Wednesday of the Second Week of Lent – March 3, 2010

Matthew 20:17 – 28

Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, he took the Twelve aside and said to them, "We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!"
Then the mother of Zebedee's sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favor of him.
"What is it you want?" he asked.
She said, "Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom."
"You don't know what you are asking," Jesus said to them. "Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?"
"We can," they answered.
Jesus said to them, "You will indeed drink from my cup, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared by my Father."
When the ten heard about this, they were indignant with the two brothers. Jesus called them together and said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave— just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

The passage lays the clear-headed, discerning way that Jesus dealt with life-matters alongside the illusions with which others operated on a daily basis.

Jesus recognized the path that has been laid before him, a difficult path of suffering, betrayal, death, and ultimate life. He also experienced the expectations others had for him, unrealistic as they were.

Jesus never shied away from speaking bluntly about his death. Suffering, betrayal, and death may sound ominous to us, but Jesus models for us a life-posture for moving into the most difficult and anxiety-producing moments of life.

Even as Jesus was stepping authentically, faithfully toward his own death and ultimate life, those around him were obsessed with trivialities. “Who will be seated in the places of power?” was one concern, which then led to the envy and indignation of others that the question was asked in the first place.

An obsessive concern for power and control reveals a self-centered agenda, a life-stance that cannot fully trust “unless I call the shots” or “unless I am in control.” Our culture is all about power and control, manipulating people and managing outcomes. We’ve made an industry out of helping people manipulate others, often blessing it as “good leadership.” Self-help and leadership books are easy enough to find in the bookstores, and it’s relatively easy to get together a good discussion around their principles with others who are on the leadership fast-track.

Then you have another group, equally self-interested, who are indignant that the first group would grapple for power. Indignation at the childish grasping of another is a not-so-subtle form of judgment. It fails to see the other as human. It looks away from the wounds that another carries. It judges the neighbor by my own personal measures of what is appropriate and inappropriate.

Jesus said that the ones who are great actually are the ones who mostly serve and who serve all. He’s not giving us a strategy for climbing the Western success-ladder: “Aspire to serve so you can be great!” He’s speaking, rather, of a life-style, a way of ordering life which truly transforms the world.

It is a way that grows out of a transformed heart and bears fruit by giving that transformation away in the world.