Servant Tradition

Isaiah 53:3-12; Luke 6:27-36; 1^st Peter 3:8-17

We were called to be God’s servants—disciples of Christ Jesus. The words sound comforting to our ears. We hear them and remember how Christ Jesus gave his very life on our behalf. We recall that God’s love compelled Jesus to come to earth to redeem us from the bonds of sin. When we hear that we were called to serve, we think first of how God has served us. What do our traditions of service to God look like? Do they measure up to our commission?

“Love, love, love, love, the gospel in one word is love. Love your neighbor as your brother. God is love.” Even the melody is peaceful, gentle, and undemanding. Thinking of love in this manner lulls the senses. Sweetness, gentleness, peace, and lack of conflict—our gospel refrain sounds more like the hallucinogenic hippie movement than Jesus’ teaching on love. Jesus’ words were more demanding. They required a greater quality and scope of love.

When Jesus taught us of love, it was “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you.” That kind of love is a little harder to grasp. It is easier to explain Jesus’ words away than to live out these demands. We would rather define love as being nice to people. Being nice, after all, is a whole lot simpler. All we have to do is wear a smile and speak politely. All we need to do is practice wearing our “Christian face.” What we wear deep down on the inside need not bother the calm surface of our words and actions. We can play at love very easily by defining love as being nice. This is, after all, our traditional interpretation of what it means to act in a Christian manner.

Unfortunately, we have to use the word, “act,” for it is acting. We can act loving by being nice, without ever loving in the least. Those of us who are better actors can rise to a higher standing within the Christian community for pretending to love. We put on our church face and act loving toward everyone, all the while knowing that love is a goal far beyond our grasp. How can we hope for doing more than being nice to those we do not love? How can we ever love our enemies? It is within our very instinct to survive that we avoid and protect ourselves from those we call enemies. We must rather protect ourselves from them by being nice. That is the tried and true way. We call it “Christian love,” though it has little to do with Christ Jesus.

In Jesus’ words, love went a whole lot deeper. In Jesus’ life, love cost a whole lot more. Love was no sentimental feeling, nor was it a façade of being nice. Jesus expressed love in the context of service. There were times Jesus was not nice at all. After all, he confronted the Pharisees with their substitution of tradition for God’s commandments. He healed people publicly on the Sabbath, creating an uproar he could easily have avoided with a simple dose of privacy. He went so far as to call some a brood of vipers! Such actions don’t sit well with our definitions for love. Jesus was not always nice. He didn’t always care what people would think. He didn’t always concern himself with the feelings of others. Love must have had some different meaning for Jesus.

Peter’s words don’t help much. He also makes us uncomfortable. Paraphrasing Jesus’ words on loving enemies, he speaks of repaying evil with blessing. That is hardly second nature for us, much less a first response. Oh, we do alright not trying to get even. We may let the injury go and accept the personal loss. Rather than blessing, we have learned to be nice. It sounds like the refrain we heard over and over again as children needing restraint—“Don’t be mean, be nice.” Nice is not the same thing as love and blessing, but it was the reachable goal we were taught to accept as sufficient. Peter somehow wants more than nice. He raises the issue of suffering along the path of love—suffering because of doing the good and loving thing! Love defined as nice does not fit Peter’s words. “Do not fear what they fear,” referred to things like imprisonment, torture, and death. The fear of suffering was not to come between the believer and faithful love. Anticipated consequences were not to interfere with a faithful witness and one’s call to serve God.

Isaiah 53 gives us a picture of what faithful service could mean in a Biblical context. These words depicted Zerubbabel’s death at the hand of foreign powers. Caught in the midst of conflicting issues of power, Zerubbabel was killed by the governor’s forces, though he had served faithfully. What counted in God’s eyes was his faithful service, not the that he had made enemies in the process. Service was the key to Zerubbabel’s definition of love. He had not made everyone happy with him, but he had loved through serving the best interests of Yahweh’s people.

So also was the love of Christ Jesus. In the process of being God’s expression of unconditional love for humanity, Jesus did not make everyone happy. He did not worry with keeping up an external façade of nicety. Jesus was not overly preoccupied with serving the whims and desires of everyone and “keeping the peace.” Being nice took a backseat to serving the needs of those to whom Jesus ministered.

Our wants are often not our needs. Our desire to avoid conflict is not always in our best interest, nor in the best interest of the larger body of Christ. Where there is conflict, we are called to serve God’s love, following Jesus’ own tradition of service and sacrifice. Jesus’ actions were not controlled from the position of making everyone happy. Rather, his actions flowed out of the desire to do what was best for those he served.

Sometimes Jesus confronted people with their lack of understanding. Sometimes Jesus healed people of their diseases. Sometimes Jesus comforted those in grief. Sometimes Jesus angered people as the taught a difference between God’s will and human tradition. Jesus’ demonstration of God’s love took the character of a tradition of service, not a tradition of being nice. This was no sentimental love, nor a peacenik love that ignores the painful reality of life with its inherent conflict. The love of Christ Jesus is a quality of love that sets our emotional and traditional baggage aside in order to focus on service. God’s greatest expression of love came in a servant tradition.

This quality of loving service is what Jesus described as the heavenly way of living. “Love your enemies, do good to those who would harm you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who mistreat you. Serve their best interests, regardless of their reactions. You are called to serve their needs, not simply to make them happy. You are called to serve them with good, not to indulge their fancy, but placing their needs ahead of your own.

We are not called to be nice. We are not called to make people happy. We are not called to make others like us. We are called to serve others with God’s love. We are to do them good, regardless of the how we are treated. Are we willing to follow Jesus along the path of this servant tradition? It cost Jesus his very life. Are we willing to sacrifice in order to follow Jesus in the path of the gospel’s servant tradition, or will we sacrifice the gospel for being nice?

—©Copyright 2006 Christopher B. Harbin

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