One of the marks of good writing is avoiding the use of the passive voice. For example, if I say, “I am holding a pen.” “I” am the subject of the verb – I am doing the action. The “pen” is the object of the verb. To state that in the passive voice we would say, “The pen is being held by me.” That’s not good English. “I heard it through the grapevine” is in the active voice. “It was heard by me through the grapevine” is passive . . . and awkward. . . .and not a catchy song title anymore. So the active voice is almost always better.
Sometimes there might be a reason to state something in the passive voice. Politicians like to use the passive voice when they are trying to obscure their own responsibility in something. So Reagan famously says when scandal hits his administration, “Mistakes were made.” No mention of who actually made those mistakes. When the power company sends a notice to those who haven’t paid the bill, they say, “your power will be shut off.” Passive voice. They don’t want to say, “We the electric company are turning off your power.” Too harsh.
So when we are writing a paper, we avoid the passive voice recognizing that there are others times we might deliberately use the passive. We all know that when it comes to our relationship with God, we must get comfortable with the passive voice. We realize that “we are saved by grace”, we don’t save ourselves. It is important to acknowledge that “I am loved by God.” “I have been justified by Christ.” “I have been baptized into his death and resurrection.” Those are all beautifully in the passive. Our pride wants to put ourselves in the active voice – as in “I have decided to follow Jesus” but we learn from Scripture that when it comes to our salvation we are passive. God does it all. And faith receives it all in the passive voice. This is good Lutheran theology. And that’s where we must always remain . . . or is it?
Jesus makes an interesting twist from passive voice to active voice in our Gospel today.
“The Son of man came not to be served, but to serve.” He said this in response to his friends, James and John, who came to Jesus with a request for good jobs in his administration. They must have thought that he was soon going to be swept into power. So they are putting in dibs to be Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense perhaps. They wanted to “be seated” at the right and left of Jesus. They wanted to be served, to be promoted, to be given positions where they are being listened to and obeyed. They wanted to be on the receiving end of all this power and influence – in passive voice.
But Jesus did not come to be on the receiving end. “I came not to be served but to serve.” You’d think that disciples would have understood this. After all, this is right after Jesus has predicted his suffering and death . . . for the third time! Clearly Jesus did not come to be accepted or admired. When he was led into the desert, he did not ask to be rescued. When he was arrested he did not ask to be released. When he was suffering, he did not ask to be relieved, when he was dying he did not ask to be spared. He came to serve, to love, to save, to give his life as a ransom for many. He came as the Suffering Servant Isaiah describes in our Old Testament reading today. But the disciples did not grasp this selfless activity of Jesus, because they, like us, wanted to be on top.
The popular British TV show Upstairs, Downstairs depicted the lives of those who lived in an English townhouse in the early twentieth century. The wealthy masters lived upstairs and the servants lived downstairs and there was a very distinct separation governed by strict societal rules. In 2002, PBS did a reality show called Manor House in which modern day participants were placed into this “upstairs/downstairs” setting with a privileged family of 5 living upstairs and a staff of 14 servants living downstairs complete with all the rules and costumes. The man who played the lord of the house said, “”I really don’t have problem with having servants…if I’m not being served, they don’t have a job. This is absolutely magnificent.” One of the girls who was a maid in the house said, “They are constantly saying upstairs that they understand how downstairs feel but they haven’t really got a clue.”
We live in an egalitarian society – where everyone has equal rights and where we promote the idea that everyone has equal worth and status. The lines between upstairs and downstairs are largely gone from our daily life. And yet we still try to climb upstairs . . . to the place where we are on the receiving end of those beneath us. We don’t have a problem with this because we want to be loved, we want to be understood, we want to be fussed over and cared for and there are people in our lives who are SUPPOSED to do that for us. And in those self-obsessed moments, we don’t have a clue how those around us feel or what THEY need. This climbing to the top is what damages and sometimes even destroys our relationships. This is not how Jesus lived. And it is not the life he offers us.
The life he gives us begins, of course, in the passive voice.
We are acted upon by God’s grace when we are powerless to act.
We are loved before we love.
We are served, in ways almost beyond what we can imagine, before we serve.
We are ministered to before we are able to minister to others.
We can only express the Gospel with Jesus as the subject and we as the objects of his love. “Jesus died for me.”
But Jesus is calling us today to use the freedom of that passive voice to embrace the active voice of serving. To climb downstairs – to take on our callings with a focus on our neighbor – to carry the cross. There is nothing we can do to accomplish God’s love for us; there is nothing we can’t do when his love compels us.
St. Francis gave us this prayer: Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. Oh, the time and energy we have spent waiting to be consoled, seeking to be understood, looking to be loved. When all the while the one who has done all this for us is calling us to do the consoling, the understanding, the loving.
Jesus said, the greatest one among us is the servant of all. Jesus IS the greatest one among us and he is the suffering servant of all. By him we are served, we are loved, we are saved, we are given his life. And through him we move into the active voice of those great verbs ourselves: we serve, we love, we save, we give our lives away. And when we do, we begin to see that it is not really us who are doing it, but it is Christ himself.
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