Greatness (As Promised)

A friend of mine recently told me, "Brett, you're going to do something great, or you're going to end up as a Mercury Insurance salesman somewhere." It was insightful, I could either work diligently and achieve something recognizable for the kingdom, or slothfully obey the demigod Laziness (where the temple worship is video games and the priestly duties include refilling the bowl of M&M's).

Did you notice how easily I associated "great" with "recognizable?" It's inherent to the mind. Our definition includes our own selves being made much of for our feats. Recognition, reputation, approbation, applause. We long for the crowds to scream our name as we stand in the limelight of our own achievement.

Is that really what greatness is? By that last definition, plenty of wicked men are "great." Hitler's name was respectfully chanted. Michael Jackson's (an unconvicted pedophile) name is adored even posthumously. So maybe there is an aspect of morality to greatness as well.

Maybe the adoring crowds should be religious in nature. Maybe the great man or woman blazes a trail of morality through the marshes of man's turpitude. Was Martin Luther King Jr. great? Was Gandhi?

I do think such men were great, by that definition. They are and should be applauded for their efforts in their respective countries. They bettered lives, corrected injustices, and could legitimately be called peacemakers.

But the greatest Man in history (because He was God), was not like them. He had his crowds, but He ran from them when they offered the crown. He drove them away with His fierce rhetoric that destroyed the petty kingdoms men erected to show themselves off. He told men who thought they were great because people praised them that greatness was not what they thought it was.
He redefined the standard notion of what greatness is.

Mark 9. The disciples argue over who is the greatest; the answer "Jesus" never seems to come to mind despite the fact that three of them just saw Him in glory that few mortal men have witnessed. (Isn't it just like sinners who have just witnessed the majesty of the Transcendent One to turn around and talk about how awesome they are?)
I imagine the disciples were recounting the various miracles they performed (Matthew 10), and debating which ones were the most powerful, which were the most righteous, and which miracle worker deserved the honorific title "greatest." They seem to have selective memory in that they just forgot how they couldn't heal a demonized boy. And why couldn't they? "This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer." (Mark 9:29). In other words, they had forgotten where the power to perform miracles came from - that God did the work, and not man.

And Jesus has just told them He was going to be captured, murdered, and resurrected - a foreshadowing that His kind of greatness did not align with their kind.

And so, as they walked the long miles through Galilee to Capernaum, Jesus had to hear their endless cat-fighting about who was the greatest. Unsurprisingly, when He asks them about it, they all get instant amnesia – I suspect that they then realized the idiocy of arguing greatness before Jesus.

What’s really interesting though, is that Jesus doesn’t condemn their desire for greatness, He just redefines it.

He says being great is to be last of all and servant of all.

I mean, last of all.

Last means behind children, behind the homeless, behind the mouth-breathing, pimpled 14 year old who talks too loud at the park, behind everyone I thought was worthless or inferior and everyone I was ever glad I wasn’t. And it’s not just that I have to recognize that I am worse than them, that I am the last of all humankind, but I have to serve them too?

Being great does not mean pastoring a great church, or becoming a renowned missionary, or writing books for the evangelical world. The greatest man in the world right now might be a Mercury insurance salesman in Northern Michigan for all I know. I’m pretty sure the greatest man in the world is not a household name.

Essentially, Jesus says that greatness is the exact opposite of everything I thought it was. You see, the longing for most people is not to be great, but to be known to be great. Rather than longing to be great, we want to be greater than someone else. Greatness is the willingness to be last. Greatness is being a blessing to as many people as you can.

Think about it. Do you really want to be great? Or do you just want to be applauded?