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43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." (Mark 10:43-35 NRSV)
Dear Friend, a most marvelous of Mondays be yours! A reminder to pray for Mrs. Marie Currie as she undergoes knee replacement surgery in Gonzales, Texas. May the Lord bless this operation to bring healing and wholeness to Marie. Prayers for her husband, Emmit as well. Please pray for Jeff and Sammie Massie. Jeff will be having a steroid epidural shot in his back next Tuesday morning and on April 14 he'll be having shoulder surgery. Please pray that both of these procedures are successful and allow for relief of his pain.Please pray for those who have asked prayers from us through our church's prayer list. Always remember why we pray! Because God answers prayer!
This is a message I need to hear. Often. I am part of a society where the old phrase is still current and applicable; the rat race. I feel it every time I get behind the wheel of my vehicle. It seems drivers in our region are in a hurry and sometimes I'm leading the pack. I'm thankful my loving wife still coaches me on my driving. I need to hear her comments as I am one, like most of this region's drivers who want to get where we are going as quickly as we can. And, given we live in a construction zone that won't be finished until the year 2525, lane changes are a way of life and most of them without notice and usually in the blink of an eye. And that's the blink you'll see as most cars on the road today don't have blinkers! And on a national scale the political climate is far from perfect or peaceful. And here we have Jesus sharing with His disciples and with us, a better way to live.
I remind us that the disciiples were not perfect people because they suffered from the same condition as us; being human, and with that the usual symptoms and desires. Though the phrase "Looking out for number one" was not yet invented it was still very much in use. The reason Jesus addresses this need for humility and servanthood was because two brothers, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come to Jesus with a request. They want the best seats in the kingdom — one on His right, one on His left. They want to be, when all is said and done, the greatest. And before we judge them too quickly, we ought to sit with the uncomfortable recognition that their ambition is not alien to us. The desire to matter, to be recognized, to occupy a position of significance — this is not a peculiarity of first-century fishermen. It is the persistent hum beneath most human striving.
When the other ten disciples hear about the request, Mark tells us they are indignant. Which almost certainly means they are angry not because James and John were wrong to want greatness, but because James and John asked first. The whole group is infected with the same ambition. They have been arguing about who is greatest since at least chapter nine. The question of status and rank has been running beneath the surface of the entire journey.
And then Jesus calls them together — all twelve — and upends everything they thought they understood about power, greatness, and what it means to lead.
"You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them." v. 42) Jesus begins by naming the world's model of greatness honestly and without sentimentality.
The Gentile rulers — the Herods, the Caesars, the Roman governors they have all watched operate — exercise power in a particular direction: downward. Authority flows from the top and presses on those beneath it. Greatness is measured by how many people are below you, how completely they are subject to your will, how thoroughly your preferences shape the lives of others. The great ones lord it over — the Greek is katakurieuousin, to dominate, to exercise power over — and the great ones are tyrants, katexousiazousin, those who press the weight of their authority onto others.
This is not a crude caricature. Jesus is describing a system of power that was everywhere visible in the ancient world and has lost none of its familiarity in our own. The hierarchy of domination — where greatness means being served, where leadership means leveraging position for personal gain, where the measure of your importance is how many people exist to meet your needs — is not a relic. It is the default operating system of human institutions, including, if we are honest, many of our churches.
Jesus does not say this system is surprising. He says: you know this is how it works. Of course you do. You have grown up inside it. You have been shaped by its logic. And it is precisely this logic that James and John have carried, without realizing it, into their request for seats of honor.
"But it is not so among you..." Four words that change the entire architecture.
It is not so among you. Not: it should not ideally be this way. Not: try to do a little better. A flat, declarative negation. The community gathered around Jesus operates by a different logic entirely — not a modified version of the world's system with the rough edges softened, but a genuine inversion of it. The kingdom of God does not merely improve on the Gentile model of power. It overturns it.
This is one of the most radical claims Jesus makes in the entirety of His ministry, and it is delivered not in a formal theological discourse but in response to a squabble among His closest friends about who deserves the most honor. The ordinariness of the occasion makes it more remarkable, not less. This is not abstract teaching for later application. It is the direct correction of an actual failure happening in real time among real people.
And the you matters enormously. Jesus is not speaking about the world in general, or about what society at large ought to look like. He is speaking about the community of His followers specifically. The church — the gathered people of God — is called to be a living demonstration that a different way of ordering human life is possible. Not because Christians are inherently better people, but because they follow a Lord who has shown them a different way and calls them to embody it.
"...whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant..." Jesus does not abolish the desire for greatness. He redirects it.
