Anyone here ever work as a waiter
or waitress? As a chauffeur or maid or
some kind of servant? Did you love
it? Was it great fun? Or did you do it only for the money, and as
soon as a better job came along you grabbed it?
“Gospel” means
“Good News”. But I have a hard time
hearing today’s Gospel as good news.
That is because I am lazy, and I like to be waited on. I don’t want to serve, but rather to be
served. I like going to a restaurant,
have someone else clean the room, someone else cook the food, someone else take
my order and bring the food, and then I especially enjoy getting up and leaving
someone else to do the dishes. Now to
me, that would be good news. But that is
not at all what today’s Gospel calls us to.
The Gospel is
challenging us to go deeper into the issue of service. You see there is service and then there is
service.
There is service
that is rather degrading: that is forced and coerced, that demeans and makes us
less. This is always the case with
slavery, with “involuntary servitude” to put a polite name on it. And that is why, in spite of the teaching of
today’s Gospel, slavery and human trafficking are always moral evils.
But there is also another
kind of service. Not one that degrades,
but one that ennobles.
I will tell you a
little story. My Dad Charlie is 91 years
old. He is still active and lives in the
same house I grew up in. He can do this
because two of my sisters, Barbara and MaryJane, every Saturday get up early
and drive an hour down to where he lives.
They wash the dishes piled in the sink, do the laundry, vacuum the
floor, fix little things that break, throw out stuff my Dad has been hoarding,
and generally clean up. Now one of my
sisters still works, and they have their own families, so they don’t have a lot
of free time. But they choose to use
their Saturday mornings in service of their Father because they want to. Because they love. Service like this is nothing more than love
in action. Practical, actual, love
serves. That is what love does.
This kind of
service does not make us less human, but more human. It is the kind of service we see in the lives
of people like Dorothy Day, Mother Theresa, Pope John XXIII, Martin Luther King
Jr., Kateri Tekawitha and Mother Marianne Kope who are being canonized today, and
all the saints.
In Vatican Council
II, this is what the entire church is called to. The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in
the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes,
begins with these words: “The
joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age,
especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and
hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise
an echo in their hearts.”
In examining this, American
Catholic theologian Paul Lakeland states: “the
Church that bears the name of Christ exists not for its own sake but for the
sake of the world.”
As Church we are
called to serve the world, to be a servant.
Most importantly,
this is the way God serves us in Jesus Christ.
Jesus came not to be served, but to serve, and give his life as a ransom
for many. Jesus did not do this out of
some coercion, being forced to do it.
Rather it was the compulsion of love for us that lead Jesus to
serve. And in this way He raised loving
service of others to the divine. Loving
service of others is not degrading, but is the best of human actions. Indeed, it is God-like.
So, as Jesus
succinctly tells us: “whoever wishes to be great among you will be your
servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all. For the
Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a
ransom for many."
Jesus turns all of
our assumptions about privilege and rank and status upside down - completely
reverses our normal human approach to power and to perks: In the Kingdom of God
power is not for self-aggrandizement, not for self-promotion, not even
self-preservation. Power is for service.
Clearly this is
the mystery of the Cross - that the way to the fullness of life leads through
death: that the way to wholeness and holiness requires letting go of ego and of
dying to self.
Paradoxically,
selfishness and ego are traps. If we
live primarily for ourselves, then we live for something really rather
small. And the more the self turns in on
itself, the more it shrinks, the smaller it grows, till our soul nearly
disappears: no matter how rich, or powerful, or famous we are.
Selfishness is
slavery. Love is freedom. Therefore, “Whoever wishes to be great
among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be
the slave of all.”
Still, that drive
to promote myself ahead of others so clearly shown by James and John in today’s
Gospel, that desire for glory of the sons of Zebedee, is deep, deep, deep in
each of us.
Even now, as I
preach, called to serve you by proclaiming the Gospel, called even more to
serve the Gospel by proclaiming it fearlessly and compellingly, I am at least
as concerned that I will look good, that you will be favorably impressed, that
you will say “Oh, that was a great homily, Father”, that “you really touched my
life,’ and ‘you really made the Gospel come alive”; and I will have the glory
of looking great - and you will like me and affirm me: all that ego stuff - as
much as I want to serve the Gospel and serve you.
Dying to our ego
is difficult. Living a life of service
to others, out of love, is not for sissies or the faint-hearted.
So how do we do
this? We can only do it in Christ. More than our role-model, more than our
teacher, more than our coach, He is our Saviour. He has gone before. He’s been there, done death, been raised to
Life, and now empowers us. He lives in
us, so that we can do it too.
As we heard in
today’s second reading: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to
sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every
way, yet without sin. So let us
confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace in
time of need.” AMEN.
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