Sharing Christ’s Ambition, Second Wednesday of Lent, March 11, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Second Week of Lent
March 11, 2020
Jer 18:18-20, Ps 31, Mt 20:17-28

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• The entire season of Lent is a commentary on what Jesus announced to us on Ash Wednesday. It’s an occasion to turn away from sin and turn to Him who is the Gospel in such a way that we seek and begin to turn with him constantly, which is what it means to “con-vert.” That conversion to which we’re summoned does not stop at external behaviors, rending our garments, but at our desires, what the Prophet Joel calls rending our hearts. In today’s readings we see how are deepest desires, our most profound ambitions, are meant to be transformed. In the Gospel yesterday, Jesus told us, “The greatest among you must be your servant,” and Jesus today reiterates that point saying, “Whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave,” and says that this is at its deepest level a reiteration of his common command, “follow me,” because “the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
• Lent is the period for the transformation of our ambitions, so that we will turn more and more with Jesus’ ambition. The three Lenten practices are all meant to help us: prayer helps us to look at things from God’s perspective, fasting to help us hunger for God and for what he hungers, almsgiving to help us to put others’ needs ahead of our own personal desires. Jesus wants to help us transform our ambitions by uniting us to his own prayer, fasting and almsgiving. It’s important for us to note that he doesn’t seek to eliminate all ambition. For him, ambition, desire, hunger itself is not a sin. But he wants us to be desirous of the right things, to revolutionize what great things we seek. 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 and their mother, not just of the apostles, but all of us. And in the process, he teaches us an important lesson about the way he purifies us of false ambition so that we may be more like him.
• We see just how much the apostles’ and their family members’ ambitions need to be transformed in St. Matthew’s account. As soon as Jesus gives the third prediction of his upcoming betrayal, condemnation, mockery, scourging and crucifixion, rather than consoling him, the apostles and John’s and James’ mom show their spiritually worldly ambitions. In fact, every time Jesus predicted his passion it seemed to bring out the worst, rather than the best, in his followers. We remember the first time he announced it, Peter, thinking not as God does but as human beings do and playing the part of Satan, “rebuked” him, saying “no such thing should ever happen to you.” The second time Jesus gave the same prediction and everyone just remained silent, thinking about their own situation, and then speaking along the way about the one who would be the greatest. It would be as if you told your best friends that you had just been informed by your doctor that you had two weeks to live and your friends, instead of consoling you and showing concern, began in your presence to ignore that diagnosis and just to think about how that would affect them. But it gets worse today. As soon as he says the words about his crucifixion, the mother of James and John approached Jesus with her sons — because they were too afraid to ask on their own it seems; how lame is that! — and asked that they sit on his right and his left as his two chief advisors when he entered into what they believed would be his earthly kingdom. Little did she know that those thrones would be occupied by two thieves on Calvary. When the other ten apostles heard about this, St. Matthew recalls, “they became indignant at the two brothers,” not of course because they found such behavior contrary to genuine love of Jesus but because they likewise coveted those two spots.
• Jesus took advantage of the ugliness of the raw earthly ambition to instruct them about the holy ambition he wants them to have. He asked, “Can you drink the chalice that I am going to drink?” That chalice was the cup Jesus would pray that the Father take away from him in the Garden, the cup of suffering announced by the psalms and the Prophet Isaiah. He was asking whether they could share in his suffering and the zeal that led him to suffer for others’ salvation. He was inviting them to share his own desires and enter truly into his kingdom. Jesus often described greatness in the Gospel, the type of greatness he wanted. 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 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. 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.” And 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 help to become truly great in all four of these ways so that we can help others grow in faith, grow in humble acceptance of God’s action, grow in the hunger to pass on the faith to others, and grow in the desire to give our life to ransom others from slavery and death.
• Today Jesus asks James and John whether they can drink the chalice he was about to drink, whether they could share his suffering for others’ redemption and the love that inspired it, so that they would be able to serve others according to the standards of the kingdom instead of the world. John and James replied, “We can!,” and Jesus told them they would. He then made a larger point about the ambition he wanted them and us to have, contrasting Jesus’ ambition with those of worldly kinds and sycophantic courtiers: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave. Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Ambition for greatness in Jesus’ kingdom will be shown not by positions of authority but by practices of service and ultimately by giving our whole life to rescue others from slavery to sin and death. Today, Jesus asks all of us whether we’re willing to drink that chalice. In an age in which the sin of clericalism has been exposed in all its destructive ugliness, but likewise in an age in which many laypeople speak fundamentally of empowerment as if all of life depended on taking and exercising power, Jesus’ words about transformed ambition are ever relevant… and challenging.
• Drinking Jesus’ chalice of holy ambition, we have to admit, goes against our hopes and plans for a comfy life. God didn’t create us with a desire to suffer. After the fall, however, our love for others would be shown by our capacity to suffer and die for them, since, as Jesus would say during the Last Supper, no one has greater love than to die for others. This transformation was a struggle likewise for the Prophet Jeremiah. After recounting to the Lord how others were contriving plots against him to destroy him, he turned to God and complained, “Must good be repaid with evil that they should dig a pit to take my life? Remember that I stood before you to speak in their behalf, to turn away your wrath from them.” He had done good and was suffering as a result and that fundamental unfairness scandalized him. He did not realize at that point because of his youth that the suffering he would eventually willingly endure, that loving service of those who were plotting to kill him, that humility and enslavement to God’s saving will, would lead to his eternal exaltation. He was able to drink the chalice of suffering in anticipation of Jesus’ drinking it to the dregs, but he at first shied away. The Lord allowed him that suffering for his own purification.
• The Lord often treats us in a similar way. When we serve others, we may not be thanked or appreciated. Others may in fact pay attention to our words not because they’re God’s words but to catch us in our speech. They may allow us to serve them just to catch us in a mistake. Regardless, God permits this because out of it he wants to help us transform our life into a ransom for others, in imitation of, and together with, Jesus’ self-giving. This is a hard teaching, but it is part of the good news: When we unite our occasionally unrequited love, our unappreciated service, to him and his, he is in fact able to make it a ransom to save many.
• Jeremiah’s conversion is a sign of hope for our own. Like him, we, too, can resist the Lenten call that Jesus forcefully makes for us to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross — of suffering and self-death! — and follow him all the way up the Way of the Cross to Calvary and glory. That cross for us, accordingly to worldly standards, often takes the form of humiliation and pain, but it’s through the willingness to suffer anything and everything to serve God and help him save others that we grow to be conformed to Christ in everything. That needs to be every Christian’s deepest ambition, to receive God’s mercy and make that mercy for others the greatest desire of our life. Jesus wants us all to be great in his kingdom and today he teaches us how. As we prepare to become one with him in Holy Communion, as we prepare to drink from the chalice of his Precious Blood, let us ask him to conform ourselves to his merciful ambitions for us so that we may imitate him in becoming the servant of the rest and give our lives, with His, as a ransom for as many as we can. He asks us today, “Can you drink this chalice?” And through the intercession of SS. James and John, may we reply, and mean, “Yes we can!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: