<p>10:43 <i>But it is not to be so among you; but whoever would become great among you-</i> This is in the singular- for &quot;let&nbsp;<i>him</i>&nbsp;be your minister&quot;. The Lord may not be intending 'If any of you wants to be the greatest, then be the servant'. He may instead be developing the theme of His absolute and unequalled Lordship by saying that&nbsp;<i>the one</i>&nbsp;who shall be great shall be the minister- and He had solely Himself in view. He knew that He was to be the greatest in the Kingdom, the one with ultimate and total&nbsp;<i>exousia</i>&nbsp;(see on Mt. 20:25). And the path to that was through servanthood, and He invited His men to likewise participate in that servanthood.&nbsp;</p><p>When the disciples argued about who should be the greatest, the Lord replied in the present tense that &quot;it <i>is</i> not so among you: whosoever will be great among you shall be your minister&quot; (Mk. 10:43 R. V.). He expected them to live up to the righteousness which He imputed to them.</p><p><i>Shall be your servant</i>- The idea may be an appeal for the disciples to allow the Lord to be their minister. This appeal had to be repeated at the last supper, when He wished to wash their feet, to be the ultimate servant, and Peter didn't want to &quot;let Him&quot; be his minister. So instead of thinking about what they could personally get out of the Kingdom as the two brethren, or being spiritually superior over their weaker brethren the ten, they were to instead accept the Lordship of Jesus and His ministration to them. And the form in which He was supremely a servant was in His death on the cross. And yet as so often, the Lord is speaking to Himself on one level, as well as to the disciples on another level. He is the one who to be great had to make Himself a minister of all, and yet He invites all those in Him to pass through the same process. For all that is true of Him is to be true of us. Hence He goes on to say that &quot;Even as&quot; He ministered, so should they.</p><p>One of the commonest allusions to priesthood in the NT is the idea of ministry. Time and again, the Old Testament speaks of the priests&nbsp;<i>ministering</i>&nbsp;in the priest's office. The priests are specifically called God's ministers (Is. 61:6; Jer. 33:21; Ez. 45:4; Joel 1:9,13; 2:17).&nbsp; The early Christians would have heard and read many of the New Testament references to ministers and ministry as invitations to see themselves as a new priesthood. The Lord said that we should aim to be a minister, a priests, to every one of our brethren, not expecting them to minister to us, but concentrating on ministering to them (Mt. 20:26). This is exactly against the grain of our nature, and also of the concept of religion we find in the world. People&nbsp;<i>expect</i>&nbsp;to have others spiritually ministering to them. They expect a priest-figure to do all their thinking for them. But our Lord said that we are each other's priests, we're not here to be ministered&nbsp;('priest-ed') to, but to minister, and give our lives in service to each other.</p><p>When James and John asked to have the senior positions, the Lord didn&rsquo;t rebuke them; he just told them that the greatest would desire to be a servant (Gk.&nbsp;<i>diakonos</i>) of all (Mt. 20:20-28). The utter degradation of the cross, and the Lord&rsquo;s willing humbling of Himself to accept it, is a pattern for all who would take up His cross. The &ldquo;servant of all&rdquo; would make no distinctions concerning whom or how he would serve; such servanthood was a complete and unqualified act of surrender. And this is taken by the Lord as a cameo of His mindset on Calvary. In conscious allusion to this, Paul could speak of how he had become a slave of all men, that he might help some to Christ (1 Cor. 9:19). He was a slave of the Gospel, a slave of the kind who was lower than the least of all others, i.e. a slave of all (Eph. 3:7,9). He didn&rsquo;t preach himself, but rather preached that he was a servant to all his brethren, for the sake of the fact that he was in Christ, the servant of all (2 Cor. 4:5). Thus he almost advertised his servant status; he preached himself as a slave. Paul wished to be perceived by his brethren and the whole world as merely a slave of Jesus (1 Cor. 4:1). In our talking to each other, or in our writing, it does us good to analyse how many personal pronouns we use; how much we are preaching ourselves rather than Jesus Christ. Any who may appear to be leaders or organisers are serving&nbsp;<i>Him</i>, who debased Himself to that depth. There can be no room&nbsp;<i>at all</i>&nbsp;for any sense of superiority amongst us. We are servants&nbsp;<i>of all</i>, not just of those individual brothers or ecclesias whom we happen to get on well with.</p>