Servant: “A person who performs duties for others” is one definition according to the Oxford English Dictionary. A definition of a public servant: “A person who works for the state or for local government.”

Since the dawn of prehistory, conquerors have taken over other people and recruited slaves and servants from the defeated population. As civilizations became more advanced, the elite classes made slaves and servants of the poorer classes. A servant was definitely an inferior. Few chose servanthood as an occupation.

Then a teacher named Jesus knelt before his disciples, took off their sandals, and washed their feet as a common servant. After this act of servitude—slavery even—he said, “You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

Jesus, called Lord of the universe by his followers, became a servant and called on us to do the same. Eventually, we understood that all our vocations—king, president, merchant, clerk, car mechanic, doctor—whatever we are called to do—are the means of serving others. A new idea was born, that government does not exist for its leaders but for the sake of the governed, whom their leaders serve.

Jesus stood on its head the usual way of doing things. But then he did this from the very beginning. The king of the universe opting to come as a helpless baby? And not in Rome or Athens, either. Not even venerable towns like Carthage or Alexandria. He came in a backwater Judean stable to a peasant woman. Who would have thought? Surely, it took God to think up that one.