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March 28, 2004
Greatness!
Greatness!
Psalm 2 / I Samuel 10: 17-24
Mark 9: 33-37
March 28th, 2004
One of my favorite moments in perhaps my favorite movie, “Chariots of Fire,” is when the head of Caius College, Cambridge speaks to the freshman dinner. He tells these young fellows all trussed up in white tie and tails, sitting up straight in a dining hall on whose walls are large wooden plaques with the names of alumni killed in battle in the defense of their country, “let each of you discover where your chance of true greatness lies.”
True greatness has nothing to do with where this was said, at Cambridge University, or to whom, to privileged young men. What the principal said had nothing to do with anticipation of careers as members of Parliament, or as regents of the crown in various parts of the Empire. It had everything to do with the fact that it was addressed to young people, everyone of whom had the capacity for true greatness. You and I have the capacity for true greatness. God has called you to true greatness and given you all the equipment you need to achieve it.
What is true greatness?
Jesus was concerned about this when he heard his disciples discussing which of them would be the greatest. Luke tells us a dispute developed among his disciples over not so much the question as the assertion, “I will probably be the greatest.” Luke’s word is stronger than the one found in the Gospel of Mark. In Mark the disciples were discussing with some animation. Luke’s word for their verbal battle meant “love of winning” (filoneikiva).
Remember these are the twelve pillars on which Jesus founded His big project in life—the Church, the core of the Kingdom of God on planet Earth! It was not, as you would expect of illustrious saints of this high order, a discussion where each said of the other, “You, John, will be the greatest.” Or “You James, or you Bartholomew.” “No, surely not me. I think it will be Nathaniel over there.” It was not like this. They were debating their own candidacy for greatness, with at least someone getting the upper hand. Maybe Peter won this argument. Greatness? What is greatness? There was no subtlety in their dispute.
In a way this jockeying for supremacy is what makes the world go round. It’s not love that makes the world go round. If only it were. It’s about the pursuit of prominence, of winning, of ideas of greatness. The desire for significance is at the root of this competition. If only we realized how significant we are simply in being born. You and I live surrounded by significant people. They work at MacDonald’s, at Eli Littly, at Purdue. They collect our garbage. They are everywhere.
Greatness is confused with being recognized for power, wealth, or achievement.
Alexander, king of Macedon was the first, I believe, to be called, “the Great.” He was called the Great because his armies conquered all the world he knew by the time he was thirty-three years old after a reign of only twelve years and eight months. He imposed the Greek language and with it elements of Greek culture everywhere. He died of a fever before he had a chance to unfold his dreams of a universal government. He would be the ideal philosopher-king. He had had Aristotle as a teacher.
There were aspects of his life that evoke amazement. One of these aspects was his capacity for reverence. He didn’t confuse himself with God as the later Roman emperors did. Josephus tells of Alexander’s arriving at Jerusalem and bowing to the ground when he met the High Priest. His ability to inspire action was uncanny because he evoked respect, even devotion from his troops. But do you think Jesus would have called him great? I wonder. I believe Jesus would have said to Alexander, “Pretty impressive, Alex. But there’s that little matter of those two thousand people you crucified after you conquered Tyre. Great people are gracious like their Creator. You were cruel, Alex.”
Alexander achieved a rare pinnacle of success, great achievement; the eyes of the world were fixed on him with awe. At his death the funeral was magnificent and lasted a long time. And we’re still talking about him. But his fame is tarnished. Jesus’ had a totally different idea of greatness.
“Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For which is the greater, one who sits at table, or one who serves? Is it not the one who sits at table? But I am among you as one who serves.”
I believe that though we would all say we accept Jesus’ teachings as true, when it comes to accepting them as a guide to life, we say, “I won’t dispute Jesus’ teaching, but I can only accept them with a grain of salt.”
Yet we would acknowledge that if everyone tried to be an Alexander the Great, the world would be in chaos. But if everyone had the outlook Jesus described and exemplified, there would be none of the strife that shreds the peace of the world, that shreds the peace within countries, that shreds the peace within families, in fact, that shreds the peace within churches. True greatness, what is it? Is it just an ideal? “Ideal” has come to mean the same as “unreal.”
Are IDEALS not attainable by definition? I don’t believe this. Greatness is achievable but probably we don’t go after it in the way most people think.
There are two aspects to true greatness as Jesus taught. First, is true humility and its evidence is found in genuine service. Second, is true submission to the will of God. Humility is high character before other people. Submission is high character before God. Humility promotes the sense of submission to God. Submission to God promotes humility before people.
It is very nearly ironical to say that Jesus was humble, but He was. As Isaiah 53 put it, “a bruised reed He will not break.” Little children and the meekest of people were comfortable with Him. He was not cowed by the rich and powerful; neither did He pose as superior to them. His submission to His heavenly Father was visible in every pore.
What is true humility? Let me try to describe it. True humility has nothing to do with self-denigration. Humility does not grovel. It is not the attitude of a whipped dog. Humility is not self-pre-occupied at all, either in praise or rejection. Humility causes us to look around us and to feel surrounded by all these people made in the image of God. Here I stand this morning before all of your made in the image of God. How do I speak to an audience made up of so many replicas of deity? You are created in the image of God. It makes me want to treat you with utmost respect AND with high expectations.
Paul described this humility in Romans 12. “I bid everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment.” Again in Philippians 2, he wrote, “In humility, count others better than yourselves . . . Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Some think of this as weakness. Is it?
If Jesus’ disciples had continued thinking of how Jesus had been to them at the table just a few minutes before, they could never have thought about, much less mentioned their aspirations for the ordinary idea of greatness—power, authority.
The church would drift into ordinary ideas of greatness, following the lead of the disciples’ argument. The church developed a hierarchy of power and wealth making of it another kind of human domination scheme with a religious twist. And the teaching and example of Jesus about what is true greatness settled into the ground of history, waiting to be excavated by anyone who longed deeply for Him.
I look out at a congregation like this. I look out at my Sunday School class. I look around the circle of folk who gather with Mike and me at the Work Release facility on Tuesday evenings, and I see candidates for greatness. Greatness comes in many shapes and sizes—to people in all kinds of situations, but it always has two characteristics—the first being true humility. Humility finds expression in serving.
It does not ask, “How much must I serve?” It does not say, “I have done my share. Let others take their turn.” It asks, “How much can I serve?” To the question “When should I stop?” asked after the calendar suggests you were born a long time ago, the humble person answers joyfully, “The day I die.” Some of you remember Lena Coombes climbing the stairs to accompany the children’s choir until her knees said “No more!” How are your knees doing?
Why did Jesus mention service as the final matter in greatness? Why did Jesus make His last big act with His disciples, to serve them in the most vivid way possible, on His knees before each of them, washing their feet? Why? Because the idea of greatness as serving is very hard to beat into our skulls. We learn this lesson with such difficulty.
Busy people are apt to think of service as what they can do with their spare time. “If I have the time,” are five words, which may reveal the true orientation of our lives.
The second ingredient in true greatness is submission to the will of God. What is submission to God’s will?
We think of submission to God primarily in terms of what we do. But it is first an outlook on life.
I believe God’s will for what we will do with our lives is filtered through a few channels. What you and I can do well, what we like to do, what others tell us we do well—these are clues to what we may do with our lives. It is important to listen to these clues.
But there is something more, and it is this more that leads on to greatness. And we find the model of this in Jesus. It was His outlook on life itself. He devoted himself to doing the will of the Father because this was the specific orientation of His life. Nothing distracted Him. It so happened that Jesus had a tough career in becoming Savior of the world. For Jesus it meant a very painful end, as Mel Gibson has reminded us.
Is it possible for us to share Jesus’ outlook on life? The natural tendency of everyone is to find significance in life. How do we find personal significance unless we go for it? What does an outlook of submission to God mean? Jesus’ submission to God was visible in how He was toward other people, beginning with the least, humanly speaking, and reaching to the “greatest” humanly speaking.
