Printer Friendly Version“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but
to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
When it comes to Jesus, the word that most clearly describes
Him is not Sovereign, but Servant. While He never spoke of himself as the
Messiah, and only reluctantly and with radical qualifications accepted it
as a title, He often identified himself as a servant: “For even the Son
of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a
ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). To His disciples during His last supper,
He said, “I am among you as the one who serves” (Luke 22:27).
It was natural that Jesus should speak of himself as servant
within the context of the last supper, for diakonia, ‘servanthood,’
originally referred to ‘waiting on tables.’ Jesus functioned as
a servant in preparing the Passover feast for His disciples. During the supper,
He assumed an even lower role by deliberately performing the most demeaning
and humiliating of first-century servant-roles, normally the lot of the lowest
ranking bond-servants or slaves. He laid aside His garments, wrapped himself
with a towel, poured water into a basin, knelt before His disciples, and washed
their feet (John 13:1-9). Because He would soon be exalted by the Father,
through His mighty resurrection from the dead “to the highest place”
as “Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11),
He thereby elevated diakonia to the highest possible level. In the hierarchy
of kingdom relationships, there is no advance from servanthood.
Jesus followed it up with the most profound of His several servant-sayings,
“You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then,
the Lord and the Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s
feet. For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did to you”
(13:13-15). This made such a deep impression upon His followers that the apostles
rejected all leadership titles which might imply authority, power and domination,
and chose instead to simply call themselves diakonos, ‘servants,’
‘ministers.’
I. Jesus’ essential nature is that of a servant.
One of the earliest creeds of the Church, predating the Gospels,
and probably already in use before Paul included it in his letter to the Philippians,
is the Christ-hymn (2:5-11). It celebrates the absolutely uninventable and
unimaginable story of the eternally existent and sovereign Son of God, who
rather than “grasping” for a higher position and more power, “made
himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human
likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became
obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (vv. 6-8).
He who was divine became human. He who was Sovereign Lord became
a lowly servant. He who was rich became poor. He to whom “all authority
in heaven and on earth [had] been given” (Matthew 28:18) voluntarily
emptied himself of His divine prerogatives, and became a weak, vulnerable,
and destructible human being. He who was sinless “became sin for us”
(2 Corinthians 5:21). He through whom “all things were made” (John
1:3), “humbled himself” unto death, even the torturous and scandalous
“death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8).
At the heart of this confession of faith lies the secret of
Jesus’ paradoxical nature as the divine human being. Paul uses two distinct
and yet complementary Greek words to describe this dual aspect of Jesus’
incarnation. Both words are translated as ‘form’ in the King James
Version: ‘form of God’ and ‘form of man.’ The first is
morphe, ‘inner essence,’ and the second is schema, ‘outer existence.’
Morphe has to do with the essential nature of a thing or a person that never
changes, while schema describes that which is external, temporal, and changeable.
A man, for instance, has the morphe of a human being, and not a cat or a fish.
He will never be anything other than a male human being. His schema, however,
passes through many changes from conception until death.
As the divine Son of God, Jesus possessed the morphe, the essence,
the very nature and character of God. The radical change in His schema, resulting
from entering into the stream of humanity, did not change His divine essence.
At the heart of every creed of the Church from Nicea (325 A.D.) to the present,
is the confession that “Jesus is truly God” and “truly man.”
What He “emptied himself” of, when He became a human being, was
not His deity but His divine attributes: His omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence,
and immutability. He surrendered those very powers that would have enabled
Him to out-Caesar all the Caesars of the world. What He emptied himself of
were the means to superimpose His sovereign will by the exercise of coercive
force. He gave up those attributes that would have enabled Him to usher in
the golden age of the Messiah’s rule by divine fiat. To have exercised
His divine prerogatives in such a manner would have been to compromise that
which constitutes His divine essence of agape love, as well as what it means
to be truly human: that is, the freedom of the will. If He would be true to
His nature of agape love, He could not make that kind of sacrifice.
It is of striking importance to note, however, the word Paul
uses to describe Jesus when He takes “the form of a bond-servant.”
We would have expected him to use the word schema, since servanthood would
have to do with His manifestation as a human being, but he does not. Instead
he uses morphe, ‘essence.’ When Jesus disclosed His identity as
a servant, He was not play-acting. He did not adopt a temporary role to teach
His disciples what it means to walk humbly before God—a posture He would
then abandon after His resurrection and ascension. To the contrary, He was
revealing who He really was, had always been, and evermore will be: a servant.
