Today’s readings: Isaiah 53, 10-11; Hebrews 4, 14-16; Mark 10, 35-45.
As Timothy Radcliffe once said, the Church is deeply fragmented. This is the face of the Church that is emerging from the synod of bishops under way in Rome. It is also what many of us experience concretely in the daily life of our parish communities and where practices of dialogue within the Church are concerned.
This may sound negative. But it is not.
First and foremost, it puts the Church on the map of all other institutions on this planet, itself also in permanent need of reform and internal audit.
Secondly, it corrects the idealistic image of the Church as being above the daily struggles of life. It was the erroneous image of the Church as defined and understood as a ‘perfect society’ after Trent in the 16th century.
We may all remember what Pope Francis told the members of the Roman Curia on the eve of last year’s Christmas when he likened the internal structure of his Curia to the human body, “also exposed to diseases, malfunctioning, infirmity”.
They are diseases and temptations, he said, that weaken our service to the Lord and which need to be acknowledged and healed.
The incident of James and John in today’s gospel, asking to be given a privileged position, as well as the indignant colleagues looking on, demonstrate how the malaises of power struggles and privilege-seeking in faith communities has always infested the Church.
Even within the Church we need to develop and excogitate processes and means of conflict resolution. But not only.
What we read in the first and second readings from the prophet Isaiah and the letter to the Hebrews respectively, completes the picture of what precisely can be the malaise and the remedy at one and the same time.
The petition of James and John shows that the disciples, the 12 of them, continued to understand the glory of Jesus to mean some kind of messianic coup. They were simply lobbying for positions, prestige and power in what they thought would be a new regime substituting the old one.
The kind of leadership Jesus was proposing was different and the remedy Jesus was excogitating for the prima donna syndromes or for overcoming discord within the faith communities was completely out of this world.
‘Out of this world’ does not necessarily mean unrealistic or completely unattainable.
The letter to Hebrews says: “For it is not as if we had a high priest who was incapable of feeling our weaknesses with us.”
The prophet Isaiah, addressing a people in exile and crushed by a vacuum of leadership as well as the loss of identity and faith, speaks of a suffering leader who will take the people’s faults on himself.
This is the lesson Jesus gives to the confused Twelve when he delineates a style of leadership and authority that in no way matched their views: “Anyone who wants to become great among you must be your servant; for the Son of Man himself did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”.
These words are the key to the right perspective of what the Church is about, of the gift Jesus meant the Church and every disciple of his to be for others. As disciples of Jesus we are called not just to be promoters of harmony, but to be harmony itself.
It is natural that we are fragmented, with different opinions and visions that are only the expression of the DNA of our being in the world and humans.
But it is divine that that diversity enhances harmony, rather than conflicts, ambitions, and ego trips that perennially put us at the centre rather than the Lord of true life.