Back when I watched college football, I used to love that there wasn’t a playoff. I know. Weird take. But hear me out.
The old bowl system with the AP poll and the coach’s poll was so messy. It helped us see that our means of ranking are always arbitrary. Two teams could both end the year at #1. Which drove everyone crazy, but was low-key fantastic.
That one year, 1993 I think, when the polls ranked a one-loss Florida State over a one-loss Notre Dame was pure, frustrating magic. Because that debate fueled all of the energy around college football for a whole year. Lou Holtz no-doubt recruited a top class to Notre Dame that spring on the promise that they should’ve been named champions.
And yet, with a playoff, the act of one team winning one game is also arbitrary. It only feels like merit. Location, timing, preparation, the flip of a coin, the bounce of a ball. It doesn’t truly determine greatness because ultimately we decide what gets named great.
But this pursuit of greatness, rank, power, glory, is also treated in our world like a virtue; natural, perhaps even righteous. To want to be the best is almost pathologically reinforced by our culture and honored as the highest motivation of them all.
We don’t just do this to ourselves, we do this to each other. We measure and determine and berate our way in systems that break souls and we call it good.
Jesus rejects this near-pavlovian response by saying it isn’t cool for a disciple to be above their teacher, for example. Nor for a slave to be above their master.
He keeps going, and we need to keep going, but sit in this for a second. Because the point isn’t to better them. The point is to be like them. Better as mechanism, ambition, focus, is no virtue; it is destructive.
We have, perhaps, the greatest example in the world’s first trillionaire who invented nothing, never delivers on his promises, and ultimately needed the government to bend the rules for him so he could leverage the US economy and the people’s retirement accounts to catapult his wealth into the stratosphere. None of this is earned. There is no merit. Nor is their virtue.
And beyond that, it isn’t enough to say that this kind of wealth creation and “besting” the other wealthy people in the world isn’t good. It is necessary to name it as evil and exploitative. Because that is how Jesus depicts wealth. And Jesus has to push us to hear that greatness isn’t a de facto good, either.
So the disciples aren’t supposed to be greater than their masters. It is enough to be like them. This is important. Because there is something, too, in the power dynamic that we aren’t called to pursue.
Here, I think the other example Jesus uses hits more. Jesus doesn’t defend slavery, but he wants to break the power system itself. So if the slaver is “greater” than the master, he is likely to become the master and reinforce slavery. See how greater than perpetuates an abusive system?
But this all isn’t just about power abstractly. Its about how the powerful see the teacher (the teacher being Jesus) and seek to undermine him.
So this isn’t about glory and proving anything to the world. Because the world will work to keep you powerless, to prove you are less than.
This teaching, then, isn’t about merit, friend. This is about how the powerful fear those who work for justice. And they want us to lust after attaining their power. Because that makes them feel powerful.
And to that, the teacher says, be like me.