TRANSLATION MATTHEW 20:20

Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to him with her sons, going down on her knees to ask him for something. He speaks to her and says, “What do you want?”

She says, “Tell me that they’ll sit, my two sons, one or your right and one on your left in your kingdom!”

Jesus answered , “You don’t know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup that I must drink?”

They say to him, “We can.”

He says to them,”Yes, you can drink my cup, but to sit on my right and on my left is not mine to give. But it is for those for whom it has been made ready by my father.”

Now when the ten heard about this, they were filled with anger at the two brothers. But Jesus called them together and said, ” You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their great men wield power over them. It must not be like that amongst you! But if someone wants to be great amongst you, he must be your servant; and if someone wants to be first amongst you, he must be your slave- just as the Son if Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his soul as the price for the liberation of many.”

The present tenses in this narrative may be classed as historic presents making it vivid; or maybe as an ecclesiastical present making the story part of the present communal life of the Christian assembly: ambitious people in the assembly should hear Jesus speaking to them now.

As noted in my last blog, Matthew spares the reputation of famous pupils of Jesus by attributing this request to a typical mother’s ambition for her sons ( “My boys, the Judges of Israel”) whereas Mark names James and John as ambitious. The key phrase in Jesus reply is that she doesn’t know what she’s asking. He is again identifying himself as someone rejected and killed; only as such is he also the promised Son of man, the bringer of God’s Rule. She, and her sons, are wrongly dividing this dual aspect of his identity. He can offer a share in his suffering, beyond which all such issues are in the hand of his father. They will judge Israel but only along with all the faithful pupils.

The severity of the discourse against entitlement may mirror the severity of Jesus’ self-discipline in accepting his dual identity as one great of soul who must give that soul as the price of freeing many from slavery.

There is an interpretation of the greek ‘lutron” (ransom for freeing a slave) which sees Jesus death as a ransom paid to a righteous God, to rescue a person from punishment. This is nonsense. The power of Jesus self-offering delivers the believer from the Evil One, in all of his manifestations.

It is in the narrative of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, that Matthew’s magical realism insists on the reality of Jesus’ mission: his magical ability to oppose and conquer evils, means his rejection and death. He is the one person. “Foxes have their holes, and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” Matthew insists that the representative of God’s Rule will complete his mission on a Roman execution stake.