Today, I get to see my beautiful and brilliant granddaughter, Brigid. I
wrote this when she was eight. She is now a college graduate—Michigan State University—and
starting a PhD at The University of Chicago. This is another “essay” from an
unpublished manuscript called Stealing
Donkeys and Other Ways of Serving the Master.
James
and John said to Jesus, “Hey, we’ve got a deal for you.” “So what is it?” said
Jesus. “Well, when you’ve made it all the way to the top, we want to share the
props and perks, one of us sitting on your right, the other one on your left.”
Jesus said, “You don’t have a clue. Can you drink from my cup, take my
baptism?” “Sure,” said James and John. “You’re right about that,” said Jesus. “You
will drink from that cup and receive that baptism, but the right and left hand
places, those aren’t mine to say. They’re already spoken for.”
When
the rest of the gang heard about it, they were mad at James and John. So Jesus
called them and said, “You know with the Gentiles, how the ones they elect to
lead then lord it over them and act like they’re entitled to do anything they
want? That’s not our way. If you want to be a great leader, you have to be a
humble servant. Whoever wants to be first has to be last, a slave to everybody.
The Son of Man didn’t come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a
ransom for many.” (Mark 10:35-45, VSR) (Also Matthew 20:20-28, in which their
mother asks for the best places for James and John.)
Our
eight-year-old granddaughter, Brigid Mary, is into competitive loving. If you
say to her “I love you,” she replies, “I love you more.” Recently she and her
mother had been escalating the stakes.
“I love
you, Brigid, more than I love chocolate.”
“That’s
nothing; I love you more than I love Barbie dolls.”
“Well,”
said Katie, “I love you more than pigs love slop.”
Then
Brigid played her trump card, the game-ender.
“I love
you more,” she told her mother, “than Grandpa loves me.”
“That’s
her gold standard,” her mother said later as she told me this story. “She can’t
conceive of anybody being able to top how much you love her.”
Brigid
is right, of course. No one has ever been loved by anyone more than she is
loved by me. Of course, that can correctly and accurately be said by many
grandmas and grandpas, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters.
It
bothers my wife when Brigid says “I love you more.” She thinks that love should
not be a competitive sport. It should just be…well, love. She’s not sure where
Brigid picked up the idea of competitive loving.
Actually,
we’ve always been mystified by where she learns things. Once, when she was two,
the plumber was working in their basement. Without her mother’s knowledge,
Brigid went down to observe. When she came back up she said, “Things weren’t
going too well down there, so I said ‘damn’ for him.”
“Brigid,
where did you learn that word? At pre-school?”
No,
she didn’t think it was at pre-school, or any of the other places her mother
suggested. Finally, she said, “It must have been at the Grandma and Grandpa
house. They were just sitting around saying ‘damn.’”
Now
there are two problems with that tale. One is that when Brigid was present,
there was no sitting around. The other is that she hadn’t been there when we
were dealing with the telephone company, but that’s a different story.
I
think some things are just in the air, and ‘damn’ is probably one of them.
Another is this matter of competition. It’s in the very air we breathe. We live
in a competitive ethos. Apparently James and John did, too. They knew they
couldn’t be Numero Uno, but they wanted to be as close to him as they could
get, on his right and left hands. They wanted to share the glory.
Obviously if you’re sitting at the
head table, right beside the guest of honor, you’re expecting the waiters to be
at your beck and call, filling your glass, bringing a different entre’ if you
don’t like the first one. You don’t expect to get up and go to the back of the
room to take water and rolls to those who couldn’t afford the higher priced
tickets, the ones that get you a table up front.
But that’s what
Jesus says you’re supposed to do, to follow his example. You should want
to be first, to be the best, the greatest, the top of the heap, but what that
means is that you’re the best at being the least, the best at taking care of
others, the one who’s best at taking orders instead of giving them. The meaning
of the sacrifice of the cross is that God loves each of us more than any other.
There is always a
competition going on within us, between our best and worst selves. It’s a hard
and uncomfortable battle, and we’re the battlefield. The way we avoid that
internal battle is by “taking it outside,” as they say about arguments in bars.
We replace the necessary internal competition between our best and worst selves
with external competition in sports and business and politics so we don’t have
to deal with the discomfort of the internal competition. It’s a system where
for every winner, there are many losers, and where even if we’re a winner one
time, we’ll be losers many more times.
Jesus not only
encourages us to keep the battle going inside, but he’s there with us, hoping
and helping with our best selves. Jesus doesn’t say competition is bad, just
that we misunderstand its purpose and location. We’re not to be the best so our
worst selves can lord it over others, say “Na-na-nanana” to them, but so our
best selves can say, “I love you more.”
JRMcF
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