And there was also a strife among them, which of them should be accounted the greatest (St. Luke 22:24)
As we celebrate St. Bartholomew’s Day, we remember the apostle, our faithful brother, whom our Lord sent out into the world to spread the Gospel, establish churches, and win a martyr’s crown. The death of Bartholomew is not included in Scripture, but early witnesses tell us the apostle was skinned alive. There are haunting statues and paintings of Bartholomew which show him holding up his skin as an offering to the Lord he loved; the Lord he knew would heal him; the Lord who had healed him.
This same apostle sat in the upper room as our Lord prepared His chosen men to change the world. Luke presents this evening with all of its sublime glory and human failing such that we have mixed together moments when the God/Man Jesus Christ cuts open the cosmos to reveal the very inner workings of reality while His disciples either dream of betraying Him or fight over who will be the greatest. This unseemly argument isn’t the first time the apostles have fallen into the trap of seeking fame and glory as the heathens do; no, we may remember James and John having their Mommy ask Jesus to place them on the right and left of His throne. Even here, at the Last Supper, sinful ambition blinds the chosen men to the meaning of life as the architect of all things show them His work and their place within it.
Seeking fame, and worse achieving it, is a cancer which eats men and women from the inside out. Just look at the most famous people in our world and witness the insecurity, anxiousness, and self-destruction which devour them year by year: something we can now actually watch in real-time given the ghoulish industries which exist to squeeze money from viewing unfiltered human suffering. Why is the pursuit of fame so terrible for us? To lust for fame and glory is just another way of denying the priority of the life to come, and of course, the primacy of Christ. We hear it in the way people talk of fame. What do they say? They say, “I want to be remembered.” The implication being that if one doesn’t compromise himself for the sake of fame, he will be forgotten, and in the small-minded, materialist’s world, to be forgotten is to cease to exist; it is Hell for the self-adoring narcissist our wounded world would have us all be.
For those who love and follow Christ, for those who know He will always remember us, the path forward is not to act like heathen kings, lording over others to justify the mad idea that we can be God; rather, we must embrace a path of servanthood which reflects the reality of being saved by the Suffering Servant we meet first in the prophecies of Isaiah, but who enters our world to free us from every mad scheme robbing us of the divine image we were made to bear. How does Isaiah describe this great servant: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:3-5). These words describe the greatest man who has ever lived. Would we desire to have them describe us? More importantly, are we ready to follow this Servant to the very gates of Hell and back?
Importantly, our Lord’s words today are not meant to create a church filled with weakness or cowardice in the face of evil. There will be Christians called to positions of leadership in the church and in their nation, and from those divinely ordered posts the expectation is for that citizen of heaven to sacrifice himself for what is right not what is popular or easy—not those things which will make him famous or popular in the eyes of fallen humanity. The same is true in our families, our businesses, and in every part of our lives, because no part of our life can be at enmity with the King who has saved us from ourselves.
So what is true glory in this world? Jesus tells us by bestowing the highest possible praise upon His disciples. He tells them, “Ye are they which have continued with me in my trials” (Luke 22:28). These men have stood by their Lord and Master and Friend as He has been mocked and called a devil; they stood by Him when the most learned religious scholars and priests called Jesus a blasphemer and a bastard; they stood by Him when their fellow countrymen took up stones to silence God’s Word made flesh. The disciples have stood by Him because they believe Jesus is the Messiah, but what happens when that hope is taken from them? We are quite used to the idea that the Messiah was always meant to die for the sins of the world, but the apostles were not, and so when a few hours after this meal, Jesus is taken from them to be beaten and crucified, the disciples fled into the darkness. As he speaks in today’s reading, Jesus, of course, knows they will abandon Him, after all He is living out Psalm 22, but in this grand moment of forgiveness and remembrance, Christ knows He is looking into the eyes of those men who would recover from their unbelief and serve Him unto death. Their faithfulness rings out through the ages drowning out their worst failures and greatest defeats. The apostles live in the world of Christ’s victory, and Christ’s victory makes all defeats only temporary.
And what is the reward for their faithfulness? “And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me; That ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (St. Luke 22:29-30). What are the apostles receiving? A kingdom they haven’t earned, a power they don’t even know how yet to wield, holy food and drink given to them from the new tree of life. Jesus Christ is the exalted, everlasting King whom Daniel saw in a vision while he and his countrymen lived in exile and fear; Jesus is the One through whom, as St. Mary the Virgin sang, “He hath showed strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts; He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek” (St. Luke 1:51-52). The mighty Lord of Sabaoth has come to upend the kingdoms of sin and death, to break down the crumbling kingdom of Adam and sit on the eternal throne upon which humanity was always meant to rule, and in His magnificence, He shares this glory with fishermen and tax collectors, humbled wise men and exalted guileless fools.
We too share in this inheritance as men and women adopted into the family of God and destined to rule in the world to come. Importantly, we must remember that this assured, future destiny is real and true in the here and now. Just as our Lord’s Supper is a real and true feasting at the table described today by our Lord, a real and true spiritual feast of Christ’s Body and Blood really and truly received by all those who embody the faithfulness of those scared and imperfect and glorious apostles preparing to change the world one heart at a time. It is in this way that we are filled with the righteousness and authority of the Earth’s true king. That King sends us forth to die well in His name, to die on a cross or skinned alive or broken by cancer or ripped apart in a car accident or asleep in the bed we assembled when we were once young. Christ sends us out into the world, and He knows we will not return to Him unscathed, but it is in the scars of service we collect, those wounds of divine, sacrificial love which mark the men and women who will inherit the future. A future not molded by impotent heathen rulers and their pathetic, boot-licking followers, but rather, a future redeemed from the best parts of what it means to be human: a future where the pain and suffering of the human experience will be drowned out forever by the angelic songs of love and joy we humans have spent so much of our existence ignoring.
We carry that reality with us everywhere we go, and so we need not ever be intimidated by the false gods and failed philosophies of the confused and damned. We kneel before the Lord’s Table in the kingdom which will outlive and outlast every nation and empire the world will ever know. “They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end. The children of thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall be established before thee” (Psalm 102:26-28).
Let us then hear the angel’s songs and know they foretell our destiny; Let us join with the apostles and live as the men and women who will inherit the earth.