Lenten Meditation: March 18, 2024
Daily Scripture Passage: Mark 9:30-41
Jesus sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” — Mark 9:35
The culture in which we live where winning and succeeding dominates the very way we think, it is not easy for us to hear these words of Jesus from scripture, “If you want to be first...you must be servant.”
I would like to unpack this well-known admonition from Him and place it in the middle of a common-place contemporary setting that happens to us almost every day. We casually meet up with someone, start a conversation and before we realize it, we are talking only about ourselves. “Let me tell you…” goes on and on. We eventually say farewell and then a short time later we realize that we failed to ask the other person a single thing about themselves. We never asked how they were doing, what they were engaged in, or where they may had been. We had done a lot of talking about ourselves but no real listening.
Being a true servant is listening to the other. Being a true servant is realizing—this is not about me. The more we focus on the other person and listen, the more we are actually following Jesus and loving our neighbor as He so often suggested—even if we never use that word servant to describe ourselves.