I was going to call this “Jesus in the family room” but it’s more like Jesus in the courtyard in the center of the house. Small rooms around the sides for sleeping or privacy, and an open-concept space for cooking, eating, gathering, living. It was private as in “away from the crowds.” But not away from the close friends gathered to talk, to eat, to listen.

When Mark tells about the group getting to Capernaum and getting in the house, that’s the kind of place they gathered. And for all we know, it may have been Peter’s house, the one where Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law, a multi-generational home.

After asking the disciples what they’d been talking about on the road, Jesus sat down. It was the cue that teaching was about to happen. The household sorted itself for listening.

And then Jesus said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and servant of all.”

In the moment, we don’t know what the expressions were, what nudges happened.

What we know as readers, however, is that the words were written after Jesus had already lived out what he meant. What they had been told but didn’t understand, what they couldn’t imagine, was that when Jesus said, “servant of all” he meant not just willing to wash feet but actually washing feet. Not just willing to forgive, but actually forgiving the people who would kill him and the people sitting in this room who would forsake, deny, and betray him. Not just willing to die, but actually dying in public the way a criminal would die.

He wasn’t talking just about letting other people go first in the buffet line, which is often, actually, a power move rather than a servant move.

He was talking about being at the bottom of the hierarchy willingly.