............ ONE NATION UNDER CCTV .............

Picture the scene if you will.
A conversation between Jesus, James and John.

"What do you want me to do for you?" Jesus asked.
James and John replied: "Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

“You don't know what you are asking," he replied.

As they heard this story from Mark’s gospel, the original readers could well have recalled the actual crucifixion of Jesus. Because if Mark’s gospel was written between 65–70 AD, its readers may have witnessed the very scene 30 years earlier, and if not, they would have been told about the two robbers, one on Jesus’ right, one on his left. And so, by having James and John ask Jesus for these very same places in his glory, the author offers an ironic teaching for any disciples of Christ who go seeking glory.... suffering is likely to be involved.

Remember how Roman glory seeking meant conquest through force and guile, and crucifixion was a punishment designed to subjugate, to humiliate and to destroy, all in a public and drawn out manner. There was absolutely no glory at all in being pinned up naked to lose control of your bodily functions. There was only utter powerlessness, your body left up for the crows to peck at.

And this fills us with horror precisely because it was supposed to. Asking for a place at Jesus’ side rather throws your glory into question. You might seem like just another weak fool getting himself crucified. After all, a civilisation is built on power and wisdom.

This may be why in Mark’s gospel we meet a Jesus trying to explain to James and John, and by implication to all of us, that there is a cost to his particular kind of glory. Let’s not go overboard, it needn’t mean a crucifixion, or even a violent death. Indeed, Acts 12 tells us James was put to death under the sword but we don’t know what happened to John, and some traditions have him living to a ripe old age.

But Jesus’ message about the cost of glory is clear. Whoever wants to become great must be servant, whoever wants to be first among you must be slave of All. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Glory seeking fantasies easily end up with disillusionment and suffering.

There’s a wonderful story about a traveller who is lost at nightfall in a large wet forest, and he can see no way out of it. So in desperation he climbs up a tree, and from the top he spies a hilltop clearing with a cottage. A light is on inside and smoke is coming from the chimney. Delighted, he climbs back down and starts a very long faltering trudge towards the hilltop. Every now and again he has to climb up and down another tree to see where he is again before trudging on. It is hard work, and he is tired and hungry, so along the way he starts fantasizing about what will happen when he gets to the clearing, and how comfortable it will be in the cottage.

Maybe a man will greet him, and then there will be a roaring fire, and the man will ask his daughter to cook a warm meal. As the traveller perseveres through the dense wood his fantasy becomes more real for him all the time. Maybe after this meal by the fire the daughter is running a hot bath for him, making his bed, and even climbing into it alongside him once he is asleep. He is getting quite excited now, and his imagination is gloriously real for him. He can’t help fearing that the cottage owner will suddenly realize what has happened and burst into the room armed with a knife, and as he imagines this in his mind’s eye he is so terrified, he also imagines being forced to flee for his life, rushing half dressed back out of the cottage and into the night.

His whole self is on its guard, and just at this very moment he arrives exhausted at the cottage door, his breath visible in the cold night air. He knocks furiously, and a small smiling man with spectacles gently opens the door to him. But this is not what the lost man sees. His glorious fantasy has become his reality, and he presses his face close up to the bemused old gentleman’s and yells: “You can keep your so called hospitality, and as for your daughter, I wouldn’t go near her if you paid me!”

The implication is that many of us, much of the time, are living in our own glorious fantasy rather than living in reality, which is the glory itself, and this creates chaos and suffering - in and around us. We no longer simply trust things the way they really are, in all their glory, and we imagine we have to be on our guard instead, trying to preserve glory, or manufacture it.

Jesus tells us that if we do want glory, we must serve reality, not try to have it serve us. If you like, we should be one nation under God, not one nation under CCTV. Really participating in God, really serving God in and amoung us, and not serving our selves, valuable creations though we are, or serving our own ideas, useful tools though they can be for us.

The Cambridge theologian and liturgist Catherine Pickstock describes this experience as: “That broader context which sees the whole of reality as arriving from a divine creative source.”

“The human self,” she says, “is by definition a divided self when it is trying to enthrone its own constructs… it starts to lead a duplicitous existence … but a liturgical self acknowledges fully its complete dependence upon another being … a divine transcendent reality, and is so committed to that reality that it can’t admit any kind of division or internal contradiction … it simply says I am nothing, and I depend upon you and I worship you, and along with that comes a recognition that everything around us arrives as a gift from God.”

Jesus knows that to be truly great is to be part of that gift, and not just to belong to our suffering self, becoming the stories we manufacture, the stories which it manufactures in us. As we read in Isaiah 55:8; "My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts".

Above and behind what visibly appears in our mind’s eye, on the closed circuit of our own personal CCTV systems, all shall be well, all is well.

When you look up at the night sky and consider your own place as a tiny fleeting speck within an unimaginably infinite cosmos evolving in God, don’t run away scared from this glorious realisation of your own insignificance. When your personal meaning dissolves and you feel lost in an empty sea of what is, this suchness makes space for a much greater glory, the kind of glory a resurrection experience must have required.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them. What defines true glory and greatness is not our fantasy about it, but our trust in the invisible Other who is revealed in this very moment, where we are in a flux, and where we are, as Jesus puts it to James and John… servants of all, be a servant of All.

So the message is do be assured, and don't keep it to yourself.