What do you want out of life?
29th Sunday of Ordinary time (B)
What do you want out of life? Do you want to do great things? Do you want to be seen as important?
James and John wanted to be seen as important. I think that probably they also wanted to do great things, but they certainly wanted to be honored and to be seen as great.
What do you want? Do you want to do great things? That is good. It is OK to dream of doing great things. God often plants in our hearts the desire to do great things.
Do you want to be seen doing great things? You are on the wrong path. This is not a desire God plants in our hearts. This is a weed the enemy of our soul plants, hoping we will fall into his trap.
Do you want to do important things? Or do you only want to be seen as important?
When you speak to God, are you saying,”Lord do this for me,” like James and John, or are you saying “Lord, what can I do for you?”
Or, maybe you are content with doing nothing.
Maybe you are content with your small life. Maybe you are content to do nothing great at all. Maybe you have given up on doing anything great in this life, as long as you are left alone in comfort.
It is not pleasing to God if we either resign ourselves to mediocrity or if we fix our minds on doing great things for the sake of being seen by others.
What is pleasing to God is that we act out of love. It is pleasing to God that we act out of love. It does not matter if the things we do are great or small. If we do them out of love, we are pleasing to God.
This is the secret. Do everything, whether great or small, with great love.
That also means – do not hide your failings. The apostles do not hide their failings. Here in the Gospel they recount for us how James and John, great apostles and martyrs, made the mistake of thinking that they could attain glory and honor in the kingdom of God without suffering.
The path to glory is the path of suffering. And, specifically, the path of suffering for others.
The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as ransom for many.
And what about us? We love comfort and convenience.
We are pleased to be honored, and to be served. Are we pleased to serve others and to sacrifice our lives for others?
Yes. But only sometimes. Only rarely.
Do we make our authority felt over others, or do we humble ourselves to be the slave of all?
Slave. That word makes us uncomfortable, doesn’t it. Slave. We hear that word and we think of African nations selling their neighbors and cousins and brothers as perpetual slaves. We hear that word and we think of the Spanish Muslims and Jews selling Eastern European Christians as slaves. We think of African slaves, both Christian and pagan, auctioned off at cathedrals in Spain. We think of Spanish colonialists enslaving the native American population to produce sugar. Even though we know that the Catholic emperor Charles 5th abolished slavery in fifteen hundred and fourty two, we know that slavery persisted for another three hundred years, and that our own homeland was one of the last to abandon the practice of enslaving others for financial gain.
We are uncomfortable with the idea of being anyone’s slave, or of having anyone be our slave.
We should be uncomfortable with the idea.
It is important, though, to remember the context of slavery for the Children of Israel, and to understand what Jesus was saying in that context. Permanent/life-long/generational slavery was an acknowledged evil, and capturing or kidnapping someone to take as a slave was punishable by death (Exodus 21:16). That kind of slavery, the kind the Children of Israel endured in Egypt, was unacceptable. That is not the slavery to which Jesus refers or calls us. In that same chapter (21) of Exodus, God gives Moses instructions for the conditions of acceptable slavery. In short, if a Hebrew owed a debt they could not pay, he could sell himself into slavery. All sorts of laws and systems were set up to make this rarely necessary, but the provision was there. HIs servitude would last for 6 years, and in the 7th year he was to go free. His debt was considered paid, although it might well be that he did not profit his master enough to pay off his debt during his years of servitude.
This is the kind of slavery to which we are called. We owe a debt (sin) that can absolutely not be paid. It is impossible for us to pay off that debt. Jesus gave himself – life and death – to absolve us of that debt. Our only proper response is to serve him with our everything. To be, in the second sense I discussed, his slave. In serving him, we will not pay off our debt, but we will be set free. And how does he command us? What does Jesus instruct us to do as his servants? “Love one another, as I have loved you.”
Jesus asks us to be slaves to one another. He calls each and every one of us, and especially those who are our leaders, to be the slave of all, and his commandment to us is to love sacrificially.
That is how we are obligated to serve each one and everyone in the house of God. We are obligated to give our everything in sacrificial love.
Are we willing for that? Are we willing to be the slave of all?
I doubt it, honestly. I doubt that we are willing for this. We are too proud. We are too stubborn. We are too convinced that we owe nothing to others, and that others owe us… something. But that is not the path Jesus sets before us.
The path he lays before us is that “…whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.”
This is a hard saying. Today, Jesus invites us to humble ourselves and to become willing to serve others out of love of God, and our neighbor. If we are willing to heed this call, we will be blessed in this world, and in the world to come. We will be great in the kingdom of God.
