Servant of All

Scriptures:    Isaiah 53:4-12,  Psalm 91:9-16,  Hebrews 5:1-10,    Mark 10:32-45

Have you ever said something to somebody that, months or years down the road, you regretted as being unbelievably insensitive or inappropriate.   I remember once as a child looking forward to going on a trip to an amusement park.  Unfortunately, on the long-awaited day, my dad got sick – not a dire illness, probably just a 24 hour bug, but he was feeling lousy enough that he just wasn’t up to an amusement park.  And instead of being concerned about my dad, I was upset that we had to postpone the trip.  One of those childhood moments where I wish I could rewind the tape and play things out differently.

Jesus and the disciples are continuing their journey to Jerusalem.  Jesus tells them, for the third time, that he will not be welcome there; indeed, quite the opposite.  Jesus tells them, “ “See, we are going up to Jerusalem, 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; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.”

This is the third time that Jesus has had this conversation with the disciples, and each time it hasn’t gone well.  The first Jesus told this to his disciples, Peter took him aside and told him to stop with the crazy talk – and Jesus turned around and called him Satan. The second time he had this conversation, we’re told that the disciples didn’t understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask – and so they argued among themselves over who was the greatest.  Jesus told them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”  And he took a child in his arms, saying, “Whoever welcomes such a child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”

So in today’s Gospel, Jesus is having this conversation with the disciples a third time – “We’re about to enter Jerusalem, where I’ll be handed over to the religious leaders, the chief priests and scribes, condemned by them to death, and then handed over to the Roman authorities, who will torture and kill me.”  And, right on cue, James and John, who with Peter were among the inner circle of the disciples, make a request that shows that they’d misunderstood or ignored every word of what Jesus had just told them.  They ask Jesus, “We want you to do anything we ask of you.”  And of course this sounds like trouble.  Jesus had taught elsewhere that if two or three asked anything in his name, he’d grant it, and maybe they were using those words to try to  manipulate Jesus, as children try to manipulate their parents…..”But Jesus, you promised…..”  Anyway, Jesus says, “OK, out with it! What do you want?”  And they asked Jesus to grant that, when Jesus came into his glory, they would have seats at Jesus’ right and left hand…..seats of power, seats of glory.  Jesus responded, “You don’t know what you’re asking.  Are you willing to drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism with which I’ll be baptized?”  In other words…..all the pain and suffering I said was coming to me in Jerusalem….are you willing to share in all that?  And the disciples blithely said, “Yeah, sure, bring it on!”  Jesus replied, “You will indeed share in my suffering, but I’m not in charge of the seating arrangements when I come to glory.”

Of course, the other ten disciples heard what happened, and they were furious – probably not because they thought what James and John had done was wrong, but because they hadn’t thought of it first.  These disciples had been jockeying for position almost from the moment Jesus called them, and now things had come to a head.  Jesus said, “You know that among the Gentiles their rulers lord it over their subjects, and their great ones are tyrants over their subjects.  But it is not so among you.”  In other words, Jesus is telling them, “Stop acting like the Gentiles!”.  For these Jewish followers of Jesus, his would have stung, would have burned, would have left a mark.  “Stop acting like Gentiles!  Don’t buy into their way of thinking.”  Jesus continues, “Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be servant of all.  For I came, not to be served, but to serve, and to give my life as a ransom for many.”

The words of James and John seem so over-the-top insensitive, following as they were immediately after Jesus’ foretelling of his suffering and death, that we may wonder about their motivation.  Of course, they were seeking status at the expense of their fellow disciples.  While it seems they were ignoring Jesus’ words about suffering and death, perhaps instead they were responding to his words – responding in a selfish way by acting to protect their own safety and security on the assumption that “of course” Jesus would overcome suffering and be enthroned in glory. 