In identifying himself as the suffering servant of God, who lays down His
life for the sake of those whom He loves, He was only doing what came naturally.
Servanthood, of course, is not the whole story about Jesus.
Paul goes on to say, “Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every
tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”
(Philippians 2:9-11). Jesus the servant, who spent His short life exalting
His heavenly Father, is now exalted by the Father. The humility and mutuality
of servanthood is an essential element in the way the Trinity functions. It
also serves, in the context of the Christ-hymn, as the model for how believers
are to relate to one another (Philippians 2:1-4).
The astonishing insight we gain from this Christ-hymn is that
whether incarnate in weakness as a human being, or exalted in power as the
eternal divine Son of God, Jesus is also always a servant. Servanthood is
as much a part of His essential nature as His divinity. His incarnation and
humiliation as the suffering servant of God was not an act performed in order
to fulfill some sort of preordained plan, nor was He out of character when
He willingly submitted himself to the Father’s will. He was simply being
himself. He could do no other than empty himself of His divine attributes.
He could do no other than clothe himself with the garments of human flesh.
He could do no other than “humble himself,” and be “obedient
to death—even death on a cross!” (v. 8), because that was who He
really was: a servant who lives not to garner glory unto himself, but to glorify
the Father and enhance the well-being of those He came into the world to serve
and to save.
As the suffering servant of God, Jesus could not remain distant
and aloof from suffering people, but was compelled by His very nature to “be
made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful
and faithful high priest in service to God. . . . Because he himself suffered
when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted (tested)”
(Hebrews 2:17-18). And again, “Since the children have flesh and blood,
he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him
who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who
all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Hebrews
2:14-15).
Jesus’ incarnation, along with all the humiliation and
suffering it entailed, was but the inevitable consequence of His essential
servant-nature. Or to put it another way, Jesus expresses His Sovereign Lordship
precisely in and through servanthood ministry: “For even the Son of Man
did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom
for many” (Mark 10:45). He is Servant Lord, Servant Messiah, Servant
King. To paraphrase a Talmudic saying, “If it were not written, it would
be too wonderful to be spoken.”
It was Christmas Eve. Snow was heavy and deep. The wind howled
outside, but we cared not as our family huddled around a roaring fire in a
mountain cabin. Our adult children, along with their families, had come home
to celebrate the holidays. In accordance with our family tradition, we had
a worship time prior to the exchange of gifts, concluding with the sacrament
of the Lord’s Supper.
Dean, our oldest son, told us about a scene that unfolded before
his eyes just before leaving his inner-city mission in Indianapolis to come
to the family reunion. A few weeks earlier, they had opened a day-care center
for the homeless. He chanced to look in on the lounge area where more than
two dozen men had gathered, seeking shelter from the biting cold. Nurse Ann,
who served as a volunteer at the mission, was on her hands and knees, washing
the men’s feet.
Dean was astonished. He had never before witnessed such a ritual.
He stood in the doorway and watched as she knelt before each man, removed
his shoes and filthy socks—that is, if they had any on—and threw
them away. She then bathed each of their feet in warm Epsom Salts water, trimmed
their toe-nails, anointed their sores with healing ointment, bandaged their
wounds, and then gave each a clean pair of new woolen socks. While she worked,
she softly sang Christmas carols. Those men, most of whom had not felt a warm
human touch in years, were too moved to say anything. Yet the tears coursing
down their weathered cheeks said it all.
“Never have I felt such a heavy and yet exhilarating sense
of the immediate presence of Christ as in that lounge,” he confessed.
“That dingy room which we have not yet had time to remodel and brighten
up, was filled with the warm glow of the glory of God such as I have never
experienced in any church or cathedral.”
This astonishing truth about Jesus begs to be taken to an even
higher level. If God is indeed incarnate in Jesus, if in Christ “all
the fullness of Deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9), if God
the Father and God the Son share the same essence, as the historic creeds
of the Church maintain, then we can and must assert that
II. The God of the universe has a servant’s heart.
God’s way of being in the world is not that of an all-controlling
Sovereign, but a servant. As such, He can do no other than express His sovereignty
through the lowliness, the non-coerciveness, and the nonviolence of a servant.
