Ambition for True Greatness in God’s Kingdom, 29th Sunday (B), October 21, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
2018 Men’s Silent Retreat
“The Bravery to Live One’s Catholic Faith to the Full”
St. Damiano Retreat Center, White Post, VA
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 21, 2018
Is 53:10-11, Ps 33, Heb 4:14-16, Mk 10:35-45

To listen to an audio recording of today’s Mass please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

The outing of the apostles’ selfish ambitions

Immediately before the passage in today’s Gospel, while Jesus and his disciples were heading up to Jerusalem from Jericho, Jesus took the 12 apostles aside and told them again what was going to happen to him. “Behold,” he said, “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.” Jesus was saying that he would indeed fulfill the prophecies announced by Isaiah in his suffering servant psalms, part of which he heard in today’s first reading, that he would be “crushed in infirmity,” he would “give his life as an offering for sin,” endure “affliction,” and “through his suffering … their guilt he [would] bear.”

What was the reaction of the 12? What would your reaction be if one of your best friends were to come to you and tell you he was not just about to die but be publicly executed? John and James came to him immediately and asked, “We want you to do for us whatever we ask of you?… Grant to us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.” It would be as if, immediately upon a friend’s telling us that he has one week to live, we were to say, “Can I have your Porsche?” We would have expected, when Jesus was talking about this to his twelve closest companions, they would have been concerned about him. But they weren’t.

But this was par for the course when Jesus announced his death. You remember the first time Jesus told his closest followers and friends about his upcoming betrayal, condemnation, mockery, scourging and crucifixion: Peter, the newly named rock, took him aside to “rebuke” him, assuring him that no such thing would ever be allowed to happen to him. That tongue-lashing earned Peter in response the worst rebuke in Biblical history, being called by Jesus Satan, for trying to lead rather than to follow Jesus. Peter himself was thinking not as God thinks, Jesus told him, but as human beings do.The second time Jesus gave the same prediction, everyone just remained silent, thinking about their own situation, and then speaking along the way about the one who would be the greatest. Today, as soon as Jesus said the words about his crucifixion, John and James — or in Matthew’s Gospel, their mother, something more pathetic — approached to ask that they sit on his right and his left as his two chief advisors in his Messianic administration when he entered into what they believed would be his earthly kingdom. It was raw ambition at its ugliest. But it wasn’t unique. When the other ten apostles heard about this, St. Mark tells us, “they became indignant at the two brothers,” not because of the way they were trying to use Jesus, but because they had been gutsy enough to ask for what the others didn’t have the chutzpah but openly desired. Little did any of them know that those thrones would be occupied by two thieves on Calvary. Perhaps the worst example of this type of unholy behavior occurred during the Last Supper. After Jesus indicated to them, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me,” the apostles got into a dispute over which of them was the greatest. Rather than thinking about who would be the despicable betrayer, they were thinking about who would be the greatest, not recognizing at the time that all of them would end up betraying him.

These were all examples of what St. James describes in his Letter as “selfish ambition” (James 3:14,16). They were seeking their own interests, not those of the Lord. They were using him, not truly loving him. What happened with them is a perennial warning to the Church, to the disciples of the Lord. We might believe that we would never treat a friend like that, but the reality is that no matter how often we hear about Jesus’ sufferings, crucifixion and death, no matter how frequently we stare at the Crucifix, rather than seek to console the Lord out of love, we, too, like the apostles, often just divert our attention to what we really love, our own plans, careers, worldly hopes and hungers.

The conversion of our ambition

So how does Jesus respond to this? Notice that he doesn’t seek to eliminate our ambitions but to convert them. God doesn’t seek to eliminate all ambition. He knows what is in man. As the Letter to the Hebrews tells us today, “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.”Jesus wants us to be ambitious, he wants us to be great, not mediocre, but he wants to convert our ambitions so that we will be desirous of great things. There’s a pacific ocean between ambition for self-aggrandizement, which is the typical ambition in the world, and ambition for souls, between seeking to glorify one’s name and establish one’s Kingdom versus trying to hallow God’s name and enter and establish his kingdom. Today in the Gospel Jesus seeks to transform make holy the ambition not just of James and John, not just of the apostles, but all of us. He who is the Way showed them the path to greatness and the means to become truly number one, so that we may share his ambitions.

Jesus says to James and John that real greatness in Christ’s kingdom would not be determined by fighting for seats at tables, but by fighting for the towel. The highest would not be the one to whom others would lift glasses in toasts but the one who would be able to drink the cup of Christ’s blood. That’s why he asked them the initially strange question, “Can you drink of the cup I am to drink?” To drink the cup of his blood means more than to receive Holy Communion, but to be able to imitate Jesus in saying to others, “This is my blood, shed for you.” To be great in other words comes not principally through Christ’s power, but by sharing his love. Christ’s closest friends and collaborators are not those kiss his butt, but those who put their own butts on the line for Him and for others.

Jesus goes on to say to the apostles today, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them and their great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant and whoever wishes to be first among you must be the slave of all.” Then he gave his own witness, for “the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for the many.” As St. Paul says, even though he was God, he didn’t focus on his divine dignity but “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness … [becoming] obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.” This safe-abasing loving service was at the root of Christ’s greatness, St. Paul continued, and that’s why, he says, “God highly exalted him.” Just as Jesus washed the apostles’ feet during the Last Supper and told them he was doing so as an example so that they might humbly wash others’ feet, so Jesus’ whole life was an example so that they might follow in on the road to true greatness.

