week, we’re in a new series. We’re in a different month.
We have a series this month, preaching series called the Upside Down Kingdom. And we’re talking about different places in scripture where at first glance, things seem to contradict each other. Just to give a couple of examples, we’re told in scripture that God is generous and gives freely to God’s people. And it’s good also to work and build wealth as God gives us the ability.
But at the same time, Jesus says it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for someone who’s rich to enter the kingdom of God. So we have this juxtaposition of teachings. And similarly, we had another contradiction. We’re told to love our enemies.
The Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans, If your enemy is hungry, feed him. And if he’s thirsty, give him something to drink. And then he says, In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head. So it’s this back and forth.
So today, we’ve got another one of these. Makes things interesting, doesn’t it? Today, our focus is on the saying of Jesus that the least among us is the greatest, and the greatest among us is the servant of all. Okay. So Bob Dylan once famously wrote a song called You Gotta Serve Somebody, which got a lot of interesting reactions from a lot of people.
Thinking about this this past week, I realized that we Americans generally don’t have a whole lot of experience with servanthood, either as servants or as people being served. We tend to think of ourselves as essentially equals. That’s the American way, right? Says so in the Declaration of Independence. All people are created equal.
Actually, it says, All men are created equal. But if it were being written today, I’m sure it would say, All people are created equal. And that would include people of different races and orientations and immigrants and people with disabilities. We still have some work to do on these ideals of ours, but it’s good to have the ideals.
And at the very least, I think we would all agree that as Americans, no one is obligated to serve us, and we are not obligated to serve anyone else. Even in the work world, where we might expect to be asked to serve others as part of our work, and sometimes we do, for the most part, we work at will. We can quit at any time. We can change jobs at any time.
We generally don’t think of ourselves as servants to our employers. Now, there was a time, I think, when that might have been different, maybe back in the 1800s, early 1900s, and I can remember my grandparents, and especially my great-grandparents, having servants in the home. Not full-time, but like one or two days a week, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry. But even these people worked at will.
So I don’t think I really understood the nature of servanthood until I went to England. And I didn’t like it when I ran up against it there. And for that matter, I still don’t like it. It’s one of the things about England I could live without.
Anyway, this really is, there really is a living, breathing class system over there, with some really weird rules. I mean, I’ve learned that Brits tend to behave in a humble way towards others if they’re not sure whether the person they’re talking to is above or below them on the social ladder. And I think that might be part of why Brits are so proper. And then there’s the fact that owners of places like Highclere Castle, which is where Downton Abbey was filmed, the owners of that castle will always be higher-ranking than, say, a member of the Rolling Stones, even though the Stones have more money.
It has something to do with where or how you got the money. And then sometimes Brits can tell a person’s social status by what neckties they wear, which is really weird. Now, thankfully, as an American, I can pretend I know nothing at all about this, and I just ignore it. But they do catch on to that after a while.
They don’t appreciate it. Anyway, looking at TV shows like Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs, we can catch a glimpse of a system of servanthood that is hundreds of years old. And it was not an easy life for the workers, the household servants. They had set working hours, but they were essentially on call 24/7 as needed.
On the other hand, the household servants were considered in many ways members of the family. There was a human relationship that went beyond mere employer-employee. And I was Googling around this week trying to find ways to describe this, how to put this into words, and I came across an excerpt of a book written in 1887 entitled How to Behave. This is not written for children.
It’s written for men. This book was directed towards men who are masters of an estate. And it describes the ideal working relationships between the owners upstairs and the servants downstairs. And I wanted to share just a part of this to give you a feel for it.
And again, remember, this is being directed to the master of the house. It says, We are all dependent in one way or another upon others. At one time we serve, at another we are served, and we are equally worthy of honor and respect in the one case as in the other. The man or the woman who serves us may or may not be our inferior in natural capacity, learning, manners, or wealth.
Servants have rights as well as those whom they serve, and the latter have duties as well as the former. We owe those who labor for us something more than their wages. And the book goes on, The true gentleman is never arrogant or overbearing or rude to domestics or employees. His commands are requests, and all services, no matter how humble the servant, are received with thanks as if they were favors.
So it’s sort of a formal, informal kind of a thing that we see, particularly if you watch Downton Abbey, you see that kind of transactions between the upstairs and downstairs. Anyway, according to the same website, there are still today about 65,000 domestic servants in the UK, including butlers, maids, cooks, valets, gardeners, chauffeurs, governesses, tutors, and so forth. One such servant was recently quoted as saying that, Being in service is almost like being married to the family. The servants are that devoted to their family.
