Back when I was growing up in Chicago there was an archbishop who was known to be a very autocratic and difficult personality. He didn’t take criticism from anyone, and if you were an official who questioned his authority you would quickly find yourself assigned to the outer reaches of Chicagoland where no one wanted to go. When he died, his funeral was big news, and a local priest was quoted anonymously in the newspaper about the archbishop’s career: “His only desire was to serve the Lord,” he said. And then, after a pause, “of course, in an advisory capacity.”
Today’s gospel has something for all of us about what it means to have authority, and not just in the church. James and John are the two disciples here who want to be seen as Christ’s left- and right-hand men, and unfortunately we don’t know very much about their personalities or what made them the type of people who would want this. Some commentators observe that back when they were recruited from being fishermen they seemed to have actual employees and bigger boats than the others, so maybe they saw themselves as somehow a cut above the other disciples. Or maybe there isn’t a reason, this is just human nature. Maybe if you put any 12 people in a room, and I hate to say it but maybe especially 12 men, sooner or later there would be some attempt to establish a pecking order, some way of making decisions and being together that would make some people more powerful and influential than the others. Whatever the case, it’s clear that at least a couple of these disciples who thought they had left everything behind to follow Jesus had a few desires that they hadn’t left entirely behind.
And so Jesus tells them and us that being an actual leader is completely different from the way it was envisioned by anyone. There weren’t any models for what Jesus was trying to describe here, the Roman Empire certainly wasn’t organized with the idea that a leader was a servant of all, the Jewish temple was not organized that way, and I doubt if anyone’s fishing business was. Even now, we don’t understand how what Jesus was saying could possibly work. I mean, how could any place function if everyone’s opinion mattered, if everyone’s needs and desires for the future were to be taken into consideration. We think, of course there needs to be someone in charge if anything is going to get done, of course some people know more about undertaking particular tasks than other people. And so we have systems, we think, to put the best people in charge, or at least the ones who want the most to be in charge.
But Jesus is trying to tell us that life for his followers involves taking a different view of the world. It’s as if Jesus is saying that there are deep connections in this world among everyone in it that leaders tend to forget about. We all have a tendency to forget that a system that is working well for us might be failing for someone else. Especially for people at the top, it’s very rare to see a sense of deep obligation to the people who aren’t there in the inner circle. Instead there are insiders and outsiders, and the outsiders can be demonized, or criticized for not having bettered themselves, but mostly they are just forgotten.
But for Jesus, everyone is connected, children are as important as adults, the poor as important as the rich, slaves as important as their masters, the outsiders as important as the insider. Everything and everyone is connected, everyone is part of Christ’s body, and the trick is to find ways to live as if we believe that.
To be honest, it’s a little bit of a contradiction to talk about this way of seeing the world in our Catholic Church, because the church is very hierarchical, with lots of titles and honors and special clothing that tell you exactly who is at whose right hand. But the church is the one place we are not ever supposed to lose this sense that we are all connected in one body, everyone equal in dignity and in God’s eyes. I don’t know if you have noticed anything in the news about Pope Francis’s attempt to get everyone in our church to remember this. But for the next three years he is asking the church throughout the world to talk together about where the church is going, where the Holy Spirit is now leading it. He is not turning the church into a democracy, but he is turning it into a single body, where its leaders acknowledge that listening to those they are supposed to serve is fundamental to a living church. People who do not have important positions in the community may be exactly the ones who can see the course for the future, even people who now see themselves on the outside of this church are supposed to be listened to, since they too might be people who can help show us the way forward.
Pope Francis is calling this movement he wants in the church synodality, and of course leave it to the church to choose a word literally no one knows to market something important. But it basically means being on a road together, which is how he wants us to picture how the church is going to prepare for what is next. Moving forward, talking with one another as a group, not being afraid of anything that the people of God together will recognize is what’s needed. There is supposed to be a process for this in our local diocese sometime in the next year, although details are not really available yet about how it will all work. Whatever happens, though, this next year or two are a good time for us to reflect on what our hopes are for the church that is to come, what our sources of hope for the future are going to be. If you think that isn’t your business, that it’s up to the people in charge, what we see in today’s gospel is that leadership in the church is a servant leadership, the people in charge are asked to be one with us, talking together, asking the Spirit to reveal the way forward through a community where all of us are only servants of one another.