John and James and the other apostles were chosen by Jesus because, even though at first they had very human and selfish desires and motivations, they were capable of conversion so that Jesus’ categories would become their own. Once they saw the fullness of Jesus’ teaching in his suffering, death and resurrection, they experienced a real metamorphosis, a real transformation of their worldly ambition into Christ-like ambition. They saw that the path to prominence was not lined with glitter but thorns. This was obviously not an easy conversion for them, but 11 of the 12 of them eventually made it. They drank Christ’s cup, they were baptized into his death and now are seated at his right in heaven.

The Lord Jesus wants all of us to undergo the same transformation. He wants all of us to desire true greatness, to trade in our false notions that real greatness means you have a butler and valet, a chauffeur and a pilot, and a whole staff of people serving you at your beck-and-call, to a notion that the greater we are, the more we will in fact serve others. But the notion is not enough. He wants to give us the help to make the choice to follow him on the way to greatness, which is the path of self-emptying loving service. This is the path that after the resurrection the apostles chose. This is the path that the saints chose. This is the path that stands before us today.

Where Jesus wants us to be great

But I don’t want to stop there. On this retreat about being not afraid, about the courage we need to be faithful to the Lord, we have to speak a little bit more expansively about what the Lord is asking of us. This isn’t the only time Jesus spoke about greatness in the Gospel. He spoke about several characteristics of Christian greatness and we need to be bold to respond to this summons not as a multiple choice test but an all of the above:

• Jesus wants us to be great in faith, praising the Syro-Phoenician mother and the Roman Centurion for their great faith and longed that all in Israel would emulate it.
• Jesus wants us to be great in humility. In response to the disciples’ question, “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?,” Jesus called a child over and said, “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.”
• As we see today, he wants us to be ambitious in our total imitation of his self-sacrificial love. “Whoever would be first among you must be the servant of all,” he said. “For the Son of Man also came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus wants us to receive his grace to grow in the desire to give our life to ransom others from slavery and death. St. Paul builds on Jesus’ desire to be great in love in his First Letter to the Corinthians. Moved by the Holy Spirit, St. Paul said to the Corinthians that they shouldn’t be ambitious for the ability to speak in or interpret tongues, for the power to work miracles, for various positions in the Church, but that they should “strive eagerly” — be ambitious! — for the “greatest spiritual gifts” — faith, hope and love, of which love was the greatest. St. Paul said in that famous passage it didn’t suffice to have the faith to move mountains. It wasn’t enough to give the body over as a martyr. One needed to do this with love. And someone who loves has a lot to work on. Out of love, he needs to learn how to be patient, kind, not jealous or boastful, insistent at his own way, arrogant or rude, irritable or resentful, rejoicing at the wrong of others.  He needs to believe, hope and endure all things and rejoice in the truth. This is something to which Jesus definitely wants us all to inspire.
• Jesus wants us to be ambitious to be saints.“Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” Jesus said, echoing the prophets’ call for us to be holy as the Lord, our God, is holy, so that we might fully become the image and likeness of the God who created us.
• And there’s one last way he speaks about. Jesus wants us to be great in living by his truths and passing them on to others. “Whoever keeps these commandments and teaches others to do so will be called great in the Kingdom of heaven,” he said in the Sermon on the Mount. Today the Church marks World Missionary Sunday and missionaries are some of the clearest examples of those who have heard these words of Christ and acted upon them. They have left the comforts of their homes, their families, their food, their language, their televisions, their internet, their air-conditioning or heating, even their electricity and their running water to go to the ends of the earth to serve others in love. Even before they speak local dialects, or help children to learn the catechism, they teach others about the truth and love of the Gospel through their actions of love, opening up not just churches, but schools, hospitals and clinics, food pantries, and so much more. They wash others’ feet in thousands of little ways. Today is a day on which we pray for them in particular and sacrifice financially for them, so that they can continue in the name of Christ and of the Church to help people in distant parts of the world learn the path to heaven, the path of love, the path of greatness.

Drinking Christ’s Chalice to the dregs

Christ wants us to be great and today he shows us how. The greatest illustration he gives us of the path to greatness is here in the Mass, our participation in time in the eternal offering of Christ in the Last Supper and on Calvary. When Jesus humbly bent down at the beginning of the Last Supper to wash his followers’ feet, he was just getting started. Later he would abase himself even further, changing bread and wine into his body and blood so that we, his servants, could consume him and live off of him. This is the chalice he places before us to drink, to which offer he hopes we will respond with as much trust and zeal as John and James. He not only wants us to receive his self-gift of loving service in the Eucharist, but he wants us to make it the path of our life. He simplifies everything he’s taught us today about the path to true greatness in the words he will say again to us in a few minutes: “Do thisin memory of me!” And he asks us, “Can you drink the chalice that I am going to drink?” As we prepare to lift up this chalice to the Lord, may we with courage respond like James and John by God’s grace ultimately did, saying, “We can!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: