The Jesus Way · Movement 2 · From Power to Servanthood
The Request
Imagine you’ve been following a teacher for three years. You’ve left your home, your family business, your entire previous life. You’ve watched him heal the sick and feed the hungry and silence the religious authorities. You’ve heard him speak about a coming kingdom with such authority that you’ve started to believe he might be the one, the Messiah, the king who’ll restore Israel and set everything right.
And now the moment seems close. You can feel it. The crowds are growing. The tension with the authorities is building. Something is about to happen. And so, before it does, you make your move.
You pull the teacher aside, you and your brother, and you say: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”
That’s how James and John open their request in Mark 10. And the sheer audacity of it is breathtaking. They’re asking for a blank cheque. They want Jesus to commit to their request before he’s even heard it. It’s the kind of thing children try with their parents: “Promise me first, then I’ll tell you what I want.”
Jesus, patient as ever, asks: “What do you want me to do for you?”
And they answer: “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”
They want thrones. They want the seats of highest honor in the coming kingdom. They want to be first and second in command. And they want it locked in now, before the other ten disciples can get there.
It’s an astonishing moment. And it’s the doorway into one of the most important teachings Jesus ever gave about the nature of power, the meaning of greatness, and the shape of the life he’s calling people into.
The Timing That Makes It Worse
As with the disciples’ argument on the road to Capernaum, which we explored in Movement 2, the timing of this request is staggering.
Mark places it immediately after Jesus’s third and most detailed prediction of his death. In Mark 10:33–34, Jesus has just told the twelve, in plain language, exactly what’s about to happen: “The Human One will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they’ll condemn him to death; then they’ll hand him over to the Gentiles; they’ll mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he’ll rise again.”
This is the most explicit prophecy of the passion in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus has laid out the sequence: betrayal, condemnation, mockery, spitting, flogging, death, resurrection. He’s been as clear as language allows.
And the very next thing that happens is James and John asking for thrones.
Mark wants us to feel the collision. Jesus is talking about a cross. His closest followers are talking about crowns. He’s describing the path of self-giving love. They’re maneuvering for position in a power structure they assume is coming. The gap between Jesus’s vision and theirs is the entire width of the gospel.
I think Mark places these scenes together because he knows we’re all James and John. We hear the call to sacrifice and our first thought is: what’s in it for me? We hear the invitation to serve, and we start calculating our rank. We nod along with the teaching about humility and then, on the way home, quietly ask God to make us the most important person in the room.
“You Don’t Know What You’re Asking”
Jesus’s response is remarkable for its gentleness. He doesn’t rebuke them. He doesn’t shame them. He says: “You don’t know what you’re asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I’m baptized with?”
The cup and the baptism are images of suffering. In the Old Testament, the cup of God’s wrath is a recurring image for the experience of divine judgement and agony. Baptism, in this context, carries the sense of being plunged under, overwhelmed, submerged in suffering. Jesus is asking James and John: Can you endure what I’m about to endure? Are you ready for the path that leads to the place of honor you’re requesting?
They answer immediately: “We are able.”
It’s a confident answer, and history would prove them partially right. James would be martyred by Herod Agrippa (Acts 12:2), the first of the apostles to die for the faith. John, according to tradition, would endure exile and persecution. They would, in fact, drink the cup. But they had no idea what they were volunteering for. They were thinking of golden thrones. Jesus was thinking of a wooden cross.
And then Jesus says something that should give every power-seeker pause: “To sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it’s for those for whom it’s been prepared.”
Even Jesus, in his earthly ministry, defers to the Father on the question of rank. He holds power and hands it away. He possesses authority and refuses to exercise it for personal gain. The kingdom he’s building operates on a fundamentally different logic.
The Anger of the Ten
Mark tells us that when the other ten disciples heard about James and John’s request, they were “indignant.” The Greek word is aganaktein, and it carries the force of genuine anger, the kind that heats the face and tightens the jaw.
But here’s the question worth asking: Why were they angry?
Were they angry because James and John had misunderstood the nature of the kingdom? Were they offended by the presumption? Were they grieved that their friends had missed the point of Jesus’s teaching about servanthood?
Probably not. They were angry because James and John got there first. The indignation of the ten is the indignation of competitors who’ve been outmaneuvered. They wanted those seats too. They just hadn’t had the nerve to ask.
This is how power works in groups, even groups that are committed to following Jesus. Someone makes a grab for position, and the reaction from the rest looks like moral outrage but feels like jealousy. We dress our envy in the language of principle. We say, “How dare they?” when we mean, “Why not me?”
Jesus sees through all of it. He sees through James and John’s ambition. He sees through the ten’s indignation. And he gathers them all together for a teaching that will redefine everything they thought they knew about greatness.
The Way of the Rulers and the Way of the Kingdom
“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it’s not so among you; whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For The Human One came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
This is one of the most concentrated statements of Jesus’s ethic in the entire New Testament. Let’s take it apart slowly.
First, Jesus names the default. “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them.” The word in Greek is katakurieuousin, which means to exercise dominion over, to bring under one’s power, to master by force. And “their great ones are tyrants over them” uses katexousiazousin, to wield authority over. The kata prefix intensifies both verbs. This is power that presses down. Power that operates from above, pushing those below into submission.
Jesus is describing the normal way of the world. Empires run on this logic. Corporations run on it. Institutions run on it. Families run on it, when they’re unhealthy. The person at the top commands. The people below obey. Status flows upward. Service flows downward. And the entire system exists to benefit those at the summit.
Every person in Jesus’s audience would’ve recognized this description. They lived under the Roman Empire, the most efficient power-from-above system the world had ever seen. Governors, prefects, centurions, soldiers, slaves: a pyramid of authority with Caesar at the apex and everyone else arranged in descending order of importance.
And then Jesus says four words that overturn everything: “But it’s not so among you.”
Among you, the logic reverses. Among you, the great one serves. Among you, the first takes the position of slave. The pyramid flips. The person at the top is the person at the bottom. The one with the highest authority carries the heaviest towel.
Servant and Slave
Jesus uses two words to describe the path to greatness in his kingdom: diakonos (servant) and doulos (slave).
Diakonos is the word from which we get “deacon.” In the first century, it referred to someone who served at table, who attended to the practical needs of others. It carried a sense of voluntary service, of choosing to meet another person’s need.
Doulos is stronger. It means slave, a person who belongs to another, whose life is determined by another’s will. In the social hierarchy of the Roman world, the doulos occupied the lowest rung. A slave had no rights, no status, no public identity of their own.
Jesus is saying: if you want to be great in my kingdom, become a diakonos. If you want to be first, become a doulos. The escalation is deliberate. Serving is the entry point. Self-emptying is the destination.
And then he grounds the whole teaching in his own life: “For the Human One came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
This is the hinge sentence. Jesus is revealing the pattern of his entire existence. He came to serve. He’s heading toward a cross. And the cross is the ultimate act of service: his life given as a ransom, a price paid to set captives free. The path to greatness, for Jesus, leads straight through Golgotha.
He’s asking his followers to walk the same road.
(A note on the phrase “the Son of Man”: the Aramaic behind it, bar enasha, means “the human one” or “the mortal.” The original phrase was never about gender; “Son of Man” is a product of translating through Greek (ho huios tou anthrōpou) into older English conventions. It’s a phrase about shared humanity, about Jesus identifying himself with the fragile, finite condition of every person he came to serve. The Common English Bible translates it as “the Human One,” and there’s a rightness to that rendering. The one who came to serve didn’t come wielding a title of distance. He came wearing the name of what we all are.)
How Power Still Works
Two thousand years later, the way of the Gentile rulers is alive and well.
We see it in political systems where leaders accumulate power and wield it for personal benefit while speaking the language of public service. We see it in corporate structures where the CEO earns four hundred times the wage of the average worker and the gap is treated as natural. We see it in institutions, including religious ones, where leaders build empires around their names, surround themselves with yes-men, and use their authority to silence dissent.
We see it in the micro-hierarchies of everyday life. The manager who takes credit for the team’s work. The parent who controls through guilt. The friend who dominates every conversation. The partner who makes every decision unilaterally and calls it leadership.
Power-from-above is so pervasive that we barely notice it. It’s the air we breathe. It shapes our expectations of leaders, our definitions of success, our fantasies about what we’d do if we were in charge. We may admire the idea of servant leadership, but most of our models of actual leadership look a lot more like katakurieuousin, power that presses down.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: most of us, when we’re honest, want to be at the top. We may not ask for thrones as directly as James and John did, but we angle for position in subtler ways. We build our personal brands. We drop names. We position ourselves as indispensable. We cultivate relationships with people who can advance our standing and neglect people who can’t. The drive for status is so deeply wired into human social behavior that it operates below the level of conscious choice.
Jesus sees this drive. He names it plainly. And he offers a different way.
What the Lower Place Actually Looks Like
I want to be careful here, because “servant leadership” has become one of those phrases that gets tossed around so casually it’s lost its edge. In some circles, it’s become a branding strategy: call yourself a servant leader, put it in your LinkedIn bio, and carry on leading exactly the way you always did.
So, let’s get specific. What does it look like to take the lower place?
It looks like doing the work nobody sees. The person who stays after the event to stack chairs. The leader who writes the thank-you notes to every volunteer. The colleague who mentors the new hire when there’s no recognition in it. Servanthood thrives in the unglamorous spaces, the places where no one is watching and no credit is on offer.
It looks like amplifying others. Using your position, your platform, your voice to lift someone who lacks those things. It means saying, in a meeting, “That was Sarah’s idea,” when it would be easier to let people assume it was yours. It means stepping back so someone else can step forward.
It looks like asking questions instead of giving answers. Leaders who serve are curious about the people around them. They listen before they speak. They assume they have something to learn from every person in the room, including the person with the least authority.
It looks like absorbing blame and distributing credit. When things go wrong, the servant leader steps forward. When things go right, the servant leader steps back. This is the opposite of how power typically operates, where leaders take credit for success and distribute blame for failure.
