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.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Right and Left →

The capture of one of the most notorious drug loads—leader of the Sinaloa Cartel—El Chapo, Joaquin Guzman made global headlines. Guzman was captured without the firing of a single bullet. This was quite a feat given that he kept an arsenal of weapons around him at all times: semi-automatic rifles, hand-grenades, rocket-launchers, and other weapons of mass-destruction. Yet, he was completely caught off guard when police arrested him in his home in the early dawn just over two years ago. He escaped not five months later by creating a tunnel from his shower. While the media hailed his capture and re-capture in January 2016 as a huge success in the fight against drug trafficking, most citizens in Mexico are less sure. There is little confidence that Guzman’s capture will slow the traffic or violence of the drug trade and its cartels, which for many seems an intractable feature of Mexican life.

The moral depravity of the real-life drug cartels has often been fictionalized in television and film. Whether the popular television show Breaking Bad or the 2007 film No Country for Old Men (adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy), the violence intertwined with the illegal drug trade has often been used as a metaphor for exploring the underbelly of evil just below the surface of ‘civilized’ life. Specifically, it is a force that seems to advance without end or solution. The recent news about heroin epidemics and overdoses in typically ‘middle-American’ towns is a chilling example. Given the chaotic elements inherent in addiction and violence, it is understandable how a kind of nihilistic despair can take hold. As the sheriff laments in the film No Country for Old Men:

“I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they would have operated these times. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, “O.K., I’ll be part of this world [emphasis mine].”(1)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Reordering Darkness →