We had been looking forward to this day for a long time. It was Passover, which is always a high point in the year. We were going to Jerusalem, which is THE place to be during Passover if it is at all possible. And we were going with Jesus, who had changed all our lives in ways which would take a lifetime for us to discover. We had been unable to think of anything else for weeks, which is why that particular Passover experience caught us so by surprise. For most of us, we would not have said we had any clear preconceptions of what that day was supposed to be like. I suppose if pressed, most of us would have described something like every other Passover we had ever been a part of, only on a grander scale and more perfect. It was one of those things which we hadn't thought much about consciously, but the expectations were there nonetheless. The other thing which we hadn't thought much about, but which certainly played at the edges of our minds, was our own sense of importance. Most of us had never been very important in our lives. We were common folk, living ordinary lives. And then we had met Jesus. It was so overwhelming to be one of his followers and I confess that there were times when we all let it go to our heads. We really began to think we were pretty hot stuff.

I tell you all of this so you will understand why we were so shocked and unsettled when we arrived in that borrowed upper room for the Passover meal and found Jesus dressed like a servant, washing our feet. We could not understand how someone who was so great, someone who was so much larger than life, someone for whom we had given up so much to follow, could be demeaning himself in this way. If he sensed our discomfort, however, he didn't show it. He simply went about his task as if it was the most natural thing in the world. But he didn't stop there. Later, during the meal, he actually scared us with the way he was talking. We were so excited to be sharing that important meal with him and we were in the mood to be festive. But he took the bread and talked about it being the sacrifice of his body. He took the cup and talked about it being his blood which would be spilled for our sake. He even spoke about one of us betraying him. We did not want to hear such talk. We didn't understand at all what it might mean or why he would be saying such things, but we knew that we did not want to hear it.

I think we would have done almost anything to change the subject at that point, but I am still dismayed when I think about what we actually did. It revealed so much about how little we had learned in our time with him. We actually began to argue about which of us was the greatest. We were in the same room with the greatest man any of us would ever know, and we were arguing over who was the greatest. To this day I do not know what we could have been thinking.

I cannot ever be too hard on us, however, because Jesus was always so patient with us, even when we acted in such blatantly thick-headed ways. And on this occasion, what he said to us will stay with me for as long as I live. In his quiet, powerful way, he took everything we had ever believed about greatness and power and authority, and he turned it upside down and inside out. He told us that to be great we must give up any claim to greatness, and to be a leader meant we must become servants. We might have thought he was joking with us, except that the image from earlier in the evening was still fresh and clear in our minds, of him on his hands and knees, washing our feet. His whole life revealed the truth of his words. And we all knew that we would never be able to think about greatness in the same ways again.

Greatness is still something which I strive for in my life. But I no longer argue over it with my friends. I simply pray that someday I might experience even a taste of the greatness which I saw in the life of the one we knew as Jesus.