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It’s Not About Us
April 10, 2005 Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson
“Master, can one of us sit on your left hand and your right hand when you come into your kingdom?” Jesus just sighed, “Don’t they ever get it?” You can imagine what Jesus was going through. Throughout his time with his disciples, he’d been trying to tell them some things. And once again, they proved that they just didn’t see it just yet. The people who asked this question were James and John. Now James and John were two, arguably, of Jesus’ favorites. He spent a lot of time with them but, like many human beings, they got the wrong idea. You see, James and John thought just like every other person in Israel at the time. They thought the Messiah was going to come, set up the kingdom in Jerusalem, and drive out the Romans and they would rule the world. And here were James and John, believing that Jesus was this Messiah. They had actually told their mom about him, told her all the exciting things he was doing, and at the impetus of their mom, being a good mom and wanting her sons to exceed she said, “Well, go ask him. Go ask him if you can be number one and number two when he comes into his kingdom, when he gets through with all of this preaching stuff.” I can’t help but believe that’s exactly what they thought of it as, just that preaching stuff. You know the preliminaries to when Jesus is going to set up the kingdom. Hmmm…that’s not so bad. Former fishermen being vice-regents to the ruler of the world. Pretty good stuff if you can get it.
So they go and ask this silly question as we look at it. “Can we sit at your right hand and your left hand when you come into your kingdom, Lord?” You see, they thought it was all about them. They misinterpreted it. They thought that being a follower of Jesus meant that they were going to have it all rather than what Jesus was going to tell them. It’s a poignant moment. Jesus looks at them, the other disciples have heard what’s going on and they’re indignant. “How dare they do this? What about us?” And Jesus is just sitting there and he looks at James and John and says, “You know, it’s not for me to say who’s going to sit at my right or left. But, let me ask you a couple of questions. Can you drink the cup that I will drink? Can you be baptized with the baptism with which I will be baptized?” What Jesus meant, what he was referring to, was the cup of suffering and the baptism of death in this case. And of course, not knowing what he was talking about, James and John said, “Yes, Lord, of course.” Jesus looks at them and says, “You will.” If they had only known what he was talking about, it would have been a chilling thing for them to hear. And then Jesus wants to teach them once again in his patience and his love. He says, “The Gentiles, when they get authority over people lord it over others. Not so with you. Not so with you, because the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many.” What a remarkable statement, for the Man who is the embodiment of God, you know the one who created the stars and the universe, the one who deserves to be name above all names, to be bowed down before, the one who deserves to be served says, “I did not come to be served, but to serve” and to give his life as a ransom for many.
I’ve chosen this scripture to read to you, it’s taken from Mark 10. I want you to listen to the story as it comes from the scripture and then I’ll read to you also a short passage from I John 3. Listen to the word of God.
Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee,
came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”
“What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. They replied, “Let one of us sit
at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” “You don’t know what
you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with
the baptism I am baptized with?” “We can,” they answered. Jesus said to them,
“You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized
with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong
to those for whom they have been prepared.” When the ten heard about this, they
became indignant with James and John. Jesus called them together and said, “You
know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them,
and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead,
whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants
to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be
served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for
many.” And from I John, chapter 3, selected verses:
How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother. This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him. This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us.
This is the word of the Lord.
I just love the disciples, mainly because they’re like me, full of petty jealousies, wrong ambition, and basically they just don’t have a clue. I really like them because it makes me feel better. And Jesus had to be so patient with them, so determined to help them along the way. I like that too because it means He’s that way with me and you. And there are a couple of things, in this passage, that I think the disciples didn’t get…maybe many but I’d like to focus on just two. One is, basically, I don’t think they got his love for them, especially this love that is wrapped up in this word that Jesus uses, ransom. Now in the Bible there are several words used for salvation, or what the work of Jesus is for us and this is one of them. This word ransom is very interesting because it has to do with the idea of slavery. In the marketplaces of the Mediterranean, there were people being bought and sold as slaves all the time. I think it was estimated that actually sixty percent of the population at that time were in some sort of slavery. So slaves were everywhere. And the idea here is that sometimes somebody being sold as a slave, or someone who is in slavery, got someone else to pay their way out of slavery, the word being ransom. Sometimes someone saved up enough money for themselves, most of the time it had to be a gift from someone. Someone would pay the ransom price for a slave. And this is the word Jesus uses and what Jesus is saying to the disciples is that, “I have come to ransom you.”
