A mother bowed before Jesus with a request. Her sons were under the tutelage of the rabbi who was stirring the city with words of another kingdom, and she wanted to assure them a place. Kneeling, she uttered, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”(1)

This exchange I remember well, and I confess, often with an air of superiority. What a silly concern. The overzealous mother, and the sons who seemed to be standing in the wing as she asked, were rightly told they didn’t quite get it. Jesus’s response seemed to be aimed at both mother and sons alike: “You don’t know what you are asking,” he said to them. Christ had come to be a servant, humbling himself as a sacrifice. For a people who didn’t understand, he came to show the way. “Can you drink the cup I am going to drink?” Jesus asked them. “We can,” they answered, still having no idea what was coming, much less what they had just agreed they could drink. The right and left seats were the least of their worries.

Author Donald Miller once realized that the right and left seats beside Jesus were also the least of his worries. He wittily explains how he never pictured himself as bothering with the seats of honor or the politics of heaven, and considered himself the better for it. In a moment of honesty, he realized he just wasn’t all that interested. He pictured himself more readily being off somewhere on a remote and rolling hillside, exploring, or fishing, or maybe even napping. The seats of honor could be given to someone else. Miller eventually realized this might not be the most corrective option.

I suspect many of us hold similar pictures. Sure, we follow Jesus, but are at times unconcerned with how closely we follow, indifferent about the gap between his steps and ours, so long as we are at least claiming to follow. At times we are probably much more like James and John than we want to admit—unaware and incorrect. Perhaps to our casual wish to be uninvolved with seats and honors in heaven, Jesus would say the same to us: “You don’t know what you’re saying.” Maybe we don’t always get it either.

The request that her sons sit on the right and left of Christ was not so absurd in the sense that we sometimes read it. Their desire to remain as close to Christ as possible was by no means the problem—and in this sense James and John understand a great deal more than those who lag behind. It was not their affection, but their assumption that Jesus challenged. To be given a position of honor in the kingdom, they believed they had to hold a position of great importance on earth—exercising authority and excelling in leadership. Gathering the twelve together, Jesus corrected these common beliefs with foreign words: Whoever wants to become great must become a servant; whoever wants to be first must become a slave. Then he concluded, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to give his life as a ransom for many.”(2)

Christ desires that we would love him as he first loved us, following after him as a friend and not as an acquaintance, nor as a political figure. “Greater love has no one than this,” he told his disciples, “that someone lay down his life for his friends.”(3) In James and John was indeed a quality God seeks. They longed to be with the Father, such that they turned their minds around when the Son told them they weren’t understanding. Like all of the disciples, they followed Christ to their deaths, becoming servants to the world they longed to reach, laying down their lives for the one they longed to follow. Christ invites us to come, not with dragging feet or minds of indifference, but as friends of the Most High.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Matthew 20:21b.

(2) Matthew 20:28.

(3) John 15:13.

 

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