Br. Keith Nelson

Feast of St. James & St. John, Apostles

Matthew 20:20-28

In the collect for today’s feast of St. James and St. John, we prayed: “Pour out on the leaders of your Church that Spirit of self-denying service by which alone they may have true authority among your people.”

I recall a line I love from Matthew chapter 7, when Jesus has concluded the Sermon on the Mount: “The crowds were astounded, because he taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes” (Matthew 7:28-29).

Jesus was a humble person who actively shunned personal reward. He was a master at side-stepping the adulation of his personality if that adulation distracted others from the deep truths of the kingdom he came to reveal. His teaching style was holistic: the Gospels portray a person with tremendous sensitivity to how a few words or a simple gesture could communicate as much as or more than a lengthy discourse. What he said had such a ring of truth to it that it awakened a thirst deep inside his listeners for more – even if more was hard to understand and came at great personal cost.

In everything he did, he “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28).

If the authority of Jesus is the measure by which all Christian leaders ought to gauge their leadership, well, I can only say that I fall very far short. That is true in my ministry as the community’s Superior, but it is also true of the more fundamental leadership to which I am called as a baptized member of Christ’s Body. I stand deeply in need of Jesus to show me where and how I go amiss. And I stand in need of fellow disciples – in my case, primarily my Brothers – who can show me what I can’t quite see about myself. In my case that includes both the sharp edges and the hidden treasures.

I think, by God’s grace, that that was Jesus’ intention for his apostles. Just as his authority came only from his radical dependence on the one he called Father, so any authority given to the members of his Body comes only through radical dependence on his grace in the midst of our frequent failures.

In today’s Gospel reading, James and John fall short in a particularly public way.

These two disciples want something very good: They want to be close to Jesus, to learn from him and to enjoy his presence in the kingdom he has come to inaugurate. We might say they want to become saints. The trouble is that their perception of the kingdom, and the way authority works within it, is conditioned by the values and power structures of worldly kingdoms.

We might pause to ask ourselves: What are the ways we sometimes continue to think about participation in the kingdom of God through the filter of our worldly conditioning – through the values that the world tells us are most important?

Ambition; competition; the posturing and image curation that are standard expectations on social media. The craving for public recognition for beauty, intelligence, business acumen, or net financial worth. There are many other examples.

Though we as the Church are Christ’s mystical Body, we are also a collection of fallible human beings. Our minds and hearts are not automatically immune from the subtle influence of these values and expectations. There is the pressure to be busy all the time, even if we are busy doing good things for others; the pressure to make a virtue of never having an empty calendar; the pressure to find innovative solutions to the many obstacles faced by our congregations and our denomination; the pressure to be available at all times, or to be all things to all people. I am certain you can think of more.

James and John had to face both the disappointment of hearing Jesus’ denial of their intended favor and then the anger of the other ten disciples when they heard about it. In praying with this passage, I noticed that they responded with anger, which seems to suggest several possibilities. The ten may have been angry at their presumption: “Who do they think they are, that they should have that privilege?” may well have been the voice in their heads. They may also have been angry because they carried their own subtle sense of entitlement: “I’m just as worthy of a place next to Jesus as they are, and you don’t see me asking my mom to get it for me!” In the end, then, Jesus’ final words about servant leadership are aimed not just at James and John, but at any one of them tempted to separate true greatness from humble service.

I imagine James and John may have had a miniature meltdown for a few days, but one thing is clear: they didn’t run away, or collapse under the weight of humiliation, or turn against the other apostles in bitterness. They stayed the course, and we remember them as saints. I can only imagine that, however slowly, they saw their mistakes, made humble apologies, and set about learning more of the truth. In God’s time, that would mean drinking the cup entrusted to them by Jesus: participation in the mystery of his life, his death, and his resurrection.

Blessed James and John, Apostles, whom we remember today.