James and John call "Shotgun!"

 But whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many (Mark 10:43b-45).

“Shotgun!” My kids still sometimes yell this out as we’re heading to the car, even though they’re almost grown up. Sound familiar? Today, James and John call shotgun in Jesus’ kingdom. Like children, they ask first, “Promise us you’ll say yes to what we’re going to ask.” The truth is, I’m afraid, we’re all really not that different from these two brothers. It’s part of the human condition, it seems, to want to be the best, to be the first, to have the most, to win the trophy…and, like the other disciples in the story, to be a little angry and jealous when we don’t.

“What is it you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks James and John…”What is it you want me to do for you?” The verb want shows up many times in this part of Mark, and each time it is paired with a seeming contradiction. When Peter cries out that Jesus must not go to Jerusalem and be crucified: “Those who want to save their life will lose it” (8:35). When the disciples are all arguing about who is greatest and Jesus welcomes a little child: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (9:35). In today’s passage, James and John say: “We want you to do for us whatever we ask of you,” (10:35) and Jesus replies, “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be slave of all (10:43). Each of these “wants” is paired with a sort of paradoxical statement: saving is losing and losing is saving, the first will be last and the last will be first, the greatest ruler must become slave of all…But what seems paradoxical is not really paradox, but misunderstanding and confusion—what James and John (and we) think of as power, and reward, and position, and glory, turns out to be fiction, the opposite of God’s reality that Jesus taught and lived.

What does it mean to be the slave of all? First of all, the word is really slave, and not servant. The Greek word δοῦλος (doulos) does not bear the connotation of a free individual serving another, but of a “bondservant,” one who sells themselves or is sold into slavery to another. Paul frequently speaks of himself as a slave of Jesus Christ (Rom 1:1, Gal 1:10, and Tit 1:1) and the term focuses attention primarily upon his belonging to Jesus. A follower of Jesus must be slave of all; must belong to all, must live for all, not for themselves. If we are to drink from Jesus’ cup and be baptized in his baptism, our lives are not our own.

“Are you able,” Jesus asked James and John, “to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They naively affirm, “Yes, we are able!” Naively—or perhaps just still full of misunderstanding and confusion—because for the third time in three chapters Jesus has foretold his torture and death in Jerusalem, the destination of their journey, and for the third time the disciples refuse to hear and understand. The disciples want to be great, and first, and powerful, and glorious, and this want is closing their eyes to what they’ve seen Jesus doing and what they’ve heard Jesus saying. Martin Luther, in his commentary on Galatians, says:

God is the God of the humble, the miserable, the afflicted, the oppressed, the desperate, and of those who have been brought down to nothing at all. And it is the nature of God to exalt the humble, to feed the hungry, to enlighten the blind, to comfort the miserable and afflicted, to justify sinners, to give life to the dead, and to save those who are desperate and damned.

This is the God, the God of the humble and miserable and afflicted and oppressed and desperate, that Jesus has shown the disciples as they’ve been following him on his way to Jerusalem, but they just can’t see it. How much we are like them still…

“‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory’” (10:37), James and John ask Jesus. “In your glory…” I imagine that at the other end of this journey to Jerusalem, when they encountered the risen Jesus in the upper room after his Resurrection and, with Thomas, saw his wounds, James and John wept for shame at their foolish and selfish want of theirs. “‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory…’” They pictured themselves, I imagine, in full armor on white stallions charging through the streets of Jerusalem trampling underfoot the Roman soldiers occupying their city. But Jesus is not the conquering tyrant of all, Jesus is the slave of all. “‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory’”—“But to sit at my right hand or at my left hand is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared,” Jesus replied. “‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory…’” “And with him they crucified two bandits, one at his right and one at his left” (15:27). This is Jesus’ glory, and these are the two for whom it was prepared—two, condemned as criminals as Jesus was, with Jesus in his glory…the glory of one who “came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (10:45).

Jesus says, “Follow me. Find glory in sacrifice. Find your life by losing it.” I invite you to join me during November as we deepen our understanding of Jesus’ glory in a book and video study of N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. My closing prayer for us all this week is this quote from Bishop Wright on the glory of the Cross: 

We have, alas, belittled the cross, imagining it merely as a mechanism for getting us off the hook of our own petty naughtiness or as an example of some general benevolent truth. It is much, much more. It is the moment when the story of Israel reaches its climax; the moment when, at last, the watchmen on Jerusalem’s walls see their God coming in his kingdom; the moment when the people of God are renewed so as to be, at last, the royal priesthood who will take over the world not with the love of power but with the power of love; the moment when the kingdom of God overcomes the kingdoms of the world.

May we be that royal priesthood this week, slaves to Christ, renewed to take up our cross and follow our Savior Jesus, to take over the world—not with the love of power—but with the power of love.