Secure People Serve People

Hours before the ultimate act of love, on the night before the crucifixion (we call that day “Maundy Thursday”), Jesus drew out and pre-enacted the template of the cross.

This is an edited repost from April 2022.

Jesus showed demonstrated the pattern of good leadership all throughout his life on earth. He showed us this pattern by his incarnation, God the Son willingly taking human nature, humbling himself; though he was rich beyond counting he became poor beyond imagining. He showed us this pattern in his teaching, healing, and kindness. Most fully, he showed this pattern during the week we now call “Holy.” Holy Week culminated in his crucifixion on the Friday we call “Good.” On Good Friday Jesus willingly put aside his rights and died under the judgment of heaven and earth, bearing the wrath of God against human sin and rebellion. Not only this, but hours before this ultimate act of leadership, on the night before the crucifixion, Jesus prefigured his act of love. It was Thursday night. We call “Maundy Thursday,” from the command (mandate) Jesus gave his disciples to love one another.

Jesus spent his final evening having dinner with his friends; and as I heard someone say long ago, we see here his heart in a focused way like virtually nowhere else in Scripture. Jesus shows his heart and his mission in the inaugural act of that evening. John captures the scene for us:

Before the Passover Festival, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. Now when it was time for supper, the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas, Simon Iscariot’s son, to betray him. Jesus knew that the Father had given everything into his hands, that he had come from God, and that he was going back to God. So he got up from supper, laid aside his outer clothing, took a towel, and tied it around himself. Next, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet and to dry them with the towel tied around him. (John 13:1-5)

In this story, we learn the nature of good leadership. We learn what it looks like when God puts on our human nature and leads the way we’re supposed to: we learn that the way of true leadership is the way of loving service. We learn that secure people serve people. This is the doubled theme of the Christ, the cross, and the nature of leadership: security and serving. Jesus shows the way.

The Security of Jesus

1. Jesus was secure in the time God had prepared

Jesus knew—“having known”—the hour. Throughout John’s gospel, John uses the term “hour” to explain the time of Jesus’s crucifixion (2:4, 7:30, 8:20, 12:23, 27). We see here that Christ loved his people and loved them “to the end.” This refers to the end of his earthly life, which “ended” in crucifixion (but actually “ended” in resurrection). It also refers to the purpose. Jesus had been ready for this moment, this time, this hour. He trusted the timing of his Father. The Father sent him not an hour, a day, a year, a decade, a century or a millennium too late or too soon, but in the perfect “fullness of time” (Gal 4:4). Jesus trusted the timing of his impending betrayal by his friend, Judas, who was swayed by satanic influence to betray the Messiah. Satan couldn’t force Judas to betray Jesus any more than Satan can force us to do anything. “The devil made me do it” is almost always a cop-out. But Satan (as Augustine and Aquinas noted) whispered silent lies into the mind of Judas, so that Judas’s sinful heart grabbed a hold of them and turned on the Savior.

2. Jesus was secure in the identity he had in God

Jesus was the God-man. In his divine nature, he was the eternally begotten Son of the Father, equally God yet a distinct person. He had been begotten of the Father before all worlds, begotten not made, Light of Light, very God of very God, fully God in his divine nature, yet taking human nature in the womb of Mary the virgin, fully human, like us in every way yet without sin. Jesus knew his identity. He knew that he was the beloved Son and the promised Messiah. He knew where he was from. He had no issues “finding himself” or “discovering” who he was. He heard the words of the Father thundered over the world and whispered into his heart by the Spirit descending as a dove: “You are my Beloved Son, and with you I am well-pleased.”

3. Jesus was secure in the place God had called

Jesus knew he was going back to God, because where else would God the Son incarnate go if not where God the Son has always been?—in the heart of the Father, in the eternal Light and Life and Love that is God the Trinity. Because God is eternal and omnipresent, God the Son never really “left” the Father, yet he truly came to earth and took human nature which had never before been in the heavenly presence of the Father. In his Incarnation, Jesus Christ was soon to ascend to heaven, returning to God, where he would be enthroned as the King of all kings and the King of all things.

4. Jesus was secure in the purpose God had commissioned

God the Father sent God the Son with a foredestined goal, a commission, a purpose: to become a being that could be killed. God cannot die, but humans can die. The consequences for sin is death, but if God cannot die, how can he pay for our sins? God became a human being who could die so that he could die on the Cross for the sake of the sins of his people. He loved them to end means he loved them with a love of purpose—to save them and bring them back to God.

We were rebellious and ungrateful kids who had turned away from our Father’s love and riches, spit in his face, flipped him the bird, and said, “I want nothing to do with you.” But God in his mercy and love still, almost inexplicably, wanted us back. The purpose of Christ was to save us from our sins and thereby glorify the Father: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you” (17:1).

Jesus’s unshakeable security, then, allowed him to serve in the most humiliating ways the culture could imagine.

The Service of Jesus

Jesus was so secure in his time, identity, place, and destiny that he could perform the penultimate act of serving. The ultimate act of serving was his crucifixion, but this was the penultimate act, the nearly ultimate act: scrubbing mud off dirty sandaled feet. The one who had formed the feet of the disciples from dust washed the dust off their feet. The one who was clean made himself dirty. This was the act of a lowly servant, not the duty of a leader or a rabbi, let alone a king, let alone a Messiah, let alone God himself.

