Jesus said: "The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve..." (Mark 10:45)
Some years ago when I was a junior reporter on a daily newspaper, a senior member of staff asked me to go and fetch them a bacon sandwich from the canteen.
He was under a lot of pressure for an upcoming deadline. So I stopped my own writing, popped upstairs to the cafeteria, and did as he requested.
Or at least that is what I should have done. What actually happened was that I, as a young man of considerable pride, considered it to be beneath my dignity to do it. After all, I had a degree from one of the UK's top universities!
Furthermore, I had recently completed my post-graduate diploma in journalism at another leading university. And my job was to write top news stories, not function as a lackey for my bosses! So I refused, and declined to change my mind.
The upshot was that this was listed as a disciplinary offence on my work record. And even when I left that newspaper some years later, the senior staff member remembered it and reminded me about it – albeit with a smile (at least for part of his recollection, if not all of it).
I had forgotten Jesus' words: "Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve..."
It's not just young men, of course, who can fall into this trap. Recently I heard about two civic leaders embroiled in an argument about who should take precedence at a local ceremonial occasion. Given that the event was being held to honour a number of people who had given up their lives for the nation, the dispute was more than a little ironic.
And Christian leaders can be just as bad. I was once party to a disagreement about who should – or should not – be billed as a speaker in a conference advertisement, as there was not space for all the names to be listed. One person even later told me that "obviously they knew more about the subject than anyone else". Per-lease!
Jesus' words about being a servant and slave of all are enormously practical. Speaking to his disciples, Jesus says: "You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognise as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them," (Mark 10:42). But, he goes on: "Not so with you."
So to be candid I have a bit of a question over whether Anglican dioceses should have "senior leadership teams" – rather than "servant leadership teams". I have a problem using my own title of "Reverend" because I don't believe in God's eyes I am any more "reverend" than anyone else; and as for titles such as Very Reverend, Venerable and all the rest of it, I find it hard to find any link between these and the ethos of Jesus in the gospels.
We are to be servants, of course, not to earn God's favour but because (as we shall see next time) Jesus liberates us from having to prove ourselves by giving his life as a ransom for us.
So maybe today you will be driving a car and could pause and let another vehicle go ahead of you, even if it is your right of way. Perhaps there will be a situation where a person in a wheelchair is struggling to get through a crowd and you need to clear a way for them. Any number of circumstances could call for a servant heart.
And maybe – just maybe – someone in authority will even ask you to get them a bacon sandwich...
David Baker is a former daily newspaper journalist now working as an Anglican minister in Sussex, England. The Rough Guide to Discipleship is a fortnightly series.