And it looks like choosing inconvenience. Servanthood is inherently inconvenient. It disrupts your schedule. It costs your energy. It puts someone else’s needs ahead of your preferences. Every act of genuine service involves a small death, a letting go of your own agenda to attend to another’s.
The Seduction of Spiritual Power
There’s a particular version of this problem that shows up in spiritual communities, and I think it’s worth naming directly.
The church has struggled with power since the beginning. The very scene Mark describes, disciples jockeying for position in the inner circle of Jesus, has been replayed in every generation. Popes and patriarchs, televangelists and megachurch pastors, conference speakers and social media influencers: the temptation to lord it over others while using the language of service is endemic to religious leadership.
The most dangerous form of power is the kind that wears humility as a costume. The leader who says “I’m just a servant” while making every decision unilaterally. The pastor who preaches vulnerability from the pulpit and is unreachable behind the scenes. The ministry that speaks about community while operating as a personality cult.
This happens because spiritual authority is uniquely potent. When you speak for God, your words carry a weight that political or corporate authority can only dream of. And that weight can be used to heal or to crush. The difference, as Jesus makes clear in this passage, comes down to direction. Power that flows downward, toward the needs of others, is the power of the kingdom. Power that flows upward, toward the glory of the leader, is the power of the Gentile rulers, no matter what language it’s wrapped in.
The Freedom of the Lower Place
I want to close with something that might sound counterintuitive: the lower place is the free place.
When you stop competing for the top, something remarkable happens. The anxiety of performance eases. The constant mental calculation, Am I ahead? Am I falling behind? Do they think I’m important? quiets down. You stop auditioning for a role you were never meant to play, and you start inhabiting the life you’ve been given.
People who’ve genuinely embraced servanthood have a lightness about them. They laugh more easily. They’re less defensive. They’re quicker to celebrate someone else’s success because it doesn’t threaten their standing. They’ve stepped off the ladder, and they’ve discovered that the ground is a perfectly good place to stand.
This doesn’t mean they lack ambition. Jesus doesn’t say “Don’t desire greatness.” He redefines it. Desire greatness. But know that the path to it runs through service. Want to be first? Serve everyone. Want to be honored? Take the lowest seat. The ambition remains. The direction reverses.
And there’s a deep joy in this reversal. Ask anyone who’s spent a Saturday morning serving meals at a shelter, or a weekend helping a stranger move house, or an evening listening to a friend pour out their grief. The joy of service is one of the most reliable joys in human experience. It arrives every time, steady and warm, because it aligns you with the grain of reality. You were made for this. The lower place is the place where you’re most yourself.
A Practice for the Week
This week, I’m inviting you to do something deliberately downward.
Choose one day this week and consciously take the lower place in every interaction.
Here’s what that might look like:
In a conversation, listen more than you speak. Ask questions. Let someone else have the last word. Resist the urge to redirect the topic back to yourself.
At work, give credit to a colleague for something you contributed to. Let their name go first. Send the email that says, “This was really their work.”
At home, do the task nobody wants to do without mentioning it. Clean the thing. Fix the thing. Handle the thing. And then don’t bring it up.
In your community, show up for someone who holds no position of influence. Visit. Call. Write. Choose the person whose friendship offers you nothing in return except the privilege of being present.
At the end of the day, sit quietly and notice how it felt. Where did you resist the downward movement? Where did it come naturally? Where did you find the joy?
And if you want to go deeper, repeat the practice for a second day. Then a third. Let the lower place become familiar. You may find you don’t want to leave.
A Question for Reflection
Here’s the question to carry with you this week:
Where in your life are you still reaching for a throne, and what would it look like to pick up a towel instead?
I’d love to hear what surfaces for you. Where did you recognize James and John’s request in your own heart? Where did you feel the pull of the lower place? And if you practiced taking it this week, what did you discover?
Share your reflections in the comments or pass this along to someone in leadership who might need to hear it.
Next week, we’ll step into the upper room for one of the most scandalous scenes in the Gospels: Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. We’ll explore what happens when the master becomes the servant, and what Peter’s resistance reveals about our own discomfort with humility. I hope you’ll join me.
Grace and peace to you on the journey.
New Book
Graham Joseph Hill. Ten Movements of the Jesus Way: Shifting from Worldly Self-Interest to Radical Discipleship. InterVarsity Press, July 2026. Preorder here: https://www.ivpress.com/ten-movements-of-the-jesus-way
About This Series
This post is part of The Jesus Way, a weekly blog series exploring the ten movements that shape a life of following Jesus. Each movement traces a path the Gospels invite us to walk: from the patterns the world rewards toward the life Jesus actually lived and taught.
The series builds toward the release of my book, The Ten Movements of the Jesus Way, coming from InterVarsity Press on 28 July 2026. If you’d like to follow the full journey, you can subscribe to receive each new post as it’s published.
Preorder “The Ten Movements of the Jesus Way” here: https://a.co/d/004aPGwi
