We worship a God who acts like a slave. Jesus even said that
he “did not come to be served, but to serve”.
This is not the sort of God we would expect. Not the sort of
God we could make up. We would imagine that a masterful Creator, an
all-powerful King would act a bit like a master, or a King. But he doesn’t –
instead of demanding everything from
us, he sacrifices his all for us. He
comes not to be served, but to serve.
He gets up in the middle of a meal with his disciples, takes
off his outer clothing, wraps a towel round his waist and gets down on his
knees to wash the muck off their feet.
Think what that must have felt like for the disciples: the
feeling of the Master, the Messiah, the Son of God, washing the muck off your
feet. Think of him doing that for you.
Are you comfortable with that?
You shouldn’t be.
Peter wasn’t – he told Jesus to stop. And Jesus told them
that they too should humble themselves and wash each other’s feet, because “no
servant is greater than his master”. In
fact when Jesus said that he “did not come to be served, but to serve”, he was
teaching his disciples that “whoever wants to become great among you must be
your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be the slave of all.”
In fact what I said earlier isn’t quite true – he sacrifices
everything for us, and then demands
everything from us. He says, “I have come that they may have life, and have it
to the full”, and he says “If anyone wants to come with me, he must deny
himself, pick up his cross, and follow me” – and they are the same offer. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” The abundant life that Jesus
offers us is a life of complete and utter surrender to him and to others. Paul
says he is “a slave of God” - the same word as when he says that Jesus himself
“took the form of a slave”. The word is ‘doulos’, and it means a slave that
‘was owned, was bought for a price, received no wages, and could not quit.’ That
is what we are. Or at least what we should be.
In the post-modern all-you-can-eat buffet of consumer
spirituality even we Christians have been fooled into thinking that Jesus is
something we can add to our lives to make them better. He is not. He is the
true King, who showed us by example that we must be slaves, he is the “Lamb,
looking as if it had been slaughtered” who sits on the throne of the eternal
God, and calls us to imitate his sacrifice.
So when we talk to our friends about Him, we shouldn’t make
it sound like He’s a hobby, or a personal preference in range of valid life
choices. We should say that we would be willing to die for him, and in fact, we
already have. We should say, with Paul, “I have been crucified with Christ and
I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”
And that’s exactly the point – when we give ourselves to Him
Christ will live in us. We get to be “living
sacrifices”. So I don’t want to guilt-trip anyone who is serving God
joyfully – God gives us love, joy and peace lavishly. But He “does not give as
the world gives”. He doesn’t offer us ‘a peaceful life’ of the sort our friends
might envy – instead his Spirit gives a supernatural peace, a peace that
“transcends all understanding”. Charles Spurgeon once prayed, “O Lord, give to
your servants that peace which the world cannot give, and the world cannot take
away.”
So maybe, if instead of offering our friends Jesus like we’re
recommending a nice book, we lived lives saturated with self-sacrifice, that
make them ask us ‘are you crazy?’, the world might sit up and take notice. And
we might just stumble upon the abundant life that Jesus has been offering us
all along.