Yet, there was Jesus, on his knees, with a water-bucket and washrag, scrubbing Jerusalem’s dust off the dirty feet of sinful men. Let me illustrate how dirty those feet must have been. Our family’s favorite place to be other than South Florida is in the sweet and crisp pine-air of the Tahoe basin. When I was a kid, every summer our family would hitch our travel trailer up to our Suburban and spend a week or two at a campground in South Lake Tahoe. When my wife Laura and I had barely been married a year, I introduced her to this camping lifestyle for the first time. She adjusted valiantly, but one of the most difficult parts was what she now calls “camping toes.” If you wear sandals in the dusty sites of the campground under the pines, your feet draw dust like a bright light draws bugs. Your feet get dry and grimy, dirt layered over dust. Imagine these men: for their lifetimes their skin had calloused as they walked everywhere, in sandaled feet, along dusty and even sewage-filled roads.

Yet there was Jesus, the God-man, kneeling down, scrubbing like a slave. In all the literature of the ancient world, one scholar notes, “Never—never!—is this act performed by a superior.” Some Jewish leaders said only Gentiles could be allowed to wash feet.

Yet there was Jesus, grabbing the towel likely used for everyone to wash their hands after the meal, moving from the center of the conversation to the margin, pushing himself outward where the disciples leaned on their sides, reclining, their feet pointing away from the center of the meal. “Picture the disciples,” D.A. Carson says, “Reclining on thin mats around a low table. Each is leaning on his arm, usually the left; the feet radiate outward from the table. Jesus pushes himself up from his own mat,” and taking the “form of a servant” (Phil 2:6-7) he serves even the friend who betrayed him.

Only someone completely secure could serve in such a way. Jesus was so secure and Jesus did so serve: “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

Learning to Lead Like Jesus

Our culture’s values and stories often fill our hearts and minds with pictures of leadership calling to mind strength, victory, and power. Good leaders are strong. Good leaders win. Good leaders blaze forward. Now, strength, victory, and ambition can be good things, but these can also be abused, elevated, or idolized. If strength, victory, and ambition become the ultimate standards of leadership, we end up in dark and dangerous places. These values must be subjected to a greater virtue that prevents them from turning the wrong direction.

Jesus enfleshes this virtue with a water bucket and wash rag.

What is good leadership? It’s servant leadership. It’s security in when, who, where, and why we are, and then serving others, considering them above ourselves. This is not a picture of raw power, relentless victory, or ruthless ambition. It’s a picture of love and humility. In reality, we are too often too weak and insecure to lead humbly by serving. Fortunately, Jesus didn’t just give an example, but served us to the point of dying for our sinful life of self-service. As Augustine said, “Proud man would be lost forever unless the humble God found him.”

These are the kinds of leaders God has called us to become.

Become secure in the time God has prepared. If you are in Christ, you have been justified, you are being sanctified and you will be glorified. He made you right when he intended. We are the ones he has chosen for this hour. Trust him in the time he has prepared. If you’re in a season of waiting, trust his timing. I had a friend in seminary who met Jesus later in life. In his late 30s he was living in a dorm, working a graveyard shift, and doing grad school to prepare for ministry. He was worried he would never find someone to spend his life with, but he met a beautiful, godly woman in her early 30s. She was a doctor, and God had been preparing her just for him, and him for her.

Become secure in the identity God has given. God made you in his own image. You bear the image of God, and you are more valuable than all the wealth of the nations, than all the Bitcoins or Tesla stock shares you could string together. Whether you are old or young or middle-aged, black or white or brown, Republican or Democrat or Independent, rich or poor or middle-class, you are an image-bearer of God and no inherently better or worse than any other image-bearer. And if you’re in Christ—woo boy!—you are a beloved child, chosen, adopted, and called by his grace, transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of the Son. You are in Christ, and you are safer than safe.

Become secure in the place God has called. Your eternal citizenship is the heavenly City, where God is King forever. You have a home, and that home is with him. He has called you there and here, where your “here” might be. That “here” centers around you friendly neighborhood local church, where the eternal City explodes into space and time as the people of God gather to worship God.

Become secure in the purpose God has commissioned. In the 1600s a group of pastors and theologians in England got together to talk about what the Bible teaches. They wanted to help Christians learn and understand Scripture and solid theological Bible teaching, so they came up with a series of questions and answers for Christians to learn. The called this series of questions and answers a “catechism” and this way of learning “catechesis” which comes from the Greek word for “instruction.” And these folks in Westminster, England wanted to start this catechism out correctly so they started it with this question:

“What is the chief end (or goal or purpose) of man (mankind, humanity, people)?” And they concluded this, based on the teaching of Scripture: “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” That’s why you’re here. You are not accidental or haphazard or random. You are designed for a purpose: to glorify and enjoy God forever. The way we say that in our church is, “God designed us for abundant life united in wholehearted worship, authentic community, and joyful mission.”

• • • 

There once was a young pastor who had just started serving as the pastor of a large church. One Sunday, after worship, the church hosted a lunch in their gym building, and after the lunch many members and servant leaders began folding up chairs and tables. The young pastor thought nothing of the fact that he was a part of the church and started doing what everyone was doing, folding up tables and chairs.

But apparently this made an impression.

A day or two later, one of the leaders of the church came into that young pastor’s office. “I was so glad to see you helping put away the chairs and tables on Sunday,” he said. “We’ve had pastors here who thought they were above that kind of thing and who wouldn’t lift a finger to help in a situation like that.”

That young pastor wondered how anyone who wouldn’t serve by folding chairs could be qualified to preach to the people who would sit in them.

True leadership is loving servant-leadership, from a place of security in Christ.

Secure people serve people.