He can do no other because that is who He really is. The omnipotence of God
is the sovereignty of love. Because of love, God has bestowed upon the universe
He created a certain degree of autonomy and potency. When it comes to the
human beings He has created “in his own image” (Genesis 1:27), He
has limited His sovereignty at the point of human freedom. God is not so much
a sovereign who lords it over the world, as a servant who enters in a covenantal
relationship with the world. It is His ‘holy love’ that wills the
good of all creation and the well-being of every person.
If this is the case, if God is like Jesus and has a servant’s
heart, then He is not a cosmic dictator, lawmaker, policeman, prosecutor,
judge, jury, and executioner. He does not afflict pitifully weak and forever
fallible humans with ceaseless guilt, terrifying fears, and a fate of unspeakable
horrors. God is not an omniscient designer, an omnipresent threat, an omnipotent
enforcer who pursues His grand “hidden plan,” as Calvin maintained,
regardless of how many cities are destroyed and people are exterminated in
the process. He does not incite holy wars that wipe out entire races and nationalities
indiscriminately. He is not one who manipulates history unilaterally, nor
does He impose His will coercively.
The Creator with the servant’s heart is a God of redeeming
love, mercy, and grace. He does not stand at a distance over against us but
is “Immanuel . . . God with us” (Matthew 1:23). He is present among
us in and through his Holy Spirit who is our paracletos, ‘advocate,’
‘comforter,’ ‘encourager.’ He is one who fashioned the
heavens and the earth for no other purpose than to provide a fit environment
for the crown of creation, the human beings He created “in his own image,”
and into whom He “breathed . . . the breath of life” (Genesis 1:27;
2:7). The cosmos that unceasingly “declares the glory of God” (Psalm
91:1) is the expression of a servant’s heart and the handiwork of an
artist. It is an ongoing ‘work in progress,’ an unfolding expression
of creative love.
The servant-God is the one who gently pursued our disobedient
foreparents in the cool of the day, not with a flaming sword of wrath but
with the plaintive cry of wounded love: “Adam, Eve, where art thou?”
(Genesis 3:9). When strong-willed sons seize their inheritance and leave their
father’s house as in Jesus’ wonderful parable of the prodigal son,
He freely lets them go. He does not chase after them, heap threats upon them,
manipulate their fate, or subject them to the white-hot display of His belligerent
vengeance. If they repent and return from exile, He does not stand aloof waiting
for them to crawl to Him on bended knee. Rather, He runs down the road, wraps
them in His arms, escorts them home, and throws a party in their honor.
British television journalist Malcolm Muggeridge made a trip
to Calcutta in 1968 to do a documentary film on Mother Teresa and her Sisters
of Charity. Up until his arrival and his subsequent story beamed around the
world, they were virtually unknown. The centerpiece of Mother Teresa’s
work was the House for the Dying. Every morning the sisters and their volunteer
helpers gathered up dying people from the streets and brought them into their
old, converted Hindu temple, so that they could, as Mother Teresa put it,
“die with dignity in sight of a loving face.” Most did die but some
recovered.
Muggeridge wanted some film shot inside. Ken, the cameraman,
said it was impossible. There was not enough natural light coming through
the tiny windows and no electricity for photo lamps. Muggeridge told him to
go ahead and shoot anyway. So Ken did, certain it was a waste of time and
money. By way of insurance, he also shot scenes of recovering people lounging
in a sun-lit courtyard, in case the film taken was blank as he expected. They
would then still have something to show for their trip.
When Ken developed the film, however, he was shocked to discover
that the footage taken outside was overexposed and useless, while that taken
inside the dark hospice was perfect. It appeared as if the room was bathed
in a kind of ethereal glow. He could not believe it. To prove to himself that
his light meter was not faulty, he found a cavernous warehouse nearby equally
dimly lit. He shot some footage there and developed it. It was blank.
He showed the results to Malcolm, who was likewise astonished.
How were they to explain this technological miracle? Muggeridge, recalling
how medieval artists painted halos around the heads of the saints, suggested
that there was so much love for those dying people in that dark and dingy
room, that it bathed everything with a radiant glow not visible to the human
eye, but picked up by their celluloid film.
An even greater miracle occurred, however. The transparent love of God, which Muggeridge saw incarnate in Mother Teresa, powerfully penetrated his hard and unbelieving heart. In his mid-sixties he became a confessing Christian, was baptized into the Catholic Church, and went on to become a vocal and influential witness for Christ.
