29th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B October 17, 2021 Mark 10, 35-45 Go Dodgers!! Everyone wants the Dodgers to win, wouldn’t it be great if we won the World Series two years in a row? I don’t know what happened, but we should have won last night. We’ll win tonight, we better! No wants a loser, we all want to be first, to be best, to be biggest, the most important, richest and smartest. When I think of St. Mary’s I think, are we the biggest church in Whittier? Do we have more people than St. Bruno’s or St. Gregory’s. I want the best music, I want you to say, “We’ve got the best priests.” Like the Dodgers we aspire to greatness. We want to be the best. No one puts a bumper sticker on their car, “My son is a C average at Whittier Middle School.” No one gets too excited about second place trophies. We strive to be above, to be over others. We don’t want to be below; we don’t want people to walk over us. That is why Jesus’ message is so hard for us. Jesus is very much unlike us. We know that Jesus is human like us in all things, but he is also God. But our idea of what it means to be human and even to be God is very much unlike Jesus’ idea. We aspire for greatness, but Jesus aspired to smallness. His idea of what it means to be God means to be emptied out. This is the paradox of the Christian faith. We have an almighty God creator of heaven and earth. He took on our lowly state, being born not only like us, but like the least of us. Our second reading the Letter to the Hebrews reaches for this paradox. We have a “great” “high” priest. But he was strangely compassionate, fragile, and subject to the very trials we abhor. The first reading from the prophet Isaiah warned of the fact. This savior would be afflicted, would suffer, and would even bear guilt. We want no afflictions, no suffering, and will admit no culpability. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who was tempted in every way that we are, yet never sinned.” (Hebrews 4:14) This is a strange indeed. Like Zebedee’s sons, we aspire to sit at his right and left, but we do not know what we are asking for. It is a cup of pain and suffering. It is an emptying-out. It is a descending. The great joke on us is that the mighty God above goes down below, even below us, proud of ourselves for not needing anything other than ourselves. What would it be like if we exercised our above-ness, our power like the God that we profess to believe in? “You know how among the Gentiles those who exercise authority lord over it them: their great ones make their importance felt. It cannot be like that with you. Anyone among you who aspires to greatness must serve the rest; whoever wants to rank first among you must serve the needs of all. The Son of Man has not come to be served but to serve—to give his life as a ransom for many.” People in authority—even the churchly kind—may love exercising it. But they mistake the authority, the above-ness of God. If we feel excluded from authority, we may crave it. But we misunderstand the authority of Jesus. Those who are above should go below. So it was and is with our God. Those who are below need not hunger for the heights. We need only enter more deeply into what we are, our humanness, to receive from the One above the message that even in our smallness the grandeur of love is revealed. Yes, I want the Dodgers to win this afternoon. I want them to win the series and go on to the world series and of course be back-to-back champions. But I say this thinking like Patrick not like Jesus. As followers of Jesus if we aspire to greatness, we need to be the servant; if we wish to be first among, we need to be the slave of all. Jesus did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many."