Nothing succeeds in America like success, they say. We like winners and brush aside losers. Let me throw out some names for you: Alfred Landon, James Cox, John Davis, Charles Hughes, Alton Parker. Sound familiar? Probably not. Yet every one of them was so important and well thought of that at some point in the twentieth century each was a nominee for President of the United States. Millions voted for them, for a while their names were plastered all over the place. But then each one lost, of course, and in America, that's that.

We are a people in love with power and success, and this surely is one area among many that the gospel needs to address in our particular cultural context. Not unlike the people in Jesus' own day, we are swift to seize on anything that looks powerful and dazzling. The bigger the congregation, the more faithful we assume. We equate success, as the world defines it, with the work of the Holy Spirit because we can scarcely wrap our minds around the possibility that there could ever be an outwardly "successful" church that might actually work against the fundamentals of the gospel. "They must be doing something right," we say to each other about successful restaurants, enterprising entrepreneurs, and also church leaders who sell millions of books and draw large throngs of people.

And sometimes they are doing something right in the best sense. There are lots of people who are both faithful to Christ and who are successful in generating enthusiasm for the gospel through books that sell well, congregations that attract many members, and so on. Still, Jesus' desire to keep things quiet until the cross reminds us that whether or not we prove to be wildly popular, it is always a quiet and careful and humble apprehension of the gospel that is key. Jesus' own example of humble servanthood comes as a critique of our own overweening tendency to be enamored with all that is glitzy and eye-popping. We should be wary if the Jesus we worship fits too snugly into any cultural context on this earth.