He does not say: abandon your ambition, suppress your desire to matter, make yourself invisible. He says: if you want to be great — and greatness itself is not the problem — here is what greatness actually looks like in the kingdom. The desire to matter, to make a difference, to lead well, to be significant — these are not sins to be extinguished. They are energies to be reoriented.
The word translated servant is diakonos — from which we get the word deacon. It referred to someone who waited on tables, who attended to the practical, unglamorous needs of others. It was not a position of honor in the ancient world. It was the work of those who had no status to protect.
To become great in the kingdom, Jesus says, is to become this. Not to perform servanthood as a strategy for eventual recognition — doing visible good works with an eye toward how they will reflect on your reputation. But to genuinely orient your life around the needs of others, to find your deepest satisfaction not in being served but in serving, to measure your days not by what you have accumulated or achieved but by what you have given.
This reordering of ambition is not natural. It runs against the grain of every instinct that has been formed by a world that measures human worth by output, status, and recognition. It requires a sustained, daily, Spirit-enabled transformation of the self — which is precisely why it belongs at the heart of a Lenten devotion. Lent is the season in which we examine what our lives are actually oriented toward and ask whether it matches what our lips confess.
"...and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all." Jesus escalates the language deliberately.
From servant — diakonos — He moves to slave — doulos. In the ancient world, this was not a subtle shift. A servant had some degree of social standing. A slave had none. A slave's time was not their own, their preferences were irrelevant, their existence was entirely structured around the needs of another. By using this word, Jesus is not endorsing the institution of slavery — He is reaching for the most extreme image of self-giving available to His audience to make His point impossible to soften.
The one who would be first — who would lead, who would hold the highest place in the community — must be the one most completely given over to the wellbeing of everyone else. Leadership in the kingdom is not a privilege to be enjoyed. It is a burden to be carried on behalf of others. The higher the position, the greater the obligation to serve. The more authority entrusted, the more completely that authority must be wielded for others rather than over them.
This inverts every natural assumption about what leadership is for. Power, in the kingdom, is not a reward for faithfulness. It is a tool placed in the hands of the servant for the sake of those who cannot serve themselves.
"For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." And here is where the teaching ceases to be merely ethical instruction and becomes gospel.
Jesus does not say: this is a good principle, now go practice it. He grounds the entire inversion in His own person and His own mission. The reason the community of His followers is called to this radical servanthood is not that it is a philosophically superior ethic. It is that He came to serve. The logic of the kingdom is not an abstraction — it is an incarnation.
The Son of Man — the title Jesus most consistently uses for Himself, drawing on Daniel's vision of the one who receives an everlasting kingdom — came not to be served. The one who had every right to every honor, the one before whom the whole creation will one day bow, the one at whose name every knee will bend — He came to serve. He came with a basin and a towel. He came to touch lepers and eat with sinners and weep at tombs. He came, ultimately, to give His life.
A ransom for many — the Greek word lytron was the price paid to free a slave or a prisoner. Jesus is using the language of His own approaching death and giving it its meaning before it happens. He will not be merely the victim of unjust execution. He will be the servant giving everything — His very life — in exchange for the freedom of others.
This is the ground of all Christian humility and servanthood. We do not serve to earn our salvation. We serve from a salvation already given, at infinite cost, by the one who bent lowest of all so that we could stand.
The cross is the ultimate act of servanthood. And every act of genuine, self-giving, ego-surrendering service by a follower of Jesus is a small reflection of it — a tiny echo of the great self-giving that purchased our freedom.
The Mirror This Passage Holds Up It is worth pausing here, in the Lenten spirit of honest examination, to let this passage ask its questions directly.
Where in your life is the world's logic of power — the expectation of being served, the protection of status, the quiet insistence on recognition — still operating? Where do you find yourself indignant, like the ten disciples, when someone else receives honor you felt you deserved? Where do you lead with position rather than with a towel?
These are not comfortable questions. But they are the questions this passage will not let us avoid. James and John were not villains. They were people who loved Jesus and had nonetheless absorbed the world's assumptions about greatness so thoroughly that those assumptions shaped even their prayers. We are not so different.
The invitation of this passage is not condemnation. It is reorientation. The same Jesus who corrected His disciples corrects us — not to shame us, but to show us a better way. A truer way. The way He Himself walked, all the way to the cross.
PRAYER: Lord Jesus, You are the one who came not to be served but to serve, and You gave everything — held nothing back. Forgive me for the ways I have sought the seat of honor, protected my own status, and measured my worth by who serves me rather than by how freely I serve. By Your Spirit, reorder my ambitions. Make me genuinely, practically, daily a servant — not for recognition, but because You first served me at the cost of Your life. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Find one concrete, unannounced act of service to perform today — something that costs you something, that no one will likely notice or praise, and that is done entirely for the good of another.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Bless someone with hope today!
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
