Volume 36, No. 7
The Servant Leader
Steve Graham
For Luke there is no crowd. Only the disciples are there walking in front of Jesus, who is sitting awkwardly astride a young colt, his feet dangling upon the ground. There is another noticeable difference in Luke’s account of the triumphal entry. According to Luke, the disciples are throwing their coats. There are no palm branches. They, instead, lay out their Coats in front of the donkey. They sing “Blessed is the King who comes.” There is no Hosanna in their song. They sing, “Peace in Heaven and Glory in the Highest and Peace on Earth.”
Jesus enters Jerusalem. If pressed, how would the disciples understand his entrance into this Holy Week?
I’m not so sure that they could have told you. They Knew what they hoped he would do, and yet did they understand what he had been telling them he would do. Denial dies hard. Instead, they would have simply said, “Oh, I’m sure Jesus will be Jesus. He’ll keep doing more of the same and aren’t we glad!”
All along, Jesus has been laying his life down. He would continue to lay down his life until there was no life to be laid down. That, after all, was his most impressive character trait, his willingness to serve. Jesus was, from beginning to end, the servant leader. I am, like you, attracted to and repelled by the servant leader. As he enters Jerusalem and is hailed as king, he teaches us that he is the servant king. He is the blessed servant who comes in God’s name. He is the one whom Paul would say though He had equal status with God didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death--and the worst kind of death at that: a crucifixion (Philippians 2:6-8, The Message).
On Palm Sunday, the eve of Holy Week, the image of Jesus coming into Jerusalem, riding on the back of a donkey, we see yet another step downward. Jesus, rich as he was, made himself poor for our sake, in order to make you rich by means of his poverty (2 Corinthians 8:9, TEV).