The True GOAT, and True Service: Sunday Reflection

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This morning’s Gospel reading is Mark 9:30–37:

Jesus and his disciples left from there and began a journey through Galilee, but he did not wish anyone to know about it. He was teaching his disciples and telling them, “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.” But they did not understand the saying, and they were afraid to question him.

They came to Capernaum and, once inside the house, he began to ask them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they remained silent. They had been discussing among themselves on the way who was the greatest. Then he sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them, “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” Taking a child, he placed it in their midst, and putting his arms around it, he said to them, “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but the One who sent me.”

We humans love ranks. We argue incessantly over who deserves to be known as the GOAT in sports, for instance — the greatest of all time. Not too long ago, that topic heated up in football as Tom Brady flirted with and then finally embraced retirement as an NFL quarterback. After this baseball season, Shohei Ohtani may be the center of similar arguments, and maybe next season if the Dodgers put him on the mound, as rumored.

For the most part, we have these debates as a form of entertainment, and rarely about ourselves in that context. I mean, I could maybe build an argument that I’m the best singer ever to perform in a moving vehicle, but many people who have been in my car will disagree … some of them vehemently. But ambition and vanity are seductive, and when we take ourselves too seriously, we can fall into blinding pride and lose perspective on our proper relationship with the Lord.

Today’s Gospel provides us another glimpse of the seductive nature of pride from the lives of the disciples themselves. In another Gospel passage (Matthew 20:20-28 as well as Mark 10:35-45), we read about the mother of James and John demanding that Jesus place her sons in positions of privilege, which causes no small amount of consternation among the others. In this passage, the debate over the ranking of disciples appears to have been more universal.

Rather than issue a sharp rebuke, Jesus gently teaches them a lesson about how the Lord judges. Taking a child — a person of no real social power — Jesus offers them a new consideration in “ranking.” He suggests that the child outranks all of them, and that they are called to serve the child rather than the other way around. 

Of course, this wasn’t the context of the debate between the disciples. They had presumably argued about which of them was the greatest student of Jesus, not the greatest person. But Jesus resets the context of their focus in an important way in this lesson. The disciples are called to serve, not to be served and not to attain glory for themselves. It doesn’t matter which of them may have better gifts or oratory, because those gifts come from the Lord in the first place. 

What matters, as Jesus gently teaches, is how we use the gifts He provides to serve others. We can only serve others when we recognize our own poverty in relation to the Lord. We do not have these gifts of our own accord but through Him. That is why we should not use them for our own glory, but for the Lord by serving others through those gifts. 

James reflects on what happens when we begin to become jealous and ambitious in our second reading. Through pride and avarice, we become covetous, and that leads to ruin:

Where do the wars and where do the conflicts among you come from? Is it not from your passions that make war within your members? You covet but do not possess. You kill and envy but you cannot obtain; you fight and wage war. You do not possess because you do not ask. You ask but do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

 This is what happens when we use our gifts to satisfy ourselves rather than serve others. We become ‘of this world,’ and seek to bend it to our own ambition and glory rather than the salvation of others. The fallen world judges on appetites; the Lord judges on love and mercy, being infinitely abundant in both to all of us.

To see the contrast, consider our first reading from Wisdom 2. The fate of the just in this  world is not to be considered the GOAT at all, but the goat in the more traditional sense. Those who profess the love of the Lord and service to all will get tested in this world by wicked people intent on discrediting the Word. It presages the Passion in the final part of the reading:

For if the just one be the son of God, God will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes. With revilement and torture let us put the just one to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience. Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.

Not only does that foreshadow the Passion, it also foreshadows the deaths of most of the Apostles. Almost all of them suffered death at the hands of the wicked on behalf of the Word, killed while trying to profess salvation and forgiveness. We see them now as great, in terms of sainthood, but even then we now recognize that they answered a call from the Lord to serve Christ, who opened the door for salvation. We recognize many saints for their service, mercy, and evangelization. Their glory comes from and through the Lord, and the saints would have been the first to acknowledge that. 

The apostle Paul anticipated and experienced this in his lifetime. In his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 3:3-11), Paul rebuked them for putting the servants ahead of the Master:

³ You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? ⁴ For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings?

⁵ What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. ⁶ I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. ⁷ So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. ⁸ The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their own labor. ⁹ For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.

¹⁰ By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. ¹¹ For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 

So too are we called to His service, but for His sake and that of His children, not ourselves. Our gifts are oriented to the service of His Word and His salvation. Even if those gifts benefit us in this life, it’s meaningless unless we also put them to use in helping God’s children to salvation. The child is our focus and our priority, not our own material ambitions and appetites. As long as we focus on that mission, we are One Body in Christ, without rank or stratification. 

Previous reflections on these readings:

The front page image is “Jesus Christ and His Disciples” by Gérard de Lairesse, c. 1700. On display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Via Wikimedia Commons. 

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.