No Elitism — Greatness Through Service
(Luke 9:46–48)
When the student protests over the NEET irregularities finally achieved results and the Education Minister resigned, one of the key leaders Abhijeet Dipke said something remarkable to his supporters:
“Don’t make me a hero because Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. The country has been ruined because of making one person a hero.”
Whether he meant it or not, either way the question he raised is worth sitting with. Everyone wants to be great — do they not? What is actually wrong with wanting to be the greatest in your life, your vocation, your field? Jesus did not think there was anything wrong with that desire. But he did something far more radical than criticizing it. He redefined it entirely.
The Argument on the Road
In Luke 9, after Jesus predicts his death and suffering, Luke records three discipleship incidents that follow immediately. N.T. Wright rightly calls the entire section the nature of discipleship. The first incident is in verses 46–48.
The disciples had been arguing on the road about which of them was the greatest. Mark’s account tells us this argument happened while they were walking — which means they were arguing about rank while Jesus was walking toward a cross. The contrast is almost unbearable.
Jesus did not rebuke their ambition. He redirected it.
“If you want to be first,” he said, “you must be last of all, and servant of all.”
And then he placed a child in the middle of them and said: “Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me.”
Two markers of true greatness. One response to their question. Serve others. Depend on God.
Greatness Through Service
In ancient China, fingernails carried powerful social symbolism. Both men and women from the upper classes — particularly the literati — grew their nails extraordinarily long as a visible signal of wealth. Long nails announced to the world that their owner did not do manual labour. The sociologist Thorstein Veblen formally described this behaviour in The Theory of the Leisure Class as using wasted time and delegated labour to demonstrate social superiority. Most feudal and capitalist societies have had their own version of the long fingernail.
So does today’s church.
Who is considered the greatest minister of God?
The one with the largest auditorium?
The highest YouTube views?
The biggest Instagram following?
The most luxurious lifestyle?
The largest entourage?
Churches sometimes unintentionally create celebrities instead of servants. Leaders begin enjoying the adulation and congregations reinforce it. Greatness slowly becomes measured by visibility rather than faithfulness. And the long fingernail grows longer.
Jesus walked into that entire system and picked up a bowl of water and a towel.
Notice something. When Jesus knelt to wash feet, no one competed with him for that position. Everyone wanted the seat beside Jesus. Nobody wanted the towel. Service has no competitors.
Service to others creates no rivalry because no one else wants to go there. And yet Jesus says that is precisely the road to greatness in the kingdom.
You do not need to be Mother Teresa to serve. You do not need a platform or a title or an audience. You need only to be a small light in your immediate area — dispelling the darkness in the room you are already in — before you worry about becoming a lighthouse for many.
Hudson Taylor, the founder of China Inland Mission, understood this. He said: “I have but one candle of life to burn and I would rather burn it out where people are dying in darkness than in a land flooded with light.” He burned his candle in the places no one else wanted to go. That is not the instinct of a man worried about his social position or his follower count.
Jesus himself remains the perfect model.
“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” (Mark 10:45, NRSV)
That is greatness.
Greatness Through Childlike Dependence
The second thing Jesus does is place a child in the centre of the room.
There is a world of difference between childlike and childish — and Jesus is commending the former. A child is not naive or unintelligent. But a child is completely dependent. On parents for food, direction, protection, provision. The child does not chart its own course and execute its own strategy. It depends.
That dependence, Jesus says, is the second marker of kingdom greatness.
I found a striking illustration of the opposite in my morning devotion recently. After Joshua conquered Jericho and Ai, the Gibeonites — the next people in the path of the Israelite advance — were afraid for their lives. So they constructed an elaborate deception. They wore old clothes and patched sandals. They carried dry mouldy bread. They presented themselves as travellers from a distant country who had come to make a treaty with Israel.
Joshua and the leaders were not foolish. They examined the evidence carefully — the torn sandals, the worn garments, the mouldy bread. They used their intelligence. And there is nothing wrong with using intelligence.
But Joshua 9:14,15 names the problem precisely:
“So the leaders partook of their provisions and did not ask direction from the Lord. And Joshua made peace with them, guaranteeing their lives by a treaty.” (NRSV)
The Bible never condemns Joshua’s intelligence. It exposes his independence. Just before this, Joshua had moved independently against Ai and felt the heat of that mistake. Now, with the Gibeonites standing before him with apparently convincing evidence, he moved independently again. The evidence looked good. The logic was sound. And the decision was wrong — because it was made without seeking God’s direction.
This is the itch that lives inside every leader — the urge to decide. We have the intelligence, we have the information, we have the experience. Why wait? Why ask? And so we move — confidently, quickly, in the wrong direction entirely.
For discipleship, direction is far more important than pace. What is the benefit of moving at full speed in the wrong direction?
A child does not make that mistake. A child asks.
Serve and Depend
So Jesus gives us two markers of true greatness — and they are not separable.
Serve others. Depend on God.
The moment we reverse either one we are back in the disciples’ argument on the road — jostling for position, making independent decisions, burning ourselves on paths God never directed us to walk.
The Chinese fingernail and the Gibeonite treaty are the same problem in different clothing. One says: I am too important to serve. The other says: I am capable enough to decide without God. Both grow from the same root — a self that has not yet been placed at the feet of Jesus.
Hudson Taylor burned his one candle where the darkness was deepest. He could do that because he was not protecting a position and he was not moving independently of God. He served. He depended. And the darkness retreated.
The world says: “Climb higher.” Jesus says: “Serve lower.”
The world says: “Become independent.” Jesus says: “Become dependent on your Father.”
Abhijeet Dipke was right when he said do not make me a hero. But he may not have known just how right he was — or why. The danger of making heroes is that it tempts leaders to serve their own image and trust their own judgment — and tempts followers to stop thinking for themselves. Greatness in the kingdom works in the opposite direction entirely.
You want to be great?
Pick up the towel. Ask God for direction. And keep walking.
Useful sir..thank you