Matthew 20:25-28 NRSV
But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Philippians 2:6-11 NRSV
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself...
A slave. A servant. Such is the status to which Jesus aspired. The status to which he inspires us to aspire.
The slave, the servant, owns nothing. The slave, the servant, tends to what belongs to the master. The slave, the servant, belongs to the master and is charged with acting only in the master’s interest.
Not what most of us have in minds for ourselves, is it? Especially for those of us who live in an individualistic, capitalistic society in which we are barraged with propaganda suggesting that each of us was meant to be a master.
But as we clear our minds and hearts of this delusion, we can see its disastrous consequences. In our quest to be masters, we lose the ability to cooperate for the common good. In our belief that each of us is the captain of our own ship, our ships run aground and into each other. We run amok, destroying our planet as we each claim sovereignty over our little patches of it. In our quest to be masters of the universe, we lose mastery even over our own minds.
We’re not meant to be masters. We’re meant to be servants. But not of any one human being.
“Men must be governed by God or they will be ruled by tyrants,” said William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania. We must submit ourselves as servants of the Ultimate Reality. Or we’ll end up as peons under autocrats.
Each of us is a temporary occupant of the role we play in stewardship of the Earth. We own no status, we own no position. We do our parts as we live, and we let our parts be taken up by others when our time is up.
In America today, with the whole world watching, we are presented with a choice. Will we follow the admonition of Jesus, will we remember the wisdom of Paul and of William Penn, or will we drift asleep into delusion?
Here is one simple but jarring way to understand the extreme threat that Donald Trump poses to our democracy. When he occupied the office of the President, he believed that he owned it, and he acted accordingly. Just like he owned and operated the Trump Organization for his personal benefit. He believed that the Attorney General was his personal attorney, to act in his personal interests. He believed that the military was his personal armed force, to act in his personal interest. He believed that the entire government – all three branches of it, executive, judicial, and legislative, was his personal property to do his bidding for his own benefit. No matter that the underlying assumption of our Constitution is that all offices of government, including the presidency, belong to the people, and that those who occupy those offices are temporary stewards of those roles, charged with employing them to serve the people and not their own personal interests.
Donald Trump was only the tenant of the White House, but he was convinced he held title to it. No wonder he refused to recognize the legitimacy of the person who became its next tenant.
The assumption that ours is a government of laws, not of particular people, is so fundamental to our system of government that few of us have thought about it or discussed it. So when this man entered the highest office of the land and violated its essential nature with impunity, we were literally left speechless.
And because we were left speechless, because we failed to wrap our minds around how profoundly he violated the root norm of democracy, this debased person could once again occupy the office of the President. And then act without any remaining restraints on his assumption that he was, still is, and ever shall be the owner of the White House.
Donald Trump is the nightmarish cartoon image of the exact opposite of the person Jesus wanted us to be. His obvious unworthiness of his wealth and status is crucial to this aspiration. If a person so boorish, so disinterested in facts or expertise can be a billionaire and become president of the United States, then anybody can be master of the universe. His spectacular moral and intellectual incompetence isn’t a bug, it’s the main feature of the persona to which he inspires people to aspire. He’s not aristocratic, not refined, not dignified like proper rich people expect each other to be. He’s a low-class person with high wealth and power: that is the attraction. This is the message with which he has infected the brains of millions of people: “He’s me, just with a lot more money!”
Vaclav Havel, an avant-garde playwright and freedom activist who went on to become the first president of the Czech Republic after the communist system there was overthrown, believed that the survival of humanity depended on humility – a recognition that we all answer to Something/Someone beyond us. He wasn’t a religious person in any formal sense. But his sentiment resonated with Jesus’ admonition for us to be servants to all the rest: “… we must divest ourselves of our egotistical anthropocentrism, our habit of seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever occurs to us. We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality. Our respect for other people, for other nations and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of being, where it is judged…. Pride is precisely what will lead the world to hell. I am suggesting an alternative: humbly accepting our responsibility for the world.” (From his 1995 Harvard commencement address, later published under the title “Radical Renewal of Human Responsibility”)
We are tenants in this world, not its owners. We are stewards of the earth, not its rulers. We are servants of each other, no matter our station in life. Whatever roles we occupy are temporary assignments to be left in better condition when we leave than when we entered. And we do well to place people in high office who reflect this humble servant-consciousness. The survival of our democracy – and the survival of our planet – depend on it.