And as much as the idea of servanthood rubs Americans the wrong way, there’s one good thing I learned from all this, and that is that it stems from that family feeling, that personal loyalty. It also teaches me a little bit about servanthood just in general. Some of you might remember an episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, that was a while back, but there was one episode where the city-dwelling family, which is that they were the stars of the show, went to visit some relatives in the country for a few weeks, and immediately, immediately, there was a major conflict between the servants of the two houses. They just did not get along.
They were nasty remarks. There was infighting, sabotage of each other’s work. And as an American, I was completely puzzled by this, but a Brit would have understood it right away. In Britain’s class society, the greater the master, the greater the servant, right? And these servants weren’t sure which of their masters was higher up the totem pole, so they were duking it out amongst themselves.
They were fighting over which one of them was the greatest. Does this sound familiar to our scriptures today? Some things haven’t changed in 2,000 years. And before we start thinking that Americans are all that different, we do sort of have our own version of the pecking order. I mean, it’s more impressive in most people’s eyes to graduate from Harvard than from community college, and it’s more impressive to land a job in marketing at Heinz than at the Postal Service.
I mean, but here’s the thing. If we’re serving God, then we are servants of the greatest. It is the greatest possible calling in life to serve God, and all of us have that calling. Every single person has that calling.
A person does not have to have a paying job in the church to be God’s servant. All of us who serve God are servants of the greatest. But being God’s servants in God’s upside-down twist makes us servants of everybody else because Jesus came to serve. So with all of that as background and introduction, let’s turn to the scriptures now.
First off, Psalm 104 today doesn’t really speak directly to the issue of servanthood other than the fact that all of creation serves God by declaring God’s glory. Psalm 104 celebrates the universe, creation, weather, fire, water, mountains, and valleys, all of them servants of God, doing what God created them to do. And we also, as God’s servants, serve best when we are being what God created us to be and doing what God created us to do. So in essence, Psalm 104 sets the stage for the other two readings.
The reading in Hebrews comes closer to the point. And in this passage, the writer of the Hebrews is talking about Jesus as God’s high priest, which is a very Jewish way of thinking of things. In the Old Testament in Judaism, the high priest is or was chosen by God. A person would never put themselves forward for a job like that.
He was a spiritual leader of God’s people. He had the duty of offering gifts and sacrifices for sins. And he was human, so he needed to make offerings for himself and his own sins, as well as the sins of others. And because of this, he could deal gently with sinners when they came seeking forgiveness.
And the writer of the Hebrews takes all this and draws a parallel from this to Jesus. He says, Jesus also was called and chosen by God, not self-appointed. God said, ‘You are my son. Today I have begotten you.
‘ Jesus did not put himself forward, but followed God’s leading all the way to the cross. Jesus offered himself as a sacrifice for sin. And while Jesus does not share our human weaknesses, he can relate to them because he has been one of us. And having said all this, the writer of Hebrews then points out that Jesus is a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.
Now this is some fairly obscure Jewish theology, but here’s why it’s important. Jesus was not descended from Aaron or Levi. They were the patriarchs of the priestly tribe. Instead, Jesus is called a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.
Now Melchizedek was a mysterious person who shows up in Genesis chapter 14 and visits Abram after Abram won a battle and captured a lot of wealth. And this is before Abram became Abraham. Melchizedek’s name literally means king of righteousness. And he is king of a region called Salem.
And Salem, like the word shalom, means peace. So here we have the king of righteousness who is literally the prince of peace. He is also a priest of El Elyon, which translates the most high God. And Abram gave Melchizedek 10% of everything he had captured in the battle.
In other words, he gave a tithe. Now needless to say, many theologians have put all these things together and come to the conclusion that this actually was Jesus visiting Abram before Abram became the father of the nation of Israel and before Jesus was physically born. There is certainly a connection somehow. Melchizedek is mentioned one other time in Scripture, and that’s in Psalm 110 verse 4, where it’s written, The Lord hath sworn and will not repent.
Thou art a priest forever after the manner of Melchizedek. And this is the verse that the writer of Hebrews quotes to prove that Jesus is and always was a priest, predating the Old Testament priesthood even before the Ten Commandments were given. That’s a lot of history there. Having said all this, the writer of Hebrews then says about Jesus, Being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who, we would expect the author to say to all who believe, but he actually says to all who obey.
So why isn’t it salvation to all who believe? Because in Judaism, again, we’re looking at the backdrop of the Jewish nation and Jewish theology. In Judaism, there’s not a whole lot of difference between believing and obeying, because faith is something that’s meant to be put into action. Faith without works is dead. As Jesus would say, Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I tell you? There’s more to faith than obedience, but obedience cannot be eliminated.
