If you have an iPhone, maybe you have used the virtual assistant it comes with, Siri. If not, I’m sure you have seen friends of yours who are now accustomed to speaking to their phones like they are human beings, giving Siri all sorts of assignments. My sister-in-law had gotten very accustomed to this, until one day when she asked Siri a fairly routine question, and she swears, Siri answered, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that for you right now.” I never really thought Siri was anything like a human assistant until I heard about that moment. It seems that even virtual assistants can drop the ball, and lose track of what they are there for.
Let’s change the scene now to today’s gospel, as the disciples argue on the road about which one of them was the greatest. It isn’t hard to imagine the petty details of this conversation. Maybe it involved who had been there the longest, or who had given the best answers to Jesus’s questions, or who Jesus seemed to like the most the previous day. We think, how could it possibly be the case that they’d be in this kind of an argument just 26 verses after they’ve witnessed the transfiguration, Jesus transformed into a shining vision of white and a voice from heaven and signs that they are on a mission from God? Yet here they are back down in the weeds right away, and when all is said and done, it’s a familiar and very human sight.
For one thing, we know we’ve seen about two thousand years of church leaders jostling one another to see who has what title, and who outranks whom. But we also know that it’s not just them. We might not want to put ourselves forward in a discussion about which one of us is the best Christian disciple, but we know that we have plenty of our own ways of preoccupying ourselves with worries about where we stand and how we’re doing. And that preoccupation, that distraction, and what it does to us, is one of the things this gospel is about. It prevents us, as it prevented the disciples, from saying yes to the work they were really supposed to be doing.
We’re all conditioned to worry about how the world sees us and ranks us, about how our life is turning out compared with other people. It’s almost inevitable in a world where there’s so much competitiveness in everything we do. We might not be obsessed with professional success, or with brand names on our resume, although some of us are at one time or another. But even if we’re not, all of us wonder what our past adds up to in terms of who we are now. Are we where we’re supposed to be? Why hasn’t my career worked out better than it has? Have I made the right decisions? Why don’t I feel as fulfilled in life as I thought I would? Where did I go wrong? The result is that we all get preoccupied with yesterday, the way the disciples were that day, trying to figure out how the score stood at that moment.
Jesus wants us to remember today that this preoccupation turns out to be a barrier for people who are genuinely trying to be servants. Real servants have to put aside everything about yesterday, it just doesn’t exist for them. For a real servant, there is only today, this moment, there is only the situation we face today, the people around us today. The past is not relevant, where we stand and who we are isn’t important, just the same way it can’t be for a servant. When the bell rings a servant is available to answer it as a reflex, without wondering who else ought to be answering, or why now is the time. All a servant knows is that now is the time, there’s no one else whose job it is to answer, and so it’s time to notice what needs doing and to do what’s needed.
Like so many examples that Jesus held up to us, we shouldn’t pretend that this an easy place to get to. First of all, it takes a great deal of trust and faith to put aside whatever we feel about our past, our success and our failure, to accept that where we are is where God has brought us, and that the present is all that matters. And maybe it takes even more prayer and grace to notice when we’re being called on as servants. That’s hard, not because what we’re being called to do is so enormous, but sometimes because it can seem to us so trivial and everyday, not grand assignments for great disciples, but everyday work for servants, as mundane as finding a way to be present for a grieving relative or a lonely outcast or a difficult and annoying friend, or helping out some people who don’t really deserve it.
That is often work that only servants would do, it’s not always so rewarding, we get no points for it, it can be hard to notice those assignments or to embrace them, and yet we do them not just because we have to, but because we are close to Jesus when we do.
Being last of all and the servant of all does not sound very appealing, we’ll fail at it, and sometimes like Siri, we’ll say we’re just not available for that kind of work. But in the end it’s liberating to stop worrying about whether we’re the greatest, or even about whether we’re any good at all, and to realize that being a servant means being free from all that, and that every day we can just ask God what needs to be done.