Now there was something very interesting in Jesus’ time; the disciples and every other Israelite felt like God loved them and had chosen them and they were basically okay because they were Israelites. And the Bible doesn’t’ really say that. John himself will say, later, “God so loved us. This is the love that God showed to us that he lavished upon us. How great is the love that God lavished on us, just spilled over to us, that we should be called the children of God.” He will say later in his gospel that in Christ we have been given the right to be children of God. So the disciples didn’t know the kind of love that they needed from Jesus. And of course we think of how Jesus died on the cross for us, for our sins, but I’d like to make that concrete, that this ransom was not only for this general category of being sinners, but he ransomed us from bad ways of thinking. He ransomed us from selfishness. He ransomed us from meaninglessness of life.
There’s a story about a man named Lee Strobel who was a big-shot reporter for the Chicago Tribune for many, many years. When he was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, he was not a believer. As a matter of fact he was very antagonistic to the Christian faith. But one day, he was doing research for a story which required him to look at many other stories he’d written and some of those stories were not on a computer database and he literally had to get the file out and there was a real long, narrow file in which were folded all the stories he had written over several years. And as he looked at these stories, he would pull out these yellowing newspaper clippings and it dawned on him that this is what he’d been living his life for, for years…yellow newspaper clippings. And he realized the meaninglessness of that and it led him to the place where there is meaning. He was ransomed from a terrible way of life.
There’s a movie that appeared pretty recently called About Schmidt. Jack Nicholson starred in it and it is about a fellow who is chronologically blessed (he’s older) but he’s a curmudgeon and he really doesn’t have any meaning in his life. But he begins to correspond with a child; you know one of those sponsorship type of things, a six-year old child overseas. He’s corresponding really through the social worker of this child, but through that correspondence he finds the meaning of love. There was a pastor who was on an airplane on an international flight and he normally doesn’t watch these movies, but this movie was playing about how this man finds meaning and love that he never had through this child. And when the movie was over, this pastor heard sobbing all around. And do you know who was sobbing? It was all these old business-types, men. You might expect some women; they tend to do that more, but not old curmudgeon business-types. But these guys were crying because they realized something about their lives, they were meaningless. They didn’t know what love was. They were pursuing the brass ring and that’s all they had and it got to them. These are the things that Jesus ransoms us from.
Sin is very specific; we have ways of thinking, we have addictions, we have all kinds of problems in our heart. We might think that we’re basically free people who choose to do whatever we want but a moment’s reflection, everyone of us has habits which we cannot break, do we not? I have some; some of the less serious ones are like TV. You know, you walk by the TV and you turn it on, it’s like it kind of pulls on you. Or you walk by the refrigerator…what’s in here? We are all addicted to something, we all have problems and we find freedom in Christ. Jesus came to give a ransom for many. Again I love the disciples because they could be taught, over a long period of time, and John did learn this…how great is the love that God has given us, He’s lavished upon us. We know what love is because love is what Jesus did for us, giving His life as a ransom for many.
But not only did Jesus ransom us from this, He also gave us a pattern for our lives as well. It is a remarkable statement that he makes. “For the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” Those of you who will be great in the kingdom are to be servants and slaves of all…a pattern for living. I think we’ve heard all this before but what does that mean practically? Well, it means that in our lives we live knowing that we’re not the point, that it’s not about us. It means to put others first and you know that takes some suffering. It means putting our needs second and that hurts. I think when Jesus talks about giving his life and that being a pattern for our life we might think sometimes that we need to go get in front of a firing squad or something. Maybe we will someday, who knows? The way the world goes, in certain countries that might be true. But in daily life, the sacrifice being talked about is putting others first and that hurts enough.
I think about marriage, I tend to when I do marriage counseling I try to get people’s attention. A lot of times when couples come for marriage counseling, they are so full of love for one another that they’re not really listening to you. Actually I tell them that they ought to come back in six months because they will hear me better. But I open up to that famous scripture in Ephesians 5 which says “Wives, submit to your husbands.” And that usually gets at least the wives’ attention and steam comes out of their ears at times. But I do it for a reason, because I believe that passage has been roundly misunderstood. Because if you read the whole thing, it beings with, “Submit to one another, out of reverence for Christ.” It’s about both submitting. And we misunderstand the word submission, because in human beings, particularly in modern contexts, when we hear the word submission we think of subservience. It’s right out of this passage in Mark 10: “You’ve heard that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them.” That’s what we think of when we hear this word submission. But I believe that it’s really saying serve like Jesus served.
