Christ Church

“What do you want?”

Between Jesus’s statement about going up to Jerusalem and the story of the blind man sitting by the wayside and calling out for mercy, which we heard from Luke several weeks ago near the beginning of Lent, is this story from Matthew about a mother and her two sons coming to Jesus “desiring a certain thing of him.” It is an intriguing and compelling scene and one which speaks directly to the assumptions of our own culture about education and success. Parents and children are in this story precisely in terms of what we think we want for ourselves and for our children.

Jesus draws out of the mother of Zebedee’s children what she wants. What she says reveals what many parents seek for their children, essentially places of privilege, prestige, and prominence. We want our children to get ahead in the world. What that means is getting ahead of others. Putting ourselves ahead of others means putting others down. What is good for us is at the expense of others. It is an old story and yet a present reality manifest in the ways in which parents scheme and plan to influence and manipulate universities and schools to give special consideration to their children; witness the university admissions scandals in the States. Augustine’s parents, too, saw education, as he says, as means to get ahead in the world. He came to think differently.

Jesus asks the mother what she wants but then turns to the sons themselves. What your parents might want for you may not be what you want. Their ambition for your life and future is one thing and may say more about their own ambitions and dreams. The problem is that it is your life and future. What do you want? That may not be the same thing as what your parents want for you. Their hopes and dreams, however well intentioned, may not be your hopes and dreams. And there is the further problem about our own uncertainties. Do we really know what we want? This is the significance of Jesus’s statement to the mother: “Ye know not what ye ask.” We think we know what is best for ourselves and one another but we don’t. He means, I think, that we have not properly examined our thoughts and our desires. He is questioning the idea of gaining advantage over others. The idea of getting ahead implies the domination over others, of putting others down in order for oneself to get ahead. It assumes a dog-eat-dog kind of world, a world of endless competition, a world of conflict and division.

This Gospel story, read in the context of Passiontide, challenges that outlook. In the encounter with her sons, Jesus refers to his Passion and to our participation in its meaning in terms of “drinking the cup that I shall drink of” and being “baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with”. That idea of suffering contrasts with privilege and prestige. This is the point of the reading. We are being taught and shown the idea of service as grounded in sacrifice, the idea of living not simply for ourselves at the expense of one another but of living for and with one another. It counters all of our assumptions about trying to get ahead of others.

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