Canon Nick Ralph

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The famous Dutch priest and theologian, Henri Nouwen, once said: "The long painful history of the church is the history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led".

Both our readings this morning present us with that different attitude to power.

In Isaiah, we heard one of the more well-known suffering servant discourses. It is almost impossible for us as Christians, not to read this as a prophecy about Jesus Christ, but that cannot have been, and was not quite the way that this post exilic, passage from Deutero-Isaiah, would have been understood for the 500 years or so after it was written, before the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ. It would have sounded different to them and characterised a servant of supreme holiness, greater than any single Israelite of the past. This servant would carry infirmities for others in himself, would be wounded because of others, and yet keep silent. And yet also this servant would ‘out of anguish see light’, and ‘make many righteous’. Therefore, Yahweh would reward him with a portion with the great. It may look like he had lost everything when, in fact, he would have won everything, everything that matters, that is.

In the gospel we have the disciples feuding after James and John ask Jesus for special treatment. First, they say ‘grant anything we want’ as if Jesus were a genie granting three wishes. He didn’t immediately say, no. He just asked what they wanted. They told him, and Jesus responded first by saying they didn’t know what they were asking; secondly by saying yes, they would drink the cup he would drink anyway; and thirdly, that no they could not have what they wanted. There was no quibbling - a straight question earned them a straight and brutal answer. This then led Jesus into the comment about being a servant – in the Greek, the first word is Diakonos, our word for Deacon. All clergy are ordained Deacon, I am a deacon, and then many but not all are later ordained priest, as I was. Last week we had the great announcement that Jonathan Frost is to be our new Bishop of Portsmouth. He has been consecrated as a bishop, but he remains also a deacon and a priest. They do not cease. Servanthood is the foundation of all ministry. Together they make up the threefold order of ordained ministry, but they are not the totality of ministry. Ministry can be multiple and various, and God calls different people to different things. Not all of them require a collar; most of them don’t.

Jesus then went further and said not just that they should be a servant but on this second time, that whoever wishes to be first must be like a slave, Doulos in Greek, an even humbler state than a servant. The direction, the idea, is clear. It is all about service of others and there are many ways in which we can follow such an example

Let me end with a brief story. A well-dressed European woman was on safari in Africa. The group stopped briefly at a hospital for lepers. The heat was intense, the flies buzzing. She noticed a nurse bending down in the dirt, tending to the pus-filled sores of a leper. With disdain the woman remarked, "Why, I wouldn't do that for all the money in the world!"

The nurse quietly replied, "Neither would I."