Following the Lord to Greatness, 29th Sunday (B), October 20, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, New York
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 20, 2024
Is 53:10-11, Ps 33, Heb 4:14-16, Mk 10:35-45

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• 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 indicating 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,” 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 Twelve? What would your reaction be if your spiritual father, or mentor, or one of your best friends came to you to tell you he was about to be publicly executed? The brothers James and John approached Jesus immediate and with great chutzpah asked Jesus for a blank check: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Jesus indulges them by asking, “What do you wish me to do for you?” and they reply, “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.” The two fishermen wanted to be the Messiah’s right and left hand men, his two viceroys or executive vice-presidents, in what they anticipated would be Jesus’ glorious Messianic reign. They were concerned about themselves rather than with Jesus. Their behavior was raw ambition at its ugliest. Jesus responded, “You do not know what you are asking,” and then gave them yet another indication of the expectation-shattering type of kingdom he would be establishing: “Can you drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized,” alluding to the cup of suffering prophesied by Isaiah and the cleansing ablution of blood that would take place on Good Friday. To his question, the brothers impetuously respond, “We can.” Jesus then foretold that they ultimately would indeed drink that cup of suffering, but reminded them that God the Father had already prepared those who would sit at his right and left, which would be the Good and Bad Thief on Calvary, the sheep and the goats at the General Judgment, and likely, dynamically, Mary and Joseph in heaven.
• Hearing this conversation, however, the other ten apostles objected and became angry at James and John, not because of the brothers’ impudence, but out of jealousy: they themselves wanted the positions that the brothers had the guts to ask for. Their anger gave Jesus the opportunity to give one of the most important instructions to them and to the whole Church about the path to greatness, about the means to become like him, about the way to reign with him and advance his kingdom. We need to focus carefully and persistently on what Jesus says, because it goes so much against our worldly ways.
• Four weeks ago, you may recall, we had an opportunity to focus on ambition and the path to greatness in God’s kingdom. The theme is a common one in St. Mark’s Gospel, because the apostles were so obsessed about which of them would be the greatest and their voracious egocentric hunger came to the surface at least four times, all disgustingly when Jesus spoke about how he would suffer, be betrayed and crucified to establish his kingdom. We spoke then about how Jesus didn’t seek to suppress their ambition but to convert and reorient it. 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. As we discussed a month ago, he wants us to become great in faith, great in humility, great in holiness, great in knowing and transmitting the faith by word and example, and great in sacrificial love. 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 own fiefdom versus trying to hallow God’s name and enter and establish his Kingdom.
• He tells the apostles, “You know that those who are recognized as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them and their great ones make their authority over them felt.” It’s still the same way today. Greatness is determined by how much power one wields in politics, how much money or influence one has in business, how many magazine covers and social media followers one has in entertainment. Greatness is determined by the capacity to command or lead others from above. Jesus says that in his kingdom it cannot be that way. “Whoever wishes to be great among you,” he states emphatically, “will be your servant. Whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all.” In his kingdom, those who are great will lead and love from below, serving, sacrificing, even dying for others. Then he summarizes everything by his intention and example: “For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Jesus was calling them not to “lord” anything “over” others but “serve” “under” others. To be great, in other words, would come not principally through sharing Christ’s power, but by emulating and extending his love.
• Jesus Christ would put these words about serving others rather than being served into action during the celebration of the Last Supper on the night he would be betrayed, when he stood up, took off his outer garment, tied a towel around his waist, and began to wash the filth off his disciples’ feet, a menial task normally done by servants and slaves. The apostles, naturally, resisted Jesus’ debasing himself in this way. After he was finished, Jesus said, “Do you know what I have done for you? You call me teacher and Lord — and rightly so, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” (Jn 13:5-17). 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 and in turn say to others with Christ, “This is my blood, shed for you.” Christ’s cabinet would be filled not by those who would kiss his butt, but by those who would put their own butts on the line for Him and for others, by being baptized into Christ’s death through their own suffering and death.
• The greatness to which Jesus wants us to aspire, therefore, has nothing to do with any type of terrestrial pecking-order. Real greatness, he described, is to become most like him, to share in his form of greatness, in his holiness, in his total self-giving love. Twenty times in the Gospels Jesus told his disciples, “Follow me!,” and today Jesus was telling us that the path to greatness is to do what he himself was doing, to serve to the extreme and give one’s life as a ransom for the many.” St. Paul would later describe to the Philippians (Phil 2:3-11) that Christ’s example was the stairway to eternal exaltation: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross. But because of this God greatly exalted him and bestowed upon him a name above every other name.” Safe-abasing loving service is the root of Christ’s greatness and he wants us to be similarly exalted by getting down to lift others up, to dying to ourselves so that others may live.
• 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 eventually become their own. Once they saw the fulfillment of Jesus’ teaching in his suffering, death and resurrection, they experienced a moral metamorphosis, a total transformation of their worldly ambition into Christ-like ambition. This was not an easy conversion, but 11 of the 12 of them eventually made it. They went from obsessing about themselves to giving their lives to bring Christ and his saving Gospel to the ends of the earth. They offered their mortal existences, as Christ did, to ransom, to rescue, the lives of many others from a life lived without God, a life often lived in darkness, in order to bring them to live as true children of the light. They drank Christ’s cup and were baptized into his death and now are seated at his right in heaven.
• The Lord would like us to experience a similar transformation, from a focus on ourselves, from seeking to live by worldly categories of success and greatness, to living according to his own categories and seeking to help others to experience the same liberation. He wants all of us to desire genuine greatness, to trade in our false notions that true prominence 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. One of the most important litmus tests as to whether we are living that transformation is our attitude to serving others, and not just in general, but like Jesus and like the converted apostles, by seeking to bring them to salvation. Jesus came to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many, to give his body and shed his blood in order to redeem them. And he wants us to become great by dedicating our life similarly to spreading the news and means of salvation.
• This Sunday is World Mission Sunday, when the Church throughout the globe focuses on how each of us, and the Church universal, is summoned by Christ to complete his saving work, going to the whole world, proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, baptizing, and teaching them everything he has commanded us. As Pope Francis and several recent popes have reminded us, the Church and each of us do just have a mission, but are a mission. Our whole Christian existence, just as much as the lives of the first apostles, is tied to the saving mission of Jesus Christ. Some members of the Church are going to be on the front line in challenging circumstances, like the apostles originally, and like missionary priests, religious and lay people today, as you yourselves, Sisters, are carrying out here in the Bronx and across the globe. But everyone in the Church has a role in the missions through basic witness close to home, as well as through prayer, sacrifices, and generosity for those on the front lines. No Christian exists to be served. Every Christian exists to serve in imitation of Christ and to spend our life to ransom others and lead them on the path to salvation.
• 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 this in 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, holy ambition and God’s grace, respond like James and John ultimately did, saying, “We can!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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