Over the summer, I was visiting my twin nephews, and they asked me to play the card game “Go Fish” with them, which I hadn’t played in decades. My nephews are five years old, so they were learning the game in stages. And they were in the intermediate stage, which meant that they were playing with modified rules.
We each had our distribution of cards, but instead of concealing them from the other players, we put them down so we could see each other’s cards. As I said, my nephews were gradually learning to play the game as adults would. If you recall, in “Go Fish,” you ask someone whether they have a certain type of card in their pile so that you can collect all the cards of that type, something known as a “book.” If the other players don’t have the type of card you want, you must “go fish” from the center pile, drawing a card and hoping it might be what you need. Once all the cards in the center pile are gone, the player with the most “books” wins. In my nephews’ version of the game, the books were all animals of various sorts: lions, elephants, monkeys, octopuses.
Now, my nephews are incredibly sweet and kind, and they have big hearts. They’re unusually effusive in how they show that love to others. Watching them play and interact with the world around them, your heart aches for the days of such innocence. But as they are getting older, they’re also beginning to learn what the world outside their loving home is like. And it’s, sadly, not the game they’re used to.
Much to my fascination, our seemingly low-risk game of “Go Fish” was a visible marker of my nephews’ transition from loving innocence to survival in a high-stakes world. At some point in the game, I looked at my nephew Mack’s cards and realized that I wanted to acquire another octopus. This would have put me closer to earning the book I needed to win. You see, I was definitely playing to win, but I don’t think that Mack fully understood that. I’m not entirely sure that he was playing to win, or at least not in the way that I was.
“Mack, I said, do you have an octopus?” I looked at him with an impish grin. And his face fell, and then he began to cry. “But I want the purple octopus.” There was a dilemma. I only see my nephews about twice a year. I don’t have quite enough uncle collateral to compete with tears. So, I caved. I gave in and let him keep the purple octopus, and I asked for another animal.
A bit later, in the kitchen with my sister-in-law, I explained what had happened. “Well,” she said, “at some point, he needs to learn that he can’t always win.” She was right. But I still wasn’t willing to risk all my uncle collateral on that game of “Go Fish.” In his beautiful childish innocence, my nephew didn’t yet understand how adults play games. For him, the game was more about having the kinds of cards he wanted, especially the ones with purple octopuses on them. For me, with several decades of trying to survive in a jaded world of competition, I was playing the game to win.
The disciples James and John are used to that same world of competition. They’re in a place of spiritual transition when they come to Jesus and ask him to grant them whatever they want. It’s a bold request, and it’s also full of spiritual naivete at best and spiritual ignorance at worst. Remember that they’re on a journey, and this is significant. For some time now, they’ve been walking along the way with Jesus, both literally on the way to Jerusalem and metaphorically towards the cross. And for the third time, Jesus announces his future passion and suffering, and yet one more time, the disciples opt for selective hearing and change the subject. The truth is that they don’t want to recognize that they must suffer, too, and give things up to follow Jesus, because doing those things is the only way to follow him in an unjust world where you can’t play the game and always retain your purple octopuses. Jesus says he must suffer and die and be raised on the third day, and the disciples respond with the equivalent of “isn’t it a beautiful day? Did you enjoy your breakfast this morning?”
James and John, and all the other disciples, are spiritually in transition. They’ve made a discernible commitment to follow Jesus by leaving their former lives and even their families, but they still don’t want to own up to what the ultimate cost of discipleship will be. They think they’ve paid the cost already, but it’s only just begun.
Jesus, they say, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Their habitual language is that of the world, of competition and of quests for success, status, and rank. They’re beginning to learn that it’s no small feat to live as Jesus’s disciples in a world oriented around domination, power, and wealth.
And so, Jesus can only speak to them in the language of the world in which they live. The disciples are struggling with how to hold onto the bliss of being close to Jesus in discipleship while living in a hard, cruel world that will eventually kill him and some of them. Jesus must translate the way of discipleship through the terms of this world, the world in which the disciples and we must inevitably live.
It's a world in which everyone is assigned a number, and following Jesus in a world of inequity and injustice will mean going to the back of the line. Following Jesus in a cut-throat world will mean sacrificing greatness and success for faithfulness and humble service. Following Jesus in an unmerciful world will mean giving up our individualism for the sake of the benefit of all.
This is our dilemma, too. We, like those early disciples, want to have our cake and eat it, too. We want glory without the cross. We want baptism without the commitment. We want union with Jesus without unity with others. We want salvation without too much change in our lives. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized? We are! is our hasty reply, but we struggle to live with one foot in the kingdom of God, where a game is just a game, and the other foot in this world, where games are about fighting your way to the top.
In this earthly life, we’re always in via, on the way, with Jesus. We must go back and forth between speaking that primal language of love where we catch glimpses of the unity that God desires for us and the harsh language of this world which ranks us from greatest to least. And this is partly why Jesus’s words sound so harsh. It sounds as if Jesus is speaking the language of the world when he says, “whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” It sounds as if he’s ranking everyone. But it only sounds that way to those of us who live in this world because that’s the way our world speaks.
In a world of competition, to give up success sounds like failure. In a world oriented around money, to give sacrificially seems like financial foolishness. In a world full of violence, to give one’s life for another seems like nothing but stark, cold death. But our true native language is the language of the kingdom of God, which we can only glimpses in fits and starts in this life. And in that language, a game doesn’t need to be played to win. A game can be played simply to delight in purple octopuses, which God will freely give. In that kingdom, there’s no competition. There’s simply wonder and love.
Jesus came to part the veil and show us what lies on the other side, where there’s no sorrow or sighing. There’s only life and joy and delight. It’s a perpetual feast. It’s the hope of glory. For now, though, we’re left with our earthly games and the language of this world. And we must live in this world as faithfully as we can while hanging onto the beauty of that glorious kingdom of which Jesus has given us a foretaste. We savor purple octopuses when we find them. And we also know that we must give them up sometimes because in this life, things are imperfect and unfair.
We also know that when Jesus gives us words that seem harsh and difficult, we must translate them from this world’s language into the language of the kingdom of God. And in that kingdom, our earthly gain is heavenly loss. But our earthly loss is our heavenly gain. In God’s kingdom, sharing in the cup of Christ’s Blood is a death to our sinful ways, but it’s also a feasting on the joy of forgiveness and love that reign eternally in heaven. In that kingdom, our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection is a painful relinquishment of our self-centeredness, but it's also a rising to a new shared life of glory. In this life’s journey, we might be last in line and slave of all, but in the kingdom of God, there are no lines and no slaves but only fellowship and rejoicing. We can simply delight in purple octopuses. And in that life, we will live forever.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
October 20, 2024