“He came to serve, not be served” (Matthew 20:28, in The Message)
It would not be an exaggeration to say that this sentence is changing my life.
I make my living preaching and teaching the Bible. It is my passion. I love exploring its mysteries and wrestling with its questions. I love discovering things I’ve never noticed before. I wrote a whole book trying to help other people unravel the Bible’s complexities.
But the longer I’m a Christian, the more convinced I become that the most important things are often the simplest (at least on their face) and the most obvious. The things both readers and preachers tend to skim right past because, well, we already know them.
Matthew 20:28 is a case in point. I’ve been hearing these words all my life. I knew them by heart by the age of five. All my training in biblical interpretation has added virtually nothing to them. What does this passage mean? Followers of Jesus are supposed to serve people. Duh. In my childhood, I understood that this was the reason we shared Thanksgiving dinner with widows and cleaned the dishes after. It was a call to sometimes go out of our way to do things for somebody else.
But somewhere in the last 18 months, this half-a-verse went from being a pair of familiar old jeans to a world-upending earthquake. It’s one thing to serve. It’s an entirely different thing, it turns out, to be a person whose entire existence is being transformed from ego-oriented to other-oriented. One is an action. The other is a slow-moving revolution.
These seven words have got into my head. They play like a GIF endlessly looping. He came to serve, not be served. He came to serve, not be served. She (Me???) came to serve, not be served.
I felt professionally disrespected. My feelings were hurt, insecurities triggered. I was going to skip an event, take a distance, go somewhere else where I’d be more affirmed. Then it was there, that small voice in my head: “He came to serve, not be served. What if you showed up like that? What if you looked to God to validate your worth and you just went with Jesus, to do whatever turns out to need doing?”
I was filled with fiery conviction about problems that needed solving and errors that needed correcting. My mind was racing with the things I could say and do to share my insights, get these people on the right track. One night I looked around the table, and they were shining, so full of light that the brilliance almost dropped me to my knees. The voice spoke again: “He came to serve, not be served. What if you led like that? What if you got less interested in your own ideas and just asked what you could do to lift the saints from underneath them?”
I have been serving my whole life. But I truly hadn’t realized how much it had all still been about me—my own agendas, insecurities, and ego-needs—until I had a few brief chances to taste the world without them. And it was joy. It was courage. It was radical freedom. Is this living without anything to defend or prove? Is this what Jesus experienced all the time?
On the final night of his life, Jesus sees the end coming. John tells us: “Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father…Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God…” (John 13:1, 3). What does Jesus choose to do, knowing these are his final hours? He washes his disciples’ dirty feet.
This kind of service is an act of supreme liberty from someone so utterly secure in his identity and worth that he has nothing to prove or defend for himself. He can simply show up for the people around him and do what love, in that moment, invites.
He came to serve, not be served.
In some ways, it can be asked as a question, a rigorous spiritual discipline: What can I bend down beneath the table to provide? What would I do if I was truly following, not ego or insecurity, but only the voice of other-oriented love?
In other ways, it can be asserted as a declaration, a celebration of the truth of our liberty: I have nothing to defend or to prove. I am utterly secure in Christ. I can give it all away with wide open hands, because I am his and all things in him are mine.
