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Each day this month of August we’ll be looking at one of the extraordinary metaphors that the Bible uses to illustrate the nature of our relationship with God.
“For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? But I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27).
Jesus’ Last Supper – his final opportunity to spend uninterrupted quality time with his closest friends and spiritual apprentices – would surely be an occasion in which those 12 men would want to be on their A Game.
The Gospel accounts tell us that the disciples were arguing about something. What was it?
“A dispute arose among them as to which of them was considered to be the greatest (Luke 22:24).
Seriously? The Son of God is on the verge of sacrificing himself to save the world and you’re quarreling over job titles and who gets the corner office?
Very little has changed after 20 centuries.
From time-to-time people ask, “What’s the worst sin in the Bible?” When you look at the Murderer’s Row of human failure that medieval theologians came to call the Seven Deadly Sins, is it possible to say that one of those seven is deadlier than the others?
Truthfully, it’s not even close. Pride is without question the worst sin in the Bible. That’s because we cannot simultaneously be convinced that we are the most wonderful person we know and that Jesus is the most wonderful person we know.
Author and theologian C.S. Lewis wrote, “The essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: It is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
It turns out that pride is one of the easiest sins to spot in other people. It doesn’t help that our culture virtually exalts it.
Self-adulation is often on display in online personal profiles. Here’s a “personal ad” from the pre-digital age posted by a woman in New York magazine:
“Strikingly beautiful.Ivy League graduate. Playful, passionate, perceptive, elegant, bright, articulate, original in mind, unique in spirit. I possess a rare balance of beauty and depth, sophistication and earthiness, seriousness and a love of fun. Professionally successful, perfectly capable of being self-sufficient and independent, but I won’t be truly content until we find each other. Please reply with a substantial letter describing your background and who you are. Photo essential.”
The good news, as author John Ortberg points out, is that this woman is definitely living out the second part of Jesus’ command, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
A sense of self-importance may be easy to see in other people, but it’s notoriously hard to spot within ourselves.
Lewis points out that the more prideful we are, the more we hate to see pride on display in another person. If you had expected to be the center of attention at the party – to receive the lion’s share of the laughs, the raves, and the thoughtful nods – it’s almost too much to take when you realize that most of the attention is gravitating toward somebody else.
That was at the center of the disciples’ dispute. Which of them deserved to be Jesus’ vice-president? Who ought to get the rose at the end of the apostolic beauty pageant?
When all is said and done, pride turns out to be a neck problem. Pride is what makes us look down on other persons, fancying ourselves to be their superiors.
If we think that we deserve to be saved, or that God must be amazingly impressed with us and would be a fool not to welcome us onto his team, or that God has somehow come to be in our debt because of the good things that we have done, then we don’t understand Redemption 101. The first and most important act of faith is to look up and say, “You are the Lord, and I am not. My life is all about you, not about me.”
That’s why pride is the deadliest of the Deadly Sins. Rigorously pursued over the course of a lifetime, pride erases our chance to know and love God, and to know and love others.
In the midst of their idiotic and prideful quarrel, Jesus taught a crucial lesson:
“Who is greater in the world’s eyes? The person sitting at the table having dinner, or the person who is serving him? It’s the one at the table, right? That’s how the world works. But I’m starting a whole new movement, one in which the ‘greatest’ person is the servant. For even though I am the Messiah, God’s Chosen One, here I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:26-30).
Having spent the better part of two weeks pondering the “lower end” of the metaphor spectrum – the realm in which we are assigned the identity of rocks, clay, salt, branches, chicks, and sheep – we’ll spend the rest of this month exploring metaphors in which we are cast in various human roles.
We begin with a relationship that was assumed to represent Square One in the ancient world: master and servant.
That automatically raises what is arguably life’s most important issue: Who gets to be the master of my life? Am I the captain of my own soul, or does that job belong to someone else? To what person or ideal should I grant authority to determine my agenda for the rest of my days?
More than anything else, my answer to that question – not my well-rehearsed, got-my-Sunday-clothes-on religious answer, but the answer that is revealed by my actual behavior – is what will determine the outcome of my life.
There is no ambiguity in Jesus’ teaching. He is the master. We are the servants – but only if we say Yes to his call.
But here’s the monumental surprise: Jesus himself embraced the servant’s role. “I came not to be served, but to serve, and to give my life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
What, in the end, is the antidote to pride? It’s servanthood. What’s the pathway to humility? Do the jobs no one else wants to do, without complaining or hey-look-at-me. What’s the secret to true greatness? Make the needs of others your first priority.
Only through a Spirit-powered revolution of the heart can such realities ever become ours.
I recently read about a man who encountered a little girl carrying a huge mass of cotton candy on a paper cone. He asked her playfully, “How can a little girl like you eat all of that cotton candy?” “Well, you see,” she answered, “I’m really much bigger on the inside than I am on the outside.”
May God give us the grace to stop anguishing about our outsides.
Inside – cultivating a servant’s heart – is where the action really is.