When I knew we would be having baptisms today, and I looked ahead at the readings appointed by the calendar of Scriptures that we follow, I thought: This might just be the worst possible Gospel reading for a baptism.
Welcome to following Jesus – a life of thankless drudgery!
So over the past week and a half I’ve been thinking about this text, trying to pry some grace out of it. I’ll let you decide if I succeeded.
I don’t think that the immediate context for this passage helps us make any sense of it. As I see it, at this particular point in Luke’s Gospel, he’s basically trying to cram in the rest of the sayings and teachings of Jesus that he knows about, before turning to the triumphal entry to Jerusalem and the culmination of the story. I don’t think this passage is particularly related to what comes just before or just after it.
But! That doesn’t mean it stands alone. In fact it has a couple of sibling passages elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel. I think they’re siblings to this passage because they also talk about servants or slaves at the dinner table. I put them in the Sunday Supplement. Would somebody read Luke 12, verses 35 to 38?
Luke 12:35-38
Jesus said, “Be dressed for service and keep your lamps lit. Be like people waiting for their master to come home from a wedding celebration, who can immediately open the door for him when he arrives and knocks on the door. Happy are those servants whom the master finds waiting up when he arrives. I assure you that, when he arrives, he will dress himself to serve, seat them at the table as honored guests, and wait on them. Happy are those whom the master finds alert, even if he comes at midnight or just before dawn.”
That complicates things, doesn’t it? It almost seems like the opposite of today’s text – like if the servants do a really great job, then the master WILL say, Sit down, let me bring you dinner!…
By the way: If you read some of these passages in different translations, you might notice that some use the word servant and some use the word slave. The Greek word is doulos, and it can mean either servant – someone working for pay – or slave – someone owned by a master – or possibly a debt-slave, somewhere in between, somebody bound to work in order to pay off money that they owe. It’s a little confusing and frustrating that the Biblical text doesn’t distinguish these things. We know a fair bit about slavery in the Roman Empire, but it’s not entirely clear what practices would have been among Judeans in Jesus’ time. But it’s safe to say you’d rather be the master than the doulos, generally speaking.
Okay, now let’s hear Luke 22, verses 24 to 27. This happens around the table at the Last Supper…
Luke 22:24-27
An argument broke out among the disciples over which one of them should be regarded as the greatest. But Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles rule over their subjects, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But that’s not the way it will be with you. Instead, the greatest among you must become like a person of lower status and the leader like a servant. So which one is greater, the one who is seated at the table or the one who serves at the table? Isn’t it the one who is seated at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.”
(In the same story in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus says, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.”)
Now, in this one, it seems like Jesus is kind of arguing with the whole idea that the most important person is the master who’s sitting down to his meal. Instead he’s saying that the real greatness is in the servant or slave who’s helping at the table, bringing in the serving platters and clearing away the dirty plates.
Who’s been to a Maundy Thursday service? … Do you remember something special and a little strange that we do at that service? …
We do that because in John’s Gospel, at his final meal with his friends, Jesus wraps a towel around himself and gets a basin of water and washes his friends’ feet. That would usually be something that a pretty low-ranking servant or slave would do, because it could be kind of gross. It makes the disciples uncomfortable to let Jesus do this for them!
And when he’s done, he tells them, “You call me Teacher and Lord – and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you should do as I have done to you.” Now, that’s in a different Gospel – but it’s at least a cousin to these passages from Luke, right?
After I preached about Jesus’ parable of the dishonest manager, a couple of weeks ago, the one who reduced everybody’s debts before he got fired, I got a wonderful email from one of you with some further wonderings about that complicated story. One thing she wondered was whether it’s possible to read the manager’s actions as pointing towards a world without mastery, without bondage. Towards the end of systems of power and exploitation. To use 20th century Black theological Howard Thurman’s terms, a world not divided into the heirs and the disinherited.
We don’t need new oppressors; we need a new world.
It’s not hard to find that, in the other two passages from Luke that we just read. In the one from chapter 12, the master is so happy to find the servants waiting up for him that he does something really surprising – he flips the script; he ties on an apron and serves them at table as honored guests. And in the one from chapter 22, Jesus breaks open this whole idea that the person being served is more important, has more authority and status, than the person who’s bringing them their meal or filling their water. He says, In the way I’m showing you, the path of greatness is the path of service. Of showing care to others instead of lifting yourself up or bossing anybody around.
