Luke 9:46-48: ‘The relentless smell of the self.'(please click for todays passage)

Yet again we see an expression of ‘the upside down kingdom’.

We can’t hide from Jesus; He sees and hears us.

People who follow Christ are called to be humble. ‘For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment…’ (Romans 12:3). ‘Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.’ (Philippians 2:2).

Here are three challenges from this short reading:

1. What is my attitude to status (48b)? Am I willing to take the lowest seat? (14:7-11). We have the example of Jesus ever before us (Philippians 2:1-11), and it teaches and rebukes and corrects us.

2. What is my attitude to children? Do I see their worth and value? Do I care for them, and listen to them and treat them with dignity? Do I welcome them and see Christ in them? (18:15-17). Do I regard the Sunday School as of less importance than the ‘main church service’?

3. What is my attitude toward others? (46). Is it one of unfavourable comparison; of competition? Do I feel myself to be in some way superior and want to be thought of in that way? What happened to the idea of all being on level ground before the cross? The irony is that the One who truly was ‘the greatest’ in that group made Himself least among them. But Jesus exemplifies God’s law of gravity, that ‘what goes down must come up’ ( see 1 Peter 5:5,6).

In his autobiography, ‘The Pastor’, Eugene Peterson describes how, at one time, two young people, ‘Sarah and Steve’, came to see him regularly to talk about what is involved in being a pastor. In one conversation he said this to them, ”You are at your pastoral best when you are not noticed. To keep this vocation healthy requires constant self-negation, getting out of the way. A certain blessed anonymity is inherent in pastoral work. For pastors, being noticed easily develops into wanting to be noticed. Many years earlier a pastoral friend told me that the pastoral ego ‘has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self.’ I’ve never forgotten that.”

Prayer: Lord I see that every Christian grace grows in the soil of humility. I hate my prideful egoism. Help me to humble myself under your mighty Hand.