It’s part of having faith. What good is it to believe in something if we’re not true to those beliefs, if we don’t live into them? That’s where the passage in Hebrews takes us. And now, at this point, with all that as background, we can turn to our reading from Mark, and we come to the point of all of this. So to give the backdrop of the Mark story, at this point in the Gospel of Mark, the disciples have been traveling with Jesus for a while.
They’ve seen his power, they’ve seen his miracles, they’ve seen his popularity with the crowds. They know that Jesus is God’s Messiah, and they know that Jesus has been talking about a kingdom. Now traditionally in Israel, people with messianic messages have led revolutions to overthrow foreign governments. They have reestablished proper worship in the temple, things like that, so that Israel could worship God freely and live in God’s promised land freely.
But Jesus has been trying to teach the disciples that he’s going to go to Jerusalem to die. But the disciples still have it in their heads that Jesus is going to reclaim the country for God. Therefore, James and John, they were called the Sons of Thunder back then, that was their nickname. The Sons of Thunder, they come up and they ask Jesus if when he comes into his kingdom, if they can sit at his right hand and his left hand.
They wanted to be number two and number three in the kingdom when that kingdom comes. And of course this ticks off the rest of the disciples. It’s interesting that Jesus doesn’t say no. Instead he asks, or he says, You have no idea what you’re asking, which is true.
And then he asks them, Are you capable of being baptized with the baptism I’m about to undergo? And he says this referring to his death, because baptism, which is by immersion back then, baptism by immersion is a symbol of dying and rising again. And they answer Jesus, We are able. And Jesus says, You will indeed be baptized as I am. But he says, It’s not up to me who will be seated next to me in the coming kingdom.
That’s somebody else’s decision. And as a footnote to this story, as things turned out, James was the first of the twelve disciples to be martyred. James was killed by King Herod Agrippa in the year 44 AD. His brother John lived a little bit longer.
He wrote Revelation while he was in exile, and nobody knows for sure where and when he finally passed away. Meanwhile, the other disciples were still ticked off about all this. So Jesus takes this as a teachable moment, and he says, Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be the slave of all. And he goes on to say and describe how the great and the powerful people of this world lord it over everyone else.
They are tyrants, Jesus says. They will do all they can to protect themselves and their prerogatives. They rely on coercion and control to maintain their dominance. Does this sound familiar? But Jesus continues and says, Not so with you.
This kind of behavior is not for God’s people. This is not how we behave in God’s family. In God’s kingdom, we stand in complete and total opposition to this worldly kind of power. Even at the cost of our own lives.
This is, as one theologian puts it, a radical renunciation of authority and privilege. As Jesus says, If you want to be great, be a servant. And the word servant here in the Greek is diakonos. It’s the word we get deacon from.
We are all called to serve the way deacons serve. Even if we’re not officially ordained as deacons. In fact, Jesus goes further and says, If you want to be first, be a slave. Slaves are even lower than deacons.
A side note on the word ransom, because that’s been taken the wrong way a lot of times. Jesus does not mean that this is the way, he doesn’t mean ransom the way we would normally mean it. It’s not a payment. The Greek word means something more like securing a release.
So in other words, Jesus gets us out of jail free. That’s what he’s here to do. We don’t earn this, we don’t deserve it, but Jesus springs us from the prison of selfishness and loneliness and the powers of evil and darkness in the world, the powers that bring sin and death. We have been sprung from all that by Jesus’ sacrifice.
All it takes is trust in Jesus. As things turn out later on in Jerusalem, Jesus does find himself enthroned on a sense on a cross with a sign over his head reading, The King of the Jews. Now the Romans were poking fun when they put that up there, but they gave Jesus his true title for the world to see and to know and to believe. And Jesus was seated, so to speak, and two other people seated on his right hand and on his left for all the world to see.
And the one, the one on his right hand is the very first person ever to be saved by Jesus’ death, the first person to enter into the kingdom of heaven, the first reward to Jesus of his servanthood and his suffering. So Jesus calls us not to repeat the sacrifice on the cross because only Jesus can save in that way, but Jesus calls us to serve others in smaller ways, to put ourselves, to put others ahead of ourselves, not because society says that we should like they do over in the UK, but in ways that fulfill God’s commands to feed the hungry, to visit the sick, to visit the imprisoned, to help those in need, to welcome the stranger. And we become free from the desire for self-promotion and prestige as the world defines it. As this happens, we trust Jesus to lead us into the service that will bring us joy to others as well as ourselves because we serve the King who gave his all for us.
So in God’s economy, the greatest or the least, the least or the greatest, and we follow Jesus who is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, the greatest, who made himself the servant of all. We serve the greatest, the greatest servant. Amen.