Friends, the world is a mess, and who of us wouldn’t love the opportunity to put it all in order? To make things right? After all, everyone wants to live in a just society shaped by lasting peace and prosperity for all, but no one in the history of the world has ever been able to build such a society. And if the world is a mess, so too is the Church as we know all too well.
So imagine what might happen if the wisest and most noble of us had absolute power just for a while to govern all things well and make the best possible arrangements for organizing human affairs everywhere into an ever more perfect union, both in civil society and in the Church. Wouldn’t that clear up the mess?
Nope. Not for an instant. And in fact, for anyone to have such mastery even temporarily would in the end only make things worse because the will to power never leads to justice and peace. Not after man’s Fall from God’s grace.
Because of the reality of sin in every life, the will to power, even among those with the best of intentions, eventually leads to oppression and coercion, and that is why the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.
This should not have come as a surprise to those who awaited the Messiah, but it did. Hear again the words of the Prophet Isaiah from today’s first reading: “Because of his affliction, he shall see the light in fullness of days; through his suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear.”
The Scriptures taught us that the Anointed One was never going to be a conquering hero who would cast down the Roman Empire and restore the throne of David to Jerusalem, but the yearning for exactly that arrangement was too strong even for the Twelve to resist, just as it remains a temptation for us.
That is why James and John approached the Lord Jesus with this request: “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.” In other words, if Jesus was going to restore the Kingdom of David to Israel, then the sons of Zebedee wanted to assist Christ the King in his new realm as the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer.
And why not? They knew the Savior well; they loved and served him truly. And even if they wanted a little recognition of their status, perhaps just to make their mama proud, they sought first the Kingdom of God and his glory and they hoped for a new and just social order in which all people could flourish. Who else should sit beside Christ the King?
But James and John did not yet understand the nature of Christ’s Kingdom and the means by which which it would be established, and so he said to them: “You do not know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?”
In their bravado, James and John boldly answered: “We can.” And it turns out that they would indeed share in that cup and in that baptism, just not as they then imagined. For the only cup of salvation is the cup of suffering, and the baptism of Christ to eternal life in the Kingdom of God is a baptism in his blood.
When the other Apostles caught on to the power play of the Sons of Thunder, they were outraged, and whether we picture the squabbling of the Twelve as tragedy or comedy, it is a sorry spectacle. But this dispute offered Christ the opportunity to teach them a salutary truth, as we read in the Gospel today:
“You know that those who are recognized as rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, 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.”
The Lord Jesus would return to this theme at his Last Supper when he washed the feet of the Twelve and insisted they must follow his example of servant leadership to fulfill their vocation in the Church. In that same night, Christ gave the Apostles his Body and Blood as the medicine of immortality, and he changed the Passover of Israel into the Eucharist of the Church, commanding the Apostles and their successors to “do this in memory of me.”
The next day, Good Friday, the perfect sacrifice of Christ the King and eternal high priest of the New Covenant was then fulfilled on the altar of the Cross, an offering foreseen by the Prophet Isaiah: “If he gives his life as an offering for sin, he shall see his descendants in a long life, and the will of the Lord shall be accomplished through him.”
And that is why the Letter to the Hebrews teaches us in the second lesson: “Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. 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 for timely help.”
But two thousand years after James and John made a power play in the Church, the temptation to do the same remains with us in several forms, and the will to power can manifest itself even in ways that at first seem to be gentle and loving.
For example, various parties in the Church have sought for many decades to change the doctrine of our faith on the Sacraments of Holy Matrimony and Holy Orders and on the foundational principles of moral and dogmatic theology to suit the spirit of the age.
And those who advocate these doctrinal deviations argue that this will make the Gospel more credible and the Church more appealing to people of our time, an argument being advanced even now at the synod in Rome by some theologians and priests and, sadly, not a few bishops, especially from the exhausted and dying churches of old Europe.
But no matter what the motive of those who propose such changes, seeking to alter the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints is to seek dominion over divine revelation and to lord it over the Gospel itself, and that may be the most destructive of all the forms of the will to power.
When anyone in the Church seeks to overturn the ancient rule of faith in favor of their own supposed higher wisdom or new paradigm, that is nothing but the will to power at work among us to the ruin of all, even when that power play is disguised as charity and mercy and perhaps especially when it is disguised as charity and mercy.
The Gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, and so Saint Paul warned the Church that anyone, including an angel, who preached a doctrine contrary to the Gospel revealed by Jesus Christ would be accursed.
Whether in the name of walking together with others, of dialoging with unbelievers, or of accommodating the sensibilities of the post-modern world, we cannot falsify the Word of God without doing violence to the Church, making shipwreck of our faith, and risking the salvation of our souls.
Yes, the world is a mess, and so is the Church. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob knew from all eternity that it would be so, and yet he still created us out of love. The misuse of human freedom cannot be prevented or undone by any exertion of human will or invention of human intelligence, even by the wisest among us and for the best of reasons.
Instead, the only cure for sin and the chaos it brings to our lives is divine sacrifice and mercy, and the only remedy for the lawlessness of our hearts is the transformation of our lives by faith, hope, and love which are gifts of grace from the Redeemer of the world to his disciples.
Friends, the will to power is not and never will be a path to happiness or holiness, and neither worldly glory nor the power to alter the Gospel lead to liberty or peace. Instead, those blessings are found only in the Way of the Cross. Our deliverance from the will to power and all the other deceits of the Enemy is found only in the death and Resurrection of the Word made flesh, because the divine Messiah alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life: the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the text of my homily for 20 October 2024, the 29th Sunday of the Year.
Fr Jay Scott Newman