Servants Not Slaves

Alan Joyce, the CEO of Qantas, has announced that the company is grounding its entire fleet and locking out its employees in the face of union demands for pay increases and better working conditions, and workers’ fears about the threat of jobs being outsourced to overseas labourers at lower rates of pay. Wasn’t this the same Alan Joyce who was granted a 71% pay increase earlier this week, putting his annual earnings over $5 million? Who is Alan Joyce serving—the company, their clients, their employees or himself? And what does it all mean for a society increasingly influenced by a corporate culture where profit is everything, people are nothing, and everybody seems to be in it for themselves, particularly if you’re a CEO earning an obscene amount of money per annum?

In the meantime, other parts of the media have been in a bit of a frenzy around the royal visit with the big news for at least a while being Julia Gillards’ failure to curtsey when, in fact, contemporary royal protocols do not require that particular act of deference to the sovereign anymore.

And let’s not even mention the hoo-haa around the Melbourne Cup, fashions of the field, and which celebrities will be attending the cup and why.
Our society seems to have some funny ideas about what is important and who matters, as do the religious leaders of whom Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel reading. Despite being important teachers and significant mentors in the faith, as Jesus acknowledges, even they too get what’s important wrong in their actions. They are concerned with knowing the things of God; but miss the incredible irony of those things when they seek to show just how godly they apparently are.

Jesus describes religious leaders who are trying very hard to live out their ideas of what being faithful to God is all about; but who, in the process, only tie themselves up in knots—taking on themselves unnecessarily heavy burdens. They wear extra long fringes on their prayer shawls, and large phylacteries (small leather cases holding passages of scripture) during prayer times. They seek places of honour at banquets and in synagogues, and signs of respect in market places. They want people to know and to acknowledge their godliness.

But according to Jesus all this play-acting is futile. It means nothing in the values of God’s realm for “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

“All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” The message is a disturbing one.

Partly, the message is disturbing because we know we can’t live up to it. Partly, it is disturbing because it is a message that has tended to be distorted in various ways. The message of the humility of discipleship in Christ is a familiar one, but I don’t think it’s really an easy one for us to understand.

Sometimes people have claimed humility for themselves while furthering their own interests at the expense of others. Sometimes people have heard the message of humility as an order to humiliate themselves--to treat themselves as less than the valued children of God whom we all are. And probably we all do a little of each of those things most of the time, because we are the frail, fragile, fallible human creatures we are.

But when we interpret the message about humility and exaltation in these kinds of ways, we’re pretty much heading in the direction of the scribes and the Pharisees ourselves—we think we know, but our actions belie our claims.

Of course, in our contemporary world, we know that people who like to make a show are generally looking for support and encouragement, for affirmation. They don’t need to be noticed because they are successful. They need to be noticed to prove that they are successful. Their problem is usually not pride. More often, it’s lack of self-esteem. When you don’t value yourself, you have to keep proving to others how significant you are by wearing and having the right things, and by doing the proper things, or the daring things, or the trendy things, in the biggest and best possible way.

The religious leaders about whom Jesus speaks are really a very sad bunch indeed. They are a sad bunch because they don’t know that they are important to God as themselves not for what they do or who they are in their society. They are special to God because they are God’s children, unique yet fallible and frail human creatures.
When you don’t feel very good about yourself, it’s hard to get your priorities right. When you don’t feel very good about yourself, it’s hard to remember that it’s okay not to know everything, not have everything, not to be everything that you think you should know, have or be. But Christian discipleship has never been about knowing or having or being more than you are. It’s never been about being honoured or respected or showy. It’s always been about being the beloved children of God—God’s frail, fragile, fallible human creatures.

In 1960, Valerie Saiving wrote what is now regarded as a ground-breaking article. In it, she suggested that the reason there was so much emphasis on sin as pride, and love as selflessness in Christianity was probably due to the fact that much of Christian theology had been written and devised by men. She suggested that for women, in their tendency to give up themselves completely to the needs of others, it was probably necessary to regard sin as self-effacement, and love as the need to value one’s self. She also suggested that as our society was becoming more feminised, it was likely that the issues of self-effacement, or lack of self-esteem would not simply be a female concern, rather it was a concern for the whole of contemporary society. Further comments on Saiving’s work have been made since that time, and it seems that she was probably right, that in emphasising sin as pride in the Christian church, we have failed to recognise the underlying impetus for what presents as pride, and that is not the overvaluing of self, but the undervaluing—perhaps those male theologians just got it wrong for themselves as well rather than actually being guilty of being proud. When people have no internal sense of self-worth, they seek it from external sources, making bigger and bigger displays of who they are and how important they can be.

That kind of information puts a different slant on our Gospel reading for today. If when we talk about people who exalt themselves, we are really talking about people who don’t feel very good about themselves, who do not know their worth as children of God, then of course, it is likely that they will be humbled, because it is impossible to receive the kind of external affirmation required to keep them feeling good. If when we talk about people who humble themselves, we are talking about people who do not need to prove their place as beloved children of God because they have accepted it—they have accepted God’s love for them, then of course they will be more comfortable with themselves, and more ready to try new things, and to take new steps in discipleship with Christ. It’s common sense really. If you feel secure in your identity, then you feel able to try new things, to learn new things, to risk being laughed at or ridiculed or considered a fool. Wasn’t Jesus just such a person? Ridiculed and derided and considered a fool, because he didn’t have to prove his worth before God.

Humility is not humiliation or neglect of either self or others, rather it is learning to value ourselves and each other as the beloved children of God and frail, fragile, fallible human creatures. In Christ, we are called to confident but not overconfident discipleship, to humility but not self-effacement.

Self-esteem and the way we see our world are BIG issues for our time. They are integrally involved in the suicides of young men in rural communities (perhaps because they see themselves as failing to attain the right way of being male in our society). They are involved in issues of domestic violence where women, and sometimes men, allow themselves to be abused because they are unable to accept themselves as the people whom they are and to make different decisions in order to protect themselves; and where men, and sometimes women, abuse others as a way of taking out their frustrations about their own apparent inadequacies. The issues of self-esteem and the way we see our world are probably even involved in the kind of corporate culture that has developed in our society—a culture where bigger salaries, greater profits, less costs are somehow a marker of the worth of the CEO or the Board or the Senior Management etc.

Attempts at grand displays of worth are not confined to religion. They are present in every aspect of human life: government, business, community, social and sporting organisations. People are people. Wherever we are, we like to be noticed, acknowledged, and recognised. Unfortunately, a lot of our fussing comes from the fact that we really do not think a lot of ourselves, and have to keep proving ourselves to ourselves and to other people.

The text in Matthew seems to be talking about pride, but when you know that some people’s attempts at getting attention are really cries to be loved and cared for and needed, then this passage is also about knowing our value in God.

In Christ we are called to recognise our value to God. As children of God we are called to be servants not abused slaves; and that cannot be achieved through self-abasement. You have to value what you have to offer in order to serve. Nor can it be achieved through self-aggrandisement even when that comes from a poor sense of self-esteem. You have to recognise your limitations in order to offer the service that you can offer and not something other than that. In Christ we are called to know how God sees us—yes, frail, fragile, fallible and sinful; but the very much beloved children of God.

And when we are able to accept our worth before God, then we just might understand what it means to be humble and yet be exalted, what it means to be the greatest and yet a servant. And we will no longer need to seek others’ acknowledgement that we are of worth.