People often imagine worship as an act of lowering oneself before visible greatness. One bows before a throne, prostrates before majesty, trembles before power. That model works easily with the image of a mighty king. But it becomes deeply problematic when applied to Jesus, because whenever one goes looking for him in that mode, one finds not a monarch demanding ceremony, but a servant washing the feet of others.
This is the scandal of Jesus. You come prepared to adore him from below, and he interrupts the performance. He looks at you as if to say: Why are you standing there? Come here and help. In that moment worship changes its meaning entirely. It is no longer a matter of displaying submission before greatness. It becomes participation in his humility.
That is why the true honoring of Jesus is not primarily a cultic gesture directed at him as though he were a worldly ruler. The true honoring of Jesus is to enter into his action. If he kneels, you kneel. If he serves, you serve. If he lowers himself, you do not glorify him best by remaining at a distance and praising him with outward signs alone, but by becoming little with him.
This is what makes Jesus so difficult. It is easy to make oneself small by falling before someone visibly higher. In fact, that kind of smallness can still preserve one’s ego, because one remains the observer of greatness, the admirer, the religious spectator. But Jesus destroys that comfort. In his case, to become small means something much more demanding: not merely to bow, but to step into the work of mercy yourself. Not simply to praise the servant, but to become a servant.
So if someone says, “I want to worship Jesus,” the answer in this framework is: Then wash the feet of others. Feed others. Carry others. Lower yourself for others. That is the form in which devotion to Jesus becomes real. Otherwise one risks misunderstanding him entirely by trying to honor him in a way that contradicts the very pattern of his life.
This also helps explain why the rivalry between Muslims and Christians over the word worship can often miss the heart of the matter. A true follower of Jesus would never “worship” Jesus in the crude sense of setting him up as a rival to the One God, as though Jesus invited attention away from God toward himself. On the contrary, Jesus constantly redirects attention. His whole life is a movement away from self-exaltation. He does not gather worship around himself as a self-contained divine ego. He leads all glory upward to the Father, while he himself descends into service.
The only natural exception is when someone has been directly saved, healed, or rescued by Jesus. Then one may fall before him. But even there, the act need not be understood as rivalry with God. It is bowing before the divine action manifested through Jesus. It is gratitude to God as encountered in the one through whom God acted. Even then, the deepest response is not to remain forever at his feet in adoration, but to rise and follow his example.
So the real problem of worshiping Jesus is that Jesus does not allow himself to be worshiped in the ordinary human way. He overturns the category. He transforms worship from passive reverence into active imitation. He makes devotion inseparable from participation. He turns religious admiration into ethical descent.
In that sense, the worship of Jesus is almost not “worship” at all in the conventional meaning of the word. It is discipleship. It is joining his movement. It is accepting his invitation to become less, to serve more, and to let all glory belong to God.
And that may be the sharpest point of all: whoever truly wishes to honor Jesus must stop trying to stand before him as a courtier before a king, and instead must stand beside him among the lowly. For Jesus is found there, not on the throne of human imagination, but on the floor, with the towel in his hands.