The question of our exaggerated sense of self-importance is central to today’s Gospel.
Among the sales gimmicks of A & P — the “Great Atlantic and Pacific” chain grocery store in town when I was a kid growing up in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, in the 1960s — was selling multivolume books. They’d start a series, like the American Heritage History of the United States, and feature a new volume every week or other week. That’s how I got the 12-volume American Heritage Book of the Presidents I still have until today.
A regular in that “book trade” was encyclopedias. They usually enticed you with volume one for 59 cents but subsequent volumes sold for like $1.99. So, I came to be the proud owner of Volume 1 of the Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia, enabling me to be an expert in everything from Aa to Ap.
And when I first learned something about humility.
Samuel Adams was an important guy. He was a Founding Father, an activist in Massachusetts for American independence. He lived to be over 80. And, from what I remember, he got about half a page in Volume 1 of Funk and Wagnall’s.
His cousin, John, was also important. Besides being a Founding Father, he also was a prime mover behind the Declaration of Independence and the first Vice President and the second President of the United States. He lived past 90. And, from what I remember, he got almost a page.
You lived 80 or 90 years. You were a key figure in your country’s history. You probably thought of yourself at least sometime as “indispensable” (and that was even before the day you had to have an iPhone to be in constant touch!) And the historians sum you up on less than half a print page.
Which — all things considered — is probably better than most of us, who get a headstone with the years we entered and left this world.
The question of self-importance is found in today’s Gospel. Jesus needles his apostles, knowing their ambition, by asking, “What were you arguing about on the way?” Was it about who Jesus is and why more people failed to grasp that? Was it about what he said about suffering? Was it about how those words about suffering made them reassess their image of the Messiah?
No. It was about “who [of them] was the greatest.”
It was neither the first nor the last time that would be the grist of their discussions. The Zebedee boys even seem to have come from an ambitious family, their mom coming to Jesus to push for box seats for her guys on Judgment Day.
Clearly, the Great Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea grocery chain was out of encyclopedias in its Bethsaida branch.
I mention this childhood experience because Jesus chooses to address his apostles’ overweening ambition by pointing to children: to foregoing ambition, to receiving a child, to being like a child.
Because even a child can realize that a lot of great things just might get compressed into very few words.
Now, I’m not downplaying the importance of doing great things. But let’s get some things clear. Good things are great things. So, the more good we do, the greater it is what we do. But the measure of that good is not the praise we earn for it but, rather, as the New Testament makes clear, the “treasure we store up in heaven” (Matthew 6:20). The treasure we deposit with the Lord is the stuff that really matters in our biographical entry. And, as he also reminds us, those deposits are recorded not by sounding trumpets on street corners but often behind closed doors (Matthew 6:2-4).
Furthermore, the more we realize that those are the only kinds of fame accumulation that matter, we can realize the truth Jacob Marley speaks to Scrooge when, in The Christmas Carol, he laments the time he squandered not doing good. “Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness.”
This summer, Pope Francis urged Catholics — especially seminarians — to return to reading good fiction. I’d send them to the English morality play, “Every Man.” It’s a