Ostium Catholic

Jesus describes a master who comes home to find his servants still watching for him, and instead of being served by them, he girds himself and serves them at the table. It's a genuine reversal, worth measuring against how leadership actually functions at its best, rather than how most hierarchies assume it functions by default.

The instinct in most organizations runs the other direction: authority accumulates privilege, and service flows upward toward whoever holds the most seniority. Today's Gospel suggests the more legitimate form of authority moves the opposite way, toward serving the people who report to it rather than only being served by them.

Paul's first reading calls believers no longer strangers but members of one household, with Christ as the capstone holding the whole structure together. A household, unlike a strictly transactional workplace, is a place where care moves in more than one direction. It's worth checking honestly whether your own team, or your own leadership of one, still functions that way, or whether service has quietly become something that only flows outward from the people with the least power.

Watch for one chance this week to serve someone who reports to you, or who has less standing than you in a given room, in a way nobody would have required of you.

The test isn't whether you're capable of it once, under observation. It's whether it becomes ordinary enough that the people around you stop being surprised when it happens.

Find one specific way to serve someone with less authority than you this week, something genuinely beyond what your role requires of you. Do it without mentioning it afterward.

Lord, you gird yourself and serve your own servants. Let me lead the same way, toward the people beneath me rather than only expecting service from them. Amen.