Feast of St. James the Apostle

Most of us have had learning experiences which have been painful and maybe even embarrassing.  Our ignorance was suddenly revealed and protective defenses unexpectedly breached.  Perhaps we had overreached or overestimated our capacities and found ourselves unable to come up with an answer to a question or challenge that life put to us.  Did we blank out or actually learn something from that?

Jesus frequently uses the missteps and misunderstandings of his disciples to lead them into a deeper experience of knowledge.  In today’s Gospel, two of his disciples show themselves masters of manipulation by getting their mother to convince Jesus to give them positions of prestige and power when he comes into the Kingdom he has been proclaiming.  They have totally missed the constant refrain in the preceding chapters about the first being the last.  Their mother is part of the cover over their own ambition.  They play all the keys and are plugged into the power system of patronage and homage to the hierarchy.  Command that these two sons of mine sit, one at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.  The request has turned into an order. Sitting and judging will catapult them into glory and honor.  The other ten disciples are naturally outraged and indignant.  They understand that power given to one is power taken away from other.  But Jesus, the teacher, does not leave them at this dead end.  He tries to open new avenues of understanding of what real power and authority might mean.

This scene is a replay of the archetypal moment when Jesus is tempted by Satan in chapter four.  The devil took him up a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence. And he said to him, ”All these shall I give to you if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.”  The ultimate and root perversion of the trusting adoration of God is offered as a solution to the harrowing suffering and chaos in the world.  It can so easily and quickly be fixed.  The answer to life’s problems can be made tangible, visible, transparent and appealing.  You can now sit and judge already. You can know clearly and distinctly.  You can enter into your glory now.  You no longer need to endure that suffering of being disappointed in what is  most dear to you.  Disappointed in your child, your job, your community, your church.  You can sit and judge in the robes of the vainglorious, those convinced of their own virtue and truth.  There is no more to be learned.

Paul’s picture of the Christian life is one which parts from this vision of the Kingdom.  He takes us up a high mountain with a different vista.  We hold this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.  We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained; perplexed but not driven to despair; persecuted but not abandoned; struck down but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.  We who live are constantly being given up to death for the sake of Jesus.  For Jesus and Paul, this is what the kingdom looks like.   Is the Kingdom less visible and present in a community with a dozen members rather than fifty?  In a Church with closing parishes rather than in one which can even dominate the political scene?  Are we learning any lessons?