Not everyone has to be the least: only the one who wants to be first.
The Twelve were never at their best when Jesus warned them about his death and prepared them for his resurrection. Even in John’s Gospel, in the comparatively serene setting of the Last Discourse, they are filled with nagging questions and rumble with argument.
James and John seem to respond to the Master’s sharing of his deepest heart with a self-centered disregard that rings across the centuries like a slap in the face:
“Master,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at the left in your glory” (Mk 10:35-37).
Jesus the Master saw very clearly that “the sons of thunder” were young and full of fire, that they were drawn to him because they believed that, somehow, he was the King, and they wanted to reign with him in his kingdom. He knew too that they loved him and wanted to be near him.
But he had to teach them more: they didn’t know what they were asking. “Can you drink my cup or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” In eager ignorance they said, “Yes, we can do what you will do.”
The Master’s response points directly to the reality that links cup, baptism, and throne — the will of the Father. This is the link that James and John have missed. Yes, they will drink Christ’s cup and share his baptism, but the depth of the cup and the center of the baptism is total abandonment to the Father.
He alone has made Jesus Master and Christ; he alone will confer glory, kingship, and power on him through the humiliation of the cross; he alone knows who belongs where in the kingdom his Son is establishing through his humble submission.
In the Kingdom, in the real world, power flows from humble, serving, sacrificial love. Christians are still grappling with this revelation.
Christ clearly says that not everyone among us is called to be “great,” but only those who want to serve. Only the one who wants to be “the slave of all” is called to be “first.”
In a supremely status-conscious culture, which prizes individual freedom and power, this teaching comes as a liberation as well as a challenge. Not everyone has to be the least: only the one who wants to be first. If I don’t want to be everyone’s slave, then I don’t have to; if I want a little greatness, then I can try serving two or three.
But if I don’t want to surrender my “personality” or my “space” or my “creativity,” I don’t have to in order to be loved by God. I will, however, have to be humble before those courageous enough to choose to serve me.
Secondly, the Master tells us that servanthood is, in the strictest meaning of the word, a mystery because it is unbreakably bound to his own choice to serve and to lay down his life “as a ransom.”
He does not hold on to his eternal equality with God, but shows that, in human life, his infinite love for the Father becomes infinitely humble service “for many” — for as many as will accept it. The Master puts himself aside for us.
“If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and the gospel will save it” (Mk 8:34-35).
How can we be ashamed of the language of the cross when neither the Master nor his disciples were ashamed? The Master “scorned the shame” of the cross (Heb 12:2), and by freely choosing to become the slave of all, transformed suffering and death itself into sacraments of life.
The “slavery” that Christ spoke of and lived leads to the communion of saints on earth as well as in eternity because it is not a yielding to blind fate, but an intimate sharing of Christ’s own trust in the Father’s love. James and John wanted to be fully united with the Master in his glory, and he showed them how to wash the feet of others.
The Master knows what irony is. Hasn’t he just been showing his skill in the use of it — great one and servant, first and slave, glorious King and ransom for many?
And isn’t his whole Gospel — not merely this teaching about power, but the entire Good News — based on the irony of the smallest thing, the seed of greatest tininess and most apparent insignificance, that becomes the tree where all creation comes to rest?
With all his skill the Master is proclaiming the irony of love. Jesus, like more recent revolutionaries, urges deeds, not words. Jesus knows what power truly is.
The “money” of God that must be spent, the word of God that must be lived, the will of the Father that is the key to the Kingdom and to each one’s place in it is, in the final irony of his unlimited simplicity, love:
A new commandment I give you: love one another as I have loved you (Jn 13:34).
In the immeasurable depth of the Master’s baptism, God’s very being transforms all things. Here is the empowerment of the powerless, the homecoming of the dispossessed, liberty to captives, good news to the poor: what is impossible to men is possible for God.
The suffering of the weak and the broken, in the furnace of Christ’s love and by the grace of his cross, becomes the gold of mercy; and even the rich can learn to pass through the needle’s eye of love into the Kingdom of peace. God himself is sleeplessly at our disposal, knocking on our doors, waiting patiently to bring us the banquet of love.
The words of the Eucharist that the Church offers every day from the rising of the sun to its setting say it all: “This is my body… for you.” “Given for you,” we say, or “broken for you,” or “given up for you,” but however we say it, the reality of the Master’s gift lies with infinite simplicity on the altar.
If we take and eat this bread of the divine humility, and drink from the cup of the Servant who was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, so that through his poverty we might become rich (2 Cor 8:9), we are plunged into the power that made the first light and now has made all things subject to him.
By that same power he forever offers himself — for us. Now, if we want, we too can become perfect subjects of Love himself.
He will teach us. He will show us how to spell love with our lives. He will give us many, a few, at least someone to serve. He will lead us deep within ourselves, to the place of true silence where the Father has already made his home in us, and the communion of saints has already begun. We will be with the Master forever as friends.
Excerpted from Circling the Sun, by Fr. Robert Pelton, Washington D.C., Pastoral Press, (1986).
Christ the King icon in Our Lady of the Woods chapel, Combermere.