James and John and the other disciples looked forward to glory, but they didn’t want to deal with the cross.  And actually, this is one of the temptations Jesus dealt with in the wilderness; remember that the devil offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world, if he would worship Satan…..that is to say, if he would bypass suffering and death on a cross.  And although in the wilderness Jesus prevailed over Satan, this temptation to bypass the cross, to fast-forward past suffering and death, came up again and again for Jesus, as when Peter had earlier told Jesus, “this must never happen to you,” and even in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus prayed, “Let this cup pass from me.”  And yet Jesus knew that there were no shortcuts or fast-forwards past suffering in the work he was called to do.  Jesus knew  his mission: not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Christians have responded to these words of Jesus in two ways.  Some have said that because Jesus served and suffered and died, we don’t have to; we get to bypass all that.  I remember years ago, back when I was in college – there were a lot of Christian groups on campus, and some of them held revivals -  being told by a visiting preacher that the word “grace” means “God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense” – and as this visiting revivalist explained it, because of the work of Jesus, all we have to do is say yes to God’s riches.  Just come forward and say yes to Jesus, and God will punch your ticket to heaven, and when you die, the pearly gates will swing wide open to receive you.  And to me, it sounded good at the time.  But as time has passed, and particularly as I’ve read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred by the Nazis for his resistance to Hitler, I came to realize that grace preached by the visiting revivalist all those years ago was the cheap grace against which Bonhoeffer warned, a cheap grace that demanded nothing in the way of Christian discipleship, a cheap grace that produced smug complacency and not transformation.   

The other way Christians have responded – the path taken by Bonhoeffer, by Archbishop Oscar Romer of El Salvador, who was gunned down while serving mass because of his resistance to government oppression – and just this month declared a saint by Pope Francis – the path taken by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, killed for his resistance to what he called the evil triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism – the other way Christians have responded is not just to admire Jesus, not just to worship Jesus, but to actually follow Jesus in the sense of serving rather than being served, to actually follow Jesus by speaking truth to entrenched and oppressive power, to actually follow Jesus by laying down their lives for others on a daily basis by putting the needs of the poor and oppressed over their own wants, even if it meant laying down their lives in the ultimate sense of being martyred.  As an old hymn puts it,

                Must Jesus bear the cross alone, and all the world go free?

                No, there’s a cross for everyone, and there’s a cross for me.

Bonhoeffer wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”  Jesus taught that greatness came through service, and that he himself had come to serve and to lay down his life.  Now, there are many ways to serve, and many ways to lay down our lives, and not all of them lead to martyrdom – we lay down our lives on the installment plan when we serve others.  But the transformation Christ promises comes when we die in two ways – to ourselves as the center of our own lives, as in giving up our insistence on self-preservation – and to what Jesus called “the world” – the domination system of grasping for power and wealth at the expense of neighbor, the domination system of feeling a need to keep with the Joneses.  Dying to self is what Jesus talked about when he said that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it produces much fruit. (John 12:24) Dying to the world is what Jesus described as being in the world but not of it (John 17:16), and what Paul talked about when he wrote, “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)  Dying to the world is not just about wanting to put different people at the head table of power, but to work for a society where there are no head tables.  Now just to be clear: this kind of dying and transformation does not mean being transformed into doormats and letting people walk all over us.  Jesus did not get crucified for being a doormat – he got up in people’s faces - and there’s nothing transformative in being a doormat.  Rather, it’s about letting go of our self-obsession in order to embrace our deep connection to God and neighbor – a deep connection that can’t pass by suffering without some kind of response.

 We live in a dangerous time, a time when our culture tells us turn inward and to turn our backs on our sisters and brothers in other countries seeking refuge from oppression, a time when the poor in our own country are increasingly abandoned and left to their own devices – a time when the contrasts between the way of our culture and the way of Jesus have never been more stark.   God grant us the courage to follow the way of service, the way of the cross.  God grant us the grace of transformed lives, so that we may become change agents to bring about the transformation of others.  Amen.