But can we find that theme of taking apart the idea of mastery, of status and authority, in this passage? At first glance it doesn’t seem like it. But I think it’s there – and reading its sibling passages helps us find it.
Notice that Jesus is asking his followers a question: What would you do? What would you do if your servant came in after a day working in the fields? Would you say, Good to see you; have a seat, it’s dinner time! Or would you say, Finally, you’re here; I’m starving; put on your apron and make me dinner!
Jesus is drawing out their assumptions, based on their familiarity with how things work, maybe their experience in their own households. Jesus’ first followers were mostly not wealthy, but in economies of extreme poverty, even people who don’t have very much often have household servants of some sort, people who have even less and have to work just to have food and a roof over their head.
Jesus’ question assumes a sort of lower middle class farmstead, not a house of wealth – because there’s only one servant who does everything, instead of field hands and household helpers.
So, Jesus is asking the disciples to think about a familiar situation: How do things work in the house you grew up in, or you friends’ houses? The script is not graciously flipped. The servant or slave stays in their role and has to keep working, fulfilling orders and expectations. Because we’re dealing here with the real world, not with God’s way of doing things.
When Jesus says, “In the same way,” he gets to the point he wants to make. He pivots from the disciples’ experiences and assumptions, to what it really means to follow him, to be part of what God is doing and showing through Jesus. And in that moment, the master disappears.
There’s just a servant saying, I’m only doing my duty. That passage from chapter 22 should help us share Jesus’ vision here: all servants, no master, and Jesus among them. He’s telling the disciples: This movement you’ve joined doesn’t have a hierarchy, a ladder to climb. You don’t work your way up to the top where you get to boss everybody else around. This is a whole different mindset, a whole different heart-set, where the driving question isn’t, How can I get ahead?, but, How can I serve? How can I help? Where can I be part of goodness?
I think that’s what the mustard seed part is about, too! When the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, they’re thinking of the whole business as some kind of Faith Olympics. It often frustrates me in the Gospels that we don’t know how Jesus said things. I think his response here is wry but playful: “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” Imagine trees whizzing around in the air because the disciples are just SO FAITHFUL!
The theme that connects the two chunks of today’s Gospel is that discipleship, following Jesus’ ways, isn’t about greatness, accomplishment, recognition.
It’s about finding and doing your part in God’s holy work.
This is never going to be my favorite Scripture passage. But after wrestling with it enough, I discovered that it actually kind of echoes some of the things that God has taught me, over the years. Things that I need to be reminded about enough that they have a place in my rule of life, the set of intentions for myself that I read through day by day. Like reminding myself to resist the mindset of productivity; that I haven’t had to earn a gold star in decades. Like a quotation from Bishop Craig Loya of Minnesota that I think about a lot: “Lean into what you believe is the genuine life of your community, and don’t worry too much about outcomes.”
One corollary of all that is that I get to rest sometimes. Because the survival and thriving of this church isn’t dependent on my accomplishments, my diligence, my skill. I do my part – and I try to do my best. But it doesn’t all depend on me. I’m a servant, not the boss. I’m not in charge; I don’ know the big picture. I’m somewhere on the lower rungs of middle management, at best.
I have the incredible privilege of getting to live a life focused on cultivating a faith community and tending the people who come through these doors (physical or virtual). Maybe that makes it easier for me to think about my daily work through the lens of servanthood. But I bet lots of us have had moments when somebody thanked you or praised you for something, and it made you a little uncomfortable or even mad.
Because whatever they were thanking you or praising you for, wasn’t something you did to be thanked or praised. Maybe it’s the thing that talent or skill or experience or love drives you to do. Maybe it’s something that just felt like the normal, decent human thing to do. In German there’s a saying, “Nicht zu danken”; it means, Not to thank. It’s something you can say when somebody thanks you for something that you just kind of don’t want to be thanked for – because that’s just what you do, or because you’d like whatever small act of decency you just committed to be normal and unremarkable. Maybe Nicht zu danken is a way to say, “We have only done what we were supposed to do.”
What do we baptize people into? Not thankless drudgery. But being servants, together, of something bigger than any of us. Into doing what’s ours to do with grace and in hope, knowing we work side by side with Jesus, who came among us as one who serves.