29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

          I don’t know if you noticed in keeping up with readings from week to week, but there is something missing between last week’s Gospel and this week’s Gospel.  In fact, there are three whole verses between the ending of last week’s passage and the beginning of the passage we just heard.  Now, that may not seem like much and we might not feel like we have missed a whole lot, but those three verses are very important for us if we are to understand the passage for today. 

Last week, of course, we heard about the rich man, who went away sad, because, though he had kept all the commandments from his youth, there was still something he lacked, and that was to let go of his possessions.  Then, this week we find James and John are “jockeying for position” Jesus’ glorious kingdom.  But in the three verses between these two episodes, Jesus predicts His passion, death, and resurrection for the third and final time in Mark’s Gospel.  He says, “Behold, 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 and hand him over to the Gentiles who will mock him, spit upon him, scourge him, and put him to death, but after three days he will rise.” 

And so, Jesus is very upfront about what is going to happen to Him and about what the establishment of His kingdom will entail.  But James and John, it seems, were not paying attention.  Because immediately following these verses in which Jesus outlines again for His disciples what He will have to endure, James and John ask, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”  Jesus rightly says to them in reply, “You do not know what you are asking.”  In other words, “Did you not hear what I just said to you, that I will be handed over and killed, and only then rise?  Were you listening to me, or were you daydreaming about your imaginary kingdom?”  And so, in His typical way, He answers their question with another question: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?”  This “cup” is the cup of His suffering.  The “baptism” is baptism into His death.  Obviously not fully realizing the meaning of His words, the two brothers answer impulsively, “We can.”  “Sign us up!”

Then Jesus says something very interesting.  He says, “The cup that I drink, you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right or at my left is not mine to give but is for those for whom it has been prepared.” 

Always when I have thought of this in the past I have thought of Our Lord triumphant upon His throne in His heavenly glory, and maybe those at His right and at His left are His Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph, so honored for their most important cooperation in God’s plan for our salvation, or maybe John the Baptist, or maybe Peter and Paul, these great “princes” of the Apostles.  But as I read and meditated on this verse again, it struck me that maybe Jesus was referring not to those at His right and at His left in his heavenly glory, but to the two criminals who would be crucified next to Him, one at His right and the other at His left.

James and John were thinking like I was when they asked, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory,” but Jesus, when he heard the word “glory,” was thinking of a very different kind of glory.  He was not thinking about a crown of jewels, but a crown of thorns.  He was not thinking about a great throne of gold, upon which He would take His seat, but about a throne of wood, to which He would be nailed.  We know that in other places in the Gospels when Jesus speaks of his “hour” or “when the Son of Man is glorified” He is often referring to His passion.   And remember, He had just got done explaining to His disciples, for the third and final time, that we would be handed over and killed and then rise on the third day.  No wonder James and John’s request seemed so odd to Him.  In essence they were asking, as Jesus understood it, though they did not know it, to be crucified with Him.  And in time they would come to share in His suffering.  They would, as would all of the other Apostles, and like so many after them up to this present day, drink of the cup of His suffering and be baptized into His death.

But what does all of this tell us?  What does it mean for us?  Well, perhaps we are not so unlike James and John.  We too want “glory,” but what we mean by “glory” and what Jesus means by “glory” may be two very different things.  To make this even clearer for us, Jesus goes on to explain that the disciples are not to be like the rulers of the Gentiles, who lord over their subjects and who “make their authority over them felt.”  “Rather, He says, “whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all.”  These are strong words.

          By these words, we are called, I think, to a radical shift in our understanding of “glory,” and with it a radical shift in our understanding of “power.”  Our “power,” our “glory” must be the power and the glory of service.  That is – I am more and more convinced – the only real power and glory there is, and that is the power and the glory modeled for us by Jesus. 

I remember my senior year of high school we had to vote on a “class motto” that would be printed on our graduation invitations and emblazed on a large seal that would hang in the auditorium.  To my shame, this is the motto my class picked: “Success and power we will mix, we’re the class of ’96!”  Blech!  I certainly didn’t vote for this.  I could thing a million better things to mix than these worldly “virtues.”  I wasn’t interested in “success,” at least as the world understands and as I think this motto intended it, and I certainly wasn’t interested in power. 

As the old Latin saying goes, “Sic transit gloria mundi”—“Thus passes the glory of the world.”  But the power and the glory that we learn in the imitation of Christ, which comes through service, will endure into eternity.  And so, every bit as much as the disciples, as James and John, we are called to “drink the cup” of Christ and to be baptized with the baptism with which He was baptized.  We are called to be servants of all.

In some ways, this might be hard for us to take from Jesu but for the fact that He Himself did this.  It is hard, as anyone knows, to take orders from someone who has not “walked the walk,” so to speak, but this is not the case with Jesus.  He is not “all talk,” a man of words only.  No, He is a man of action as well.  He is an image, I believe, of that “suffering servant” spoken of in Isaiah (in our first reading), who lays down His life as an “offering for sin,” who bears our guilt and justifies the many.  And as we heard in our second reading from the Letter to Hebrews, “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.”  He came, as He said, “not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many,” truly the “slave of all.”  And so, knowing this, I think, we can more readily accept the charge that Jesus gives us today in the Gospel.  He asks nothing of us that He has not Himself already done and a thousand times more. 

And so, let’s respond generously to this call to service, knowing that the power and the glory we seek is no earthly power or glory, but a power and a glory that must first pass through the cross; a power and a glory that are borne of genuine self-gift to God and neighbor; a power and glory that may never be recognized or honored in this life, but which will be everlasting in heaven.