These words from today's first reading must rank among the most crushing in the Bible – crushing not just because of their brutal directness, but also because the speaker is God. 'Do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them.' Baruch, the person addressed by these words, must have felt well and truly put in his place. He was an assistant to the prophet Jeremiah, and had been complaining about how hard his life was: 'Woe is me! The Lord has added sorrow to my pain; I am weary with my groaning and I find no rest.' Or, as we might say: 'Things are not working out; things aren't going as well for me as they should. I was made for better things than this...'
'Do you seek great things for yourself?' God asks Baruch. 'Do not seek them.'
Today we celebrate the festival of the apostle St James, one of the first disciples of Jesus. James and Baruch have this in common: they are both memorably rebuked in the Bible for seeking great things for themselves.
We hear about James' experience in today's Gospel, and we'll reflect on it in a moment, but first we might ask whimsically whether James gets fed up with hearing this embarrassing story about himself read out solemnly on his big day every year: if they want to honour me, he might ask, why do they keep digging up that embarrassing episode? Why do they keep rubbing my nose in it?
More seriously, this passage illustrates something very important: the way the Bible portrays the saints 'warts and all'. In this story James and his brother John appear sneaky, manipulative and power-hungry, with no real understanding of what Jesus is seeking to do. This tells us that on saints' days we don't celebrate people who were born shining with holiness and then went on to live lives of effortless perfection. The good news is that the saints that the Church celebrates were made of the same unpromising, confused, mixed-up material as you and me. That's why we can celebrate them: if God was able to make something wonderful, something Christlike, out of their lives, he can do the same with you, he can do the same with me.
Back to James and his brother John, and today's Gospel. Along with the other disciples, they are with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem. His movement seems to be coming to a head, with all kinds of expectations swirling around. What exactly is Jesus aiming to achieve? One very natural hope is that he will bring in a real kingdom, a new political order sweeping away the unjust rule of the Romans and of the Jewish powers-that-be.
James and John, as good sons of Israel, long for this day and they want to be in the thick of the action, right beside Jesus; they want to stake their claim to high office in the new order. It's a natural ambition. They have been with Jesus from the beginning; they were among the first people he called; they are very close to him. They love the prospect of his kingdom (as they understand it) and they want to be at the heart of it, making it happen. They want to be at Jesus' right and left hand when he establishes his kingdom.
So they go to Jesus with their mother and she asks Jesus to reserve this special status for her sons, this special share in his greatness. We don't know whether it's their mother's initiative, pushing her boys forward, or whether they get her to ask the question for them. Either way, James and John certainly do this out of earshot of the other disciples, because they know that the others won't be amused.
And what does Jesus say in response? It's one of those many moments when he is disappointed by the failure of his disciples to grasp what he's really about. He has already told the disciples more than once that he is going up to Jerusalem to suffer and to die; he spoke of this immediately before this episode with James and John. And they just don't seem able to hear this. So he explains again. 'You don't understand what you're asking for', Jesus says. 'I am going to suffer – to drink a cup of suffering – do you want to suffer with me; can you share that cup?' 'Of course we can', they say. But they don't know what they are talking about.
Then the other disciples do hear about what James and John have asked Jesus, and they are furious. A great row breaks out: egos in conflict all over the place. Just like we all know about at work, in our family, our club, our church. Familiar, depressing stuff. Egos in conflict, grasping after high standing, craving status.
James and John seek great things for themselves. We could say, putting it more charitably, that they want to share in the greatness of Jesus. The trouble is that they don't understand the greatness of Jesus.
So Jesus gets all the disciples together and he talks to them about greatness. If you want to know what it means to be truly great, he says, you have to un-learn a great deal. You have to un-learn the lessons about greatness you have absorbed from your earliest days. You have learnt that to be great you have to get hold of power and control other people. But I want you to be part of the new thing I am bringing into being, the new human reality. You spoke about my kingdom. Well, in my kingdom greatness is not about getting other people to fulfil your aims, but about becoming a servant and letting go of your life for the sake of others, so that they might live more fully. If you want to know what that means, look at me, says Jesus. I am not among you as a master controlling you but as a servant, letting go of my life moment by moment for your sakes. In the coming days you will see this at its fullest as I totally let go of my life, I lay it down, I die, as a 'ransom for many', to bring life and freedom for the world.
That is greatness, re-defined by Jesus. That is the greatness of Jesus, and it is also the greatness of God; because if Jesus is God in human flesh, in Jesus we see the greatness of God in a human life. God shows his greatness by becoming a servant and giving his life for the sake of the world. That is the greatness of God, the greatness at the heart of all things.
And as those who bear the name of Christ we are called to share in this kind of greatness. I spoke earlier of how James might grow tired of hearing this embarrassing episode re-told again and again. But perhaps he would recall it with good-humoured gratitude as a key moment in the painful but liberating process into which Jesus called him: the process of being set free from wrong, imprisoning ideas about ourselves and about God, and being released to live with a new understanding of life, a new understanding of what it means to be truly great.
We celebrate James today because he did re-learn what it means to be great. This encourages us to believe that we can too. James did un-learn his instinctive beliefs about power and greatness. Along with his brother John and the other disciples, James learnt that the Jesus who laid his life down as a ransom for many was also raised to life by the Father, to show that the way of the suffering servant is the way of true greatness and the way to life. James followed that way and some years later he did drink the cup of suffering that Jesus spoke of. In today's reading from the Acts of the Apostles we heard how James laid his life down as a faithful disciple, put to the sword by King Herod, dying as one of the martyrs of the early church. So he did come to share in the greatness of Jesus, but this was a quite different greatness from what James had in mind when he, John and their mother came to Jesus with their request.
Do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them.
Instead, seek to be like God, the God we know in Jesus Christ, who did not seek great things for himself, but laid his life down to bring life to others.
Revd David Marshall