“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” Martin Luther King, Jr. had it exactly right.
When Jesus roared into Jerusalem at the head of an impromptu parade everyone thought they finally had a messiah who made sense. The Galilean rednecks bellowed the Marseillaise and shouted “Viva Zapata!” The Sadduccean bureaucrats huddled in caucus to strategize about spin-control. The Roman garrison nervously fingered their swords.
Hardly anybody got the point: Jesus was not finally throwing off servitude to show himself God-like; he was embracing ultimate service because he was God.
A few years down the road when Paul ponders the cross the laser-logic of his prose puckers and forces him to fall back on poetry. He belts out a few bars of a popular praise chorus about death as the ultimate form of service, and service as the ultimate form of power. Modern readers often miss an important phrase that comes along in the refrain: “every knee will bow.” The lyricist lifted that line from an older hymn originally penned by the prophet Isaiah where God Almighty sings the solo:
I have sworn by Myself,
The word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness
And will not turn back,
That to Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear allegiance.
That fiercely monotheistic confession Paul now applies to the crucified Christ not only as proof of Jesus’ deity but as an insistence that the mark of divinity is sacrificial service even unto death. Jesus did not abandon or damp-down his deity on the cross, he displayed it.
Be like that, Paul advises. Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.
Get Down!
Doug
Collect
Only wise God, Your Son showed us who You are not by ascent but by descent, not by the exploitation of power but by the humiliation of service. Shape our minds on the model of the cross that in our littleness and our lowliness the world might see Your greatness and your majesty and openly confess Christ as Lord. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Benediction
May God place in you the mind of Christ,
That you might empty yourself of all but Him.
May God place on you the cross of Christ,
That you might humble yourself in fellowship with Him.
May God place you at the right hand of Christ
That you might forever proclaim the unending praise of Him
Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
One God now and forever,
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment