There’s a beautiful song that we sometimes sing during our liturgies called “The Servant Song”.
Written by Richard Gillard, the words of the first verse are:Will you let me be your servant,
let me be as Christ to you;
pray that I may have the grace to
let you be my servant, too.
I thought of that song when I read Jesus’ teaching in the gospel today… a teaching that must have surprised his hearers. He told them that when the Master of the house returns and finds his servants vigilantly waiting for him, that he, the Master, “will gird himself, have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.”
Just think about that for a minute. Jesus, the Master, is now waiting on the servants. Once again, Jesus turns custom and the whole order of things upside down. Servants usually serve their Masters, but Jesus is giving us an example and showing that we should embrace being His servants. As servants of Jesus, we look for chances to do those dull, thankless jobs that mark us as witnesses of God’s Kingdom. Being a servant means doing things that need doing because people matter. It’s a reminder to us to put ourselves last and we will be first; to lose our life, and we will find it.
We call this ‘servant leadership’, and it began in obscurity many years ago…in small villages in Galilee, by fishermen, tax collectors, widows and shepherds. They imitated the servant leader, Jesus himself, and they dared to hope, followed his example, and eventually shaped history. They heard Jesus say: "The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve…” (Mk 10:45) Jesus’ servanthood is rooted in humility, not power, and lived out in small acts of love, not attention getting acts.
Preparing a meal for a sick person, listening to someone patiently, praying for the needs of our world and for peace on earth brings the witness of Jesus’ servanthood to reality in our daily community.
Lastly, the second verse of “The Servant Song” puts our servant leadership to one another in perspective:
We are pilgrims on a journey,
we are trav'lers on the road;
we are here to help each other
walk the mile and bear the load.
