What does it mean to be great? If you watch horse racing ... I mean, politics, you’re familiar with this question. What does it mean to be great?

Who has the power?

Who sits at the top of the heap?

Much of the furor in the Presidential campaign over the last month or so has been about, of all things, crowd size. One of the candidates has tended to look to the number of people attending rallies as a measure of his popularity. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been even partially conscious during the recent past. For this candidate, size is apparently the only way to measure value.

How fat is your bank account? Do you have enough power to do whatever you want … to whomever you want? How famous are you? Do you have the tallest buildings, the best golf score, the greatest number of gold bathroom fixtures?

In other words, are you big enough that I need to pay attention to you?

Of course, if bigness is the way you calculate worth, that means most people are rendered disposable because they don’t have enough influence with the right folks, aren’t known by enough people, or don’t possess the requisite number of golden toilets.

If big is the standard, a lot of people get left out.

But the reality that some people get written off has been around for a long time—even in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

We’ve got a statue that says different: "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

But there are a lot of “tempest-tost” who have historically resided at the bottom of our national to-do list. Women, African-Americans, immigrants, LGBTQ, the elderly, children, the poor, the illiterate, the houseless, the folks who carry lunch pails to work, or those still unable to find work.

A lot of people get lost in the shuffle because, whether we admit it or not, the world tends to discount their contributions.

Our culture is built on the idea of bigness. It’s too easy to look past the little ones. We want excellence. We love winners.

Oh, there may be those who despise greatness, but usually only from a sense of envy. Right? In our more idealistic moments, even when we wouldn't admit it to anyone else, we all aspire to greatness of some sort.

And though the standards for greatness aren't written down anywhere, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it. It has always been thus and will continue to be.

Excellence. Success. Winners. Every culture in history has valued it.

No civilization, no tribe, no dynasty has ever said, “Come on, mediocrity is within our grasp!”

As the old monster.com job site said in one of its commercials, nobody dreams of “clawing their way up to middle management.”

Greatness has always been the prize. Losing is for ... well ... losers.

In light of the standards of greatness, I think it was a rather unpleasant moment for the disciples when Jesus said, "The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him ..." As a matter of fact, so far out of the realm of possibility was Jesus announcement of his impending death that Mark says they didn't even understand what he was trying to say.