James and John: Looking At Jesus the Wrong Way
“James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” 36 And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” 37 And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” 38 But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” 39 They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”
July 14, 2013
Mark 10:35-45, Looking At Jesus the Wrong Way
Doug Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
[vimeo 70334691 w=500&h=375]
[powerpress]
41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42 So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
In these verses from Mark, Jesus is talking about leadership. Leadership is of crucial importance in the church and in every aspect of society. One can look at schools, businesses, churches, governments, artistic or athletic organizations and find a common thread. While there may be some mitigating factors, in most cases, those that are thriving tend to have good leadership and those that are struggling do not. A symphony orchestra can exist at a certain level for years and then a new conductor arrives and takes it to a whole new level. A business can be struggling to break even and then a new CEO arrives and leads the company in a different way with great success. A superior coach succeeds with whatever team he or she leads. Someone once said of the late Paul “Bear” Bryant who coached the University of Alabama football team for many years, “He could beat yours with his, and he could beat his with yours.”
There has never been a more successful leader in the history of the world than Jesus. He only worked for three years, in a tiny part of the world, without the benefit of a computer or a smart phone. Among his twelve close followers – two were political rivals, two were hungry for personal power and glory, one betrayed him, and another denied him – and that was the strong half of the group! He had a larger following of about 120 people. 2,000 years later empires have risen and fallen, the world has changed dramatically, yet they work he began has gone global spanning every continent with over a billion followers.
Truett Cathy is a devoted Christian who built his chicken sandwich business into the national enterprise Chik-Fil-A (which is not open on Sunday). His mission at Chik-Fil-A is not only to serve customers, but also to develop his staff. His business provides college scholarship funds for young people who have worked for his company for several years and he places a strong emphasis on developing leaders throughout his corporation. When asked what he felt constituted leadership, he gave a very simple answer, “To be a good leader, you must be a good follower. That is the very first thing.”[1]
Each of us in our lives is called to be both a follower and a leader. At different times, a different person in the same group may take the role of a leader. For example, when 23 of us go on a mission trip to Alaska next month, when it comes to devotions, I will most likely be the leader. When it has come to organizational details with this trip, Sharon Palmer has taken the leadership role. When it comes to actually doing physical work on specific job sites, folks like Bob Linnell, Ben Gregson, Roger Bray, Peter Donovan, and others will likely be in leadership roles. Teams, families, churches, and organizations function well when the group discerns properly who should be leading and when the people who lead also know how to follow. Jesus was a leader, but he was also the greatest follower there ever was. He obeyed God’s will completely and followed faithfully from beginning to end. Jesus was a follower who was humble, who spent much of his time with his leader, listening to and learning the leader’s mission so he could convey it to others and live it in his own life.
But even Jesus had leadership problems. Jesus often found it difficult to keep his disciples in good relationship with one another and working together to accomplish his mission in the world. They argued about who was the greatest, lobbied for positions of glory and honor, refused to perform tasks they considered beneath them, and lacked commitment and understanding. Other than that they were really good. Obviously they were nothing like us, thank goodness.
Today’s scripture is about James and John, two brothers who, along with Peter, were part of Jesus’ inner most circle. In Mark 10:35 the brothers James and John came to Jesus and said, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Talk about a loaded a question – any parent knows how effective that kind of request is going to be. Yeah, right, like that’s going to happen. Their request is to have positions of power and prestige on Jesus’ right and left in glory. Even worse, they are asking this just after Jesus has told them for the third time that he is going to be killed. They’re looking at Jesus the wrong way. They’re looking at Jesus as the path to glory, honor, and recognition for themselves, failing to grasp that Jesus gave all those things up to come to earth and live a few short years serving everyone he met. The other ten disciples get angry when they hear what James and John asked for, probably initially because they didn’t think of it first. So Jesus has to tell the pushy two and the indignant ten a little about servant leadership.
