A sermon preached at St Mary’s Church on Sunday 20th October 2024 by Revd Clare Hayns
Readings
Isaiah 53. 4-end
Hebrews 5. 1-10
Mark 10. 35-45
It’s difficult to think of a more inappropriate request that the one made by James and John, the sons of Zebedee, than the one we read about today in our gospel reading.
‘Grant us’, or ‘Can you arrange it for us’, they say to Jesus, ‘to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.’ (Mark 10.37)
In Matthew’s Gospel, perhaps because he was embarrassed by the behaviour of James and John, this dreadful request is attributed to their pushy mother (Matthew 20.20)!, but in both gospels the request is the same, and both come directly after Jesus has given his third and most graphic description of what was about to happen to him.
‘We are going up to Jerusalem” (Jesus has just said), and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; 34 they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him (which, they must have known, would have been by crucifixion as this was the main form of capital punishment for the Romans’ (Mark 10.32-34).
And so, directly after hearing this, these two thought they’d sidle up to Jesus and ask if, after all that nasty stuff had happened and Jesus was in glory, could they get a good place near him! There timing was certainly pretty terrible.
But how about the request itself?
I have some sympathy with the brother’s request. A few years ago, when I was working as a chaplain at Christ Church we would have a special guest dinner once every term where we could invite guests or friends or family. The hall would be decked out beautifully and the main high table would be used with an extension table in the hall below if numbers were large enough, which they invariably were.
Every single time I was always put onto the extension table below. On one occasion, because I decided the guests I was bringing were important, and frankly I thought I’d had a hard term so deserved a treat, I wrote an email to the Steward:
“Can you arrange it for me”, I said, for us to be on the high table for this dinner? I didn’t quite ask to be seated to the right and left of the Dean, but my request was pretty much that. I got short shrift. “That’s not possible”, she said, “because the seats are arranged in order of seniority and, as chaplain, you are at the bottom of that order.” I was put well and truly in my rightful place!
We might take comfort in that we wouldn’t be as crass as James and John in our timing but, if we’re honest, the allure of status and power is strong. We are all, perhaps, in some way sons or daughters of Zebedee. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who has fallen foul to their sense of entitlement at one time or another. How often is our own spiritual life coloured by a similar sense of entitlement? Entitlement to live our lives as we choose; to be treated with the respect we feel we are due, whether through wealth or status or education or nationality. We might not be as up front about it as James and John, but in our heart of hearts, we often covet best seats in the house, or church. Or yearn for a slightly bigger salary than our sibling. Or are delighted when our children or grandchildren come top of the class.
I went to a very interesting talk by Bishop Emma Ineson on ambition the other week, and she reflected how ambition can be good and holy. That there is nothing wrong with doing well, wanting to succeed, and wanting our churches to grow and flourish. But ambition that is selfish, and gets in the way of loving relationship with one another and with God, is where things go wrong. 1
St Paul in his letter to the Philippians says:
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.” (Philippians 2.3)
Jesus’ response to James and John’s selfish request is actually perhaps more gentle that they deserve.
“You do not know what you are asking.. are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with”, he asks them.
We’ve established the request was badly timed, but what Jesus is saying is the request itself shows they had utterly misunderstood everything about him, everything he’d been telling them about the kingdom of God, and everything he’d been showing them by how to live.
It wasn’t that this was the wrong time to ask about the high table in heaven, it was rather “what on earth do you think glory is like, at all?”
Jesus tells them once again that God’s kingdom rule is nothing like the examples they have from their worldly life. Where rulers sit on thrones and where high tables exist.
It seems that James and John and the disciples heard what Jesus was saying about suffering and were thinking that this was just a painful blip for him to get through. And that then once he’s out the other side of it, everything would be all about glory and honour and status and power.
“it is not so among you.. (he says once again)…whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all”
We have heard this so often that we can get rather immune to it. On one had we know we should think the place to be is at the low table; that we should consider that those who serve are somehow luckier or more blessed that those who are being served. But it’s incomprehensible in terms of the world we live in. Things simply do not work that way. We make sense of it at all by thinking of all this service stuff as some sort of intermediate stage, like parole, before something better. Do your time as a servant with no whining and win two good seats in the kingdom to come! It doesn’t work that way, Jesus tells them time and time again.
The theologian Barbara Brown Taylor puts this well:
“[Jesus] is not pretending to be a servant until the time comes for him to whip off his disguise and climb onto his throne; he is a servant through and through. The good seats are not his to give. He does not even have one himself. Someone else is in charge of all that, someone he is too shy even to name, whom it is his sole pleasure and purpose to serve. “He is not in it for reward…He is in it for the love of God, which promises him nothing but the opportunity to give himself away. The best seat he will get this side of the grave is a throne full of splinters, and when he is hung out on it to dry by the powers that be, it will not be James and John on either side of him but two unnamed bandits, one on his left and the other on his right.” [1]
The kingdom of God has no high table. There is no seniority or status in this way. All the things that we count and measure ourselves by and measure one another by, whether it be money, wealth, degrees, whatever – none of it is of any consequence in God’s kingdom.
This, I think, is good news because it’s such a relief. This doesn’t mean that we can’t be ambitious in this life, and it doesn’t mean that the things that we strive for on earth are of no value. Let us be ambitious, for ourselves and our church, for God’s kingdom, but let us do that with humility, recognising our own weakness, our tendency like the sons of Zebedee to get things very wrong. Reverse your sense of entitlement, says Jesus, and make yourself a servant of others. Exchange your entitlement for humility and service.
What might this kind of humble service look like in our lives, in the life of our church or community?
Many of us watched a play about the life of Henri Noewen[2] a couple of weeks ago, and his journey was one where he had all the status and authority of an eminent academic and was called to learn humility and service through caring for people with profound disabilities in L’Arche community. He writes:
‘service is being involved in something that is for the people of God. At times we might be involved in larger things – clothing the naked, sheltering the poor, helping the refugees, visiting the sick or imprisoned, but it is always small to begin with. It begins with small gestures. Being kind to your family and the people you work with, saying a patient word, writing a card, sending a flower’. [3]
Following Jesus in this life of service will transforms us in a way that chasing places at the important tables does not. And not just us, but those around us, and indeed, the whole world.
I will end with some words of a prayer from St Francis of Assisi, another person who lived this life of humble service:
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in self-forgetting that we find;
And it is in dying to ourselves that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
[1] (Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine, Boston: Cowley Publications, 1995, pp. 43-44).
[2] The Beloved Son, by Murray Watts
[3] Henri Nouwen, Following Jesus, SPCK, 2019, pg. 128