Who ever heard of a god who came to serve?
No one, until the Son of Man, Who alone has seen the Father, revealed the unprecedented, the unthinkable and unimaginable fact, that Name of God is Love.
In fact, the meaning of the Name of Jesus is the revelation of this truth.
The world is full of men who want to be gods. The world has always been filled with wannabe divinity's.
"You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them," Jesus said, soon after He started walking toward Jerusalem, shocking His followers as He seemed to be deliberately walking toward destruction.
Of course He was.
James and John, assuming and presuming that He was approaching the crowning achievement of a policial campaign in which He would take up the power of the State and put down all the enemies and phobias of Israel, thought that this was their opportune moment.
They wanted primacy. Perhaps a crown. Surely, glory and honor, privilege. Favor and gifts to shower upon their friends. Their own oligarchy.
They had no idea: "You do not know what you are asking," Jesus told them. "You do not understand the cup that I will be drinking and the baptism that I will undergo."
Jesus was grieved. He had heard this all along from His disciples, His friends. They never understood, or wanted to understand. They were always jockeying for position.
"How long, how long must I put up with you?" He had cried out these very words in just the chapter before, when His disciples had utterly failed at their greatest challenge of servanthood -- to drive out a terrible demon from a little boy.
Servanthood is what Jesus asked of His friends. This is what God had always asked of His people, from Adam to Abraham, from Moses to David to the Prophets.
Because Servanthood is what the Name of God means, precisely.
"Whoever would be great among must be your servant," Jesus told them, on the way to the Cross. "Whoever would be among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all."
This is a complete inversion of the metanarratives of the fallen world. This is an utter, exhaustive rejection of the primeval deception, to deify oneself at the expense of the Covenant. To seek one's advantage over the rest to seek primacy at the cost of the rest.
God's righteousness had always been intended for the fulfillment of the needs of all. God's Table was always set for every single creature. Even in the fallen world, there was never insufficiency.
People suffer and starve. People die. Only because "great men exercise power over them."
In this moment when power that exceeds the Gentiles, when demonic fascism has been let loose upon little Ukrainian boys and girls, grandfathers and grandmothers, and parents, and young men who die on the battlefield and young Ukrainian women are raped by Russian soldiers ...
... in this moment when monsters dare to carry the Cross while turning it upside down, we hear the words of the True God Who rejects the satanic religion of power and domination:
"For the Son of Man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10.45).
This True God "emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death upon a cross" (Philippians 2.7-8).
So when you hear of ideologies and war plans, when you hear of culture wars and authorities rationalizing invasions and justifying slaughter, ask yourself this:
Who is serving whom?
For Christ is the One Who said and demonstrated the true meaning of this verse, contrary to the recent blasphemous utterance in the darkness of an anti-cathedral.
Christ, Who is Love itself, said "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (John 15.13).
The Cross is the Sign of the True God, Who alone bears the Name of Love.
Comments