No matter how hard or how clearly or how repeatedly Jesus tried to explain it, the disciples struggled to understand or envision the leadership or the kingdom Jesus described. Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God. They envisioned a human kingdom where they would lead by ruling over others. Until the end of Jesus’ life the disciples were betraying him, denying him, and complaining that he hadn’t carried out his mission exactly as they wanted him to. According to Luke 22:24, even at the Last Supper the disciples were still arguing over who was the greatest. Jesus literally had to die before they understood.
We may or may not realize how many ways we’re involved in leadership. If you’re part of a family, do any kind of work or volunteer service, you’re in leadership. A key question we all have to ask ourselves is: what is my motivation for wanting to lead? Is it because we truly want to serve? Do we have to check our heart to make sure there is none of James’s and John’s desire to rule and control. In a cartoon someone gave me, a group of women are pictured sitting in a room drinking coffee. One woman is standing shaking her fist and saying, “Bylaws! What do you mean bylaws! I’ve waited seven years to rule this group!”
Jesus makes it clear that leadership among his followers is not to be modeled on the pattern of leadership in the world. The prevailing world pattern of leadership for most of history has been to rule and dictate by power and force. The simple response of Jesus to this approach is, “But it is not so among you.” We’re not to follow the world’s pattern of leadership in the church or our lives. As author Norman Shawchuck notes, “Even the people and the institutions of the world are finding the old patterns intolerable. All over the world the authoritarian pattern is being challenged – and in America authoritarian leadership is dead! Everywhere people are demanding more participation in the decisions which affect their lives.”[2]
Jesus was trying to help the disciples see him the right way and not the wrong way, the right way to see Jesus is as a servant leader. Robert K. Greenleaf writes in Servant Leadership, that the true test of effective leadership is two-fold. Do those served grow as persons? Do they become healthier, wiser, freer, more likely to become servants themselves? Secondly, what is the effect on the least privileged? By those measures, obviously Jesus was a highly effective servant leader. What about us, how does our life look in response to those questions?
Leadership should always be for the sake of the people, the organization, the church, the nation, not for the leader or his or her ego or benefit. It’s easy in any organization, including a church, to lose sight of the people who are meant to be served. Eugene Peterson has been a pastor, a seminary professor, and author. He’s best known for his paraphrase of the Bible, The Message, however he’s also written a number of good books about pastoral leadership. In one of them he relates an experience from his early ministry.
“One of my duties I had as an organizing pastor of a new church was to prepare a monthly report on my work and send it to a denominational executive in New York City. It was not a difficult task, but it did take a day’s work. The first page was statistical: how many calls I made, how many people attended worship, a financial report of offerings, progress on building plans, committee activities. This was followed by several pages of reflection on my pastoral ministry: what I understood of God’s presence in my work, theological ruminations on the church, my understanding of mission, areas of inadequacy that were showing up in my ministry, strength and skills that seemed to be emerging. After a few months of doing this, I got the impression that my superiors were not reading the second part. I thought I would test out my impression and have a little fun on the side.
“So the next month, after dutifully compiling the statistical data, I turned to page two and described as best I could an imagined long, slow slide into depression. I wrote that I had difficulty sleeping. I couldn’t pray. I was getting work done at a maintenance level but it was a robotic kind of thing with no spirit, no zest. Having feelings and thoughts like this I was seriously questioning whether I should be a pastor at all. Could they recommend a counselor for me?
“Getting no response, I upped the ante. The next month I developed a drinking problem which became evident one Sunday morning in the pulpit. Everybody was very nice about it, but one of the Elders had to complete the sermon. I was at the point where I need treatment. How should I go about getting it?
“Still no response. I got bolder. The next month I cooked up an affair. It started out innocently enough as I was attempting to comfort a woman through an abusive marriage, but something happened in the middle of it, and we ended up in bed together, only it wasn’t a bed but one of the pews in church where we were discovered when the ladies arranging flowers for worship walked in on us. I thought it was all over for my ministry at this point, but it turned out that in this community swingers are very much admired, and on the next Sunday, attendance doubled.”
Peterson continues, “This was turning into a gala event one day each month in our house. I would go to my study and write these wonderful fictions and bring them out and read them to my wife. We would laugh and laugh, collaborating by embellishing details.
“Next I reported some innovations I was making in the liturgy. This was the sixties, an era of liturgical reform and experimentation. Our worship, I wrote my supervisors, was about as dull as it could get. I had read some scholarly guesses about a mushroom cult in Palestine in the first century in which Jesus must have been involved. I thought it was worth a try. I arranged for the purchase of someone mushroom caps, peyote it was, and introduced them at our next celebration of the Eucharist. It was the most terrific experience anybody had ever had in worship, absolutely dazzling. But I didn’t want to do anything that was in violation of our church constitution, and finding nothing in the Book of Order on this, could they please advise me on whether I was permitted to proceed along these lines.
“Month after month I sent stories to the men and women who were overseeing the health of my spirituality and the integrity of my ministry. Never did I get a response.
At the end of three years, I was released from their supervision. I went for a debriefing to the denominational office in New York City under which I had worked. They asked me to evaluate their supervision through the three years. I told them I appreciated their help. The checks arrived on time each month. I was treated courteously at all times. But there was one minor area of disappointment: they had never read past the first page of statistical reporting that I had sent each month. ‘Oh, but we did,’ they said. ‘We read those reports carefully; we take them very seriously.’ ‘How can that be,’ I said. ‘That time I asked for help with my drinking problem and you didn’t respond. That time I got involved in a sexual adventure and you didn’t intervene. That craziness when I reported I was using peyote in the Eucharist and you did nothing.’
Their faces were blank, and then confused – followed by a splendid vaudeville slapstick of buck-passing and excuse making. It was a wonderful moment. I had them dead to rights. I replay the scene in my imagination a couple times a year, the way some people watch old Abbott and Costello movies.”[3] Peterson was disappointed because the Christian leaders who were responsible for his work, were not interested in him as a person. They were more interested in serving an institution than serving the people they were responsible for assisting, mentoring, and guiding. They were looking at him the wrong way.
Why was Jesus such a successful leader? Because people respond to a leader who is first proven and trusted as a servant. Jesus cared for the disciples, even with all their faults and shortcomings. He cared for them and he served them, and they knew it.
At the heart of leading like Jesus is this paradox of leading by serving. Herb Kelleher the co-founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines for many years has been admired and written about for his servant leadership style. In fact, on Boss’s day in 1994, a full-page ad appeared in USA Today. It was paid for by the employees of Southwest Airlines and it was addressed to CEO Herb Kelleher. It read: “Thanks Herb
For remembering every one of our names.
For supporting the Ronald MacDonald House.
For helping load baggage on Thanksgiving.
For giving everyone a kiss (and we mean everyone). For listening.
For running the only profitable major airline.
For singing at our holiday party. For singing only once a year.
For letting us wear shorts and sneakers to work.
For golfing at the LUV Classic with only one club. For outtalking Sam Donaldson.
For riding your Harley Davidson into Southwest Headquarters.
For being a friend, not just a boss.
Happy Boss’s day from each of your 16,000 employees.”
A display of affection like that only happens when a leader has worked hard to connect with people and when the leader is a servant leader.[4]
Jesus was humble enough to live as one of us, to serve as the least of us, and to die on the cross for all of us. He has issued an invitation that anyone may follow him and share in his life so long as we look at him the right way and understand that when we choose to follow Christ, we’re choosing to be a loving, humble servant.
Prayer: Dear God,
Don’t give us blessings; give us grace to be obedient to your every command & desire.
Don’t give us status; give us a place to serve. Don’t give us things for our use; use us.
Don’t give us jobs; put us to work. Don’t give us pleasure; give us perspective.
Don’t give us satisfaction; teach us to sacrifice. Grant us strength to do your will and the desire to take Jesus’ love to the world.
May our greatest joy be pleasing you; no other joy can compare. Amen.