“The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” And that passage really means serve one another, put the other first. Marriages that work are when the two over time begin to learn to serve one another. Now, in any human relationship that’s an ongoing process. And if you’re like me, I’ve learned 10% of it, I’m working on 11, maybe not even that. But that’s what it’s about. When people get married, they’re thinking about themselves most of the time, whether consciously or unconsciously they’re thinking, “What am I going to get out of this relationship? What can this person do for me?” When it’s really about, “What can I do for the other person? Because God has rigged it that we get most often when we give and so the idea is to give and to serve the other person. A very practical thing, but it’s hard.
You know, it’s true in churches as well. I’ve been going to a lot of meetings in the past month or two and they’ve reminded me that our denomination, the Presbyterian Church, is very ill. A lot of healthy individual churches, but the denomination is ill. And what I mean by that is over the past 40 years, since the mid 1960’s we have lost an average of 40,000 members a year. We’ve lost half of our membership over the past 40 years and in another 40 years, I don’t know. It hasn’t stopped, we keep thinking it will go down because there aren’t that many churches, but it hasn’t. Our denomination is ill. But why is that happening? For a lot of reasons, it would take me a long time to talk about it…some of its theological, but I think there are some very practical things going on. Churches have forgotten that it’s about serving. Again when we join a church, we join often because it’s about what that church will do for us. And what happens in human circles is we get into a place and we like it or with a group of people we like and it’s hard to look outward instead of inward because we like our people too much. So we forget to look out and serve those on the outside of us. One reason the church exists is to serve others on the outside, not on the inside.
So in the Presbyterian Church, demographically, most of our people are chronologically blessed, they’re older. And that’s not bad except that we’re not bringing in younger folks and so what happens, in churches all across the country, is that people are so comfortable with their own little group that they forget about the folks on the outside. In every Presbytery I’ve ever been in, I’ve been a member of the new church development committee. That’s what we do, we go out looking, trying to start new churches. In almost every Presbytery I’ve ever been in, there have been plans to maybe build a church in a certain community but a little church that’s been there a hundred or two hundred years comes up and objects. They say, “What’s going to happen to us? You’ll take all our members away.” But they haven’t attracted new members in fifty years. It’s about them. We need to put others first, it’s not about us. I’m not particularly talking about Faith, but as a church body, as individuals, we need to put the principle in practice of serving…having an outward mentality instead of an inward one, putting others first over ourselves. That’s how our church will grow, that’s how we’ll grow as people. It’s hard because our natural tendency is to do the opposite, is to take care of number one. It’s almost like a constant vigilance thing; we have to just constantly tell ourselves, “It’s not about us. It’s not about us…it’s about someone else.” Now that doesn’t mean we don’t take care of ourselves as individuals or as a church. We appropriately look after ourselves, we feed ourselves, we do exercise, we have good boundaries, we have all kinds of things. But, in the end, it’s about someone else and not just us.
Again, I love the disciples. I think this was harder for them than learning that God loved them. And it is for us as well. It’s hard for us to know that God loves us; we have to learn that lesson again and again and again. But that’s easier than what I’m about to say…it’s what John says. He says, “For God so loved the world, He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” What’s hard for us is not accepting God’s love as much as it is letting God love others through us. What’s hard for us is letting God love others through us and that’s what it’s about. That’s what being a servant is about, letting God’s love flow through us. As Jesus says, “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.” You need to let God’s love flow through you. This is what life is all about, this is what church is all about, this is what it’s all about…serving, letting God’s love flow through us. It’s not about us. It’s about what God wants in our lives. I just want to encourage you, we all have trouble with this, we all do, but like the disciples we can be taught. In the end, they got it. It took a long time, it did. Do you remember James? James became a martyr. He was the first martyr in the church. And John lived a long time but we see it in his writings again and again. “Let us love, not with words or with tongues but with action and in truth. This is written so that you may believe,” he says. Over and over again he talks about how love flows through him. He learned. We can learn too but we have to be diligent because we often forget. And through it all God does love us. Jesus’ patience is so deep and so wide and so wonderful. But let us seek to be channels of His love that He has given to the world. Let us let God love others through us.
Let us pray… |
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