Everyone needs Jesus. The “greatest” people are often very unhappy. The “least” people are often very poor. Need is written over every one of us. Jesus stooped beneath the most miserable people to show how deeply the loving hand of God reaches to scoop up and embrace the weak and heavy-laden.
Jesus career goal was so other-oriented that it meant actually dying in the way most commonly imposed on the people the Romans wanted to despise the worst. It is estimated that literally hundreds of thousands of people died by crucifixion by the fourth century when Constantine ended this cruelest form of execution. So in dying by crucifixion, Jesus stooped beneath the most miserable of all people, sharing their burden in His own death.
I doubt very much that any of us will be called by God to be crucified. We can’t have this kind of job. But we are on the path to greatness when we do what God has called us to do with all we have—as unto Him.
But there is a rider to this truth. In fulfilling with all our powers God’s will for us, it must be done in a way that does not violate the first principle of true greatness, humility.
We all know people who are so career-driven, so determined to be excellent in their research (in this community) that everything plays second fiddle to this quest.
What is lacking in this kind of approach to achievement is that it lacks perspective. Their excellence is for their own sake, which leaves other people out of the picture. Jesus offers us the perspective that allows excellence in our work to feed into greatness, that is, true humility. The perspective is this: if it is the will of God that I do this, I must do it with everything I have, and with grace.
God is not pleased with shoddy workmanship. Sometimes submission to the will of God may not even look very religious at all. It is doing your work well with grace. Why? Because I carry the outlook of Jesus who loved people so much that He died on the cross for them.
Because my own life has unfolded mostly in academic settings, one of the finest human examples I know of how to follow Jesus’ idea of greatness, comes from the academic world.
Bruce Metzger was one of my teachers in seminary. I shall always be proud to say this, partly because Professor Metzger is legendary as a Bible scholar. His knowledge not only of his specialty, New Testament textual criticism, but also of all the languages into which the New Testament was translated in the first two centuries is unequaled. He is now spoken of along with Origen, the great third-century Bible scholar, and Erasmus, the Renaissance Biblical scholar.
Every class which I had with him began the same way. The full lecture hall would be bustling with conversation. Then, when Professor Metzger walked in and raised the bookstand on the huge podium to the height he wanted, everyone became quiet. He would fold his hands and say, “Let us pray.” And his prayer was as simple as a child’s. It was almost always about the same. He asked that what we learned that day might help us to present the Gospel winsomely, so that people would be drawn to Jesus. I learned the word “winsome” from Professor Metzger.
Now if this were all there was to it, maybe I wouldn’t have continued to find such fascination in him. But it also seemed to me that he singled me out for attention. He made careful, thoughtful comments on my papers, comments that encouraged me. He knew my name. He spoke so respectfully to me. He knew to ask about my wife, my children, and my preaching on weekends.
One day I met Dr. Metzger on the sidewalk outside Speer Library after he’d just opened a letter from Oxford University Press informing him his magnificent book on ancient versions of the New Testament had been released to bookstores. He bubbled with happiness and shared his joy with this undergraduate as with a close friend. “O Mr. Robertson, let me tell you something!” I felt so esteemed.
But I discovered in speaking with other students, that he was the same to them too. He built them up too.
During the holidays, he would inquire to see which students could not go home. He would invite them to his home. Once in his home they found this generous-hearted, kind man, overflowing with interest in them. What did Bruce Metzger have that is not available to us all? Devotion of all his talents to God. Humility before all kinds of people.
We all have every ingredient needed for greatness: Hearts to love God and others, work to do to the glory of God. These are what we need to achieve true greatness.
Jesus calls us all to true greatness. Not the kind His disciples were arguing about. But true greatness. True humility. True submission to the will of the Father. True service our whole lives long. And doing it with our full concentration, whatever it might be.
Our greatness as a congregation awaits us. Our greatness as men and women, boys and girls, as followers of Jesus is waiting for us. Is it worth going for it?
O Lord God, we thank you for Jesus, who emptied himself, who lived in submission to Your will, who loved us with an everlasting love, who served until the very end. Help us to follow Jesus. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at March 28, 2004 09:30 AM