Fr Marco Lazzaron
he question posed by Zebedee’s sons to Jesus, in the most decisive stretch of his journey towards passion, will certainly have resonated in his ears, but above all in his heart: “another failure”. It seems that Jesus is preaching to the wind! The very people who share his life daily have not understood anything about him, or perhaps refuse to understand. The deafness and hardness of the hearts of his disciples and the rest of his contemporaries must have weighed on Jesus’s soul as one of the worst temptations, that of giving up everything. Would they have finally understood that he would have said and given everything when hanging between heaven and earth on the infamous scaffold of the cross, dying in that exaggerated embrace? For Jesus, it is worth the try and he hardens his face even more, while Jerusalem gets closer and closer.
The question of James and John reveals their attachment to the logic of the world, a certain selfishness mixed with presumption makes them ask and, in some way, expect the Master to do for them what they ask of him. But Jesus tries to relaunch, offering them the possibility of reviewing the trajectory of their desires: “You do not know what you are asking”. It is liberating to think about how God is never discouraged, when he still sees us as closed and narrow-minded in our small interests, perhaps because we are still unaware that we are destined for a love much greater than what we can imagine. Perhaps we too, like James and John, think we already know where true happiness is, but the Master continues to surprise us, reminding us that happiness does not lie in what increases one’s prestige or gets us the best recognition. And not even in feeling safe from pain, safe from the unexpected events and storms of life, but rather when we can embrace and make our own the style of the Son of Man, who “did not come to be served, but to serve and give one’s life as a ransom for many”.
Here is the most surprising definition that Jesus gives of himself. He does not hold the world at his feet, he kneels at the feet of his creatures. Let’s think about what it means to have a God who is our servant. Jesus overturns the traditional image of God, giving it a stunning beauty: we were created to be loved and served by God! God exists for you, to love you, to serve you, to know you, to be amazed by you, by this unpredictable, free, and fragile child that each one of us is.