Week 1: Who is Greater?

If—

By Rudyard Kipling

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Within minutes they were bickering over who of them would end up the greatest. But Jesus intervened: “Kings like to throw their weight around and people in authority like to give themselves fancy titles. It’s not going to be that way with you. Let the senior among you become like the junior; let the leader act the part of the servant.

“Who would you rather be: the one who eats the dinner or the one who serves the dinner? You’d rather eat and be served, right? But I’ve taken my place among you as the one who serves. And you’ve stuck with me through thick and thin.

-Luke 22:24-28 (MSG)

The last words of a person's life are very important. And these are the words we find here with Jesus. These are the last few days of His life. He knows what lies ahead for Him, and this is perhaps also why John devotes so much of his gospel (the largest part) to this last teaching of Jesus. He teaches His disciples what is happening to them and then gives them a different way of looking at what is happening. It seems as if the noose is now tightening around their necks - they are being persecuted, they wonder what will become of them. Jesus is about to be arrested; a trial is coming and very possibly, a death sentence. Everything is unjust. Jesus sees all of this in the light of the will of his Father. He does not only look at what is in front of him. He finds the Father's work and His presence in everything that happens to Him. It is still difficult, but His experience of what is happening is now completely different. He invites His disciples to look at what is happening in the same way as He does.

It changes everything in your life when you can see what is happening in the context of a larger plan of God’s will, and realise that God is there. That is why He says, look at Me. And this is our journey this week, to just look at Him. He tells the disciples the way down is actually the way up. We get a very different message from the culture and the world we live in. For us, climbing the ladder of success is the way up. This leads to a lot of discord, like what is now emerging among the disciples. It is a life of tension. It is not easy. He invites them, “Come with Me, live as I do.” It is a life of Freedom, peace and joy.

Prayer: I ask for the grace of deep insight and conviction that my obsession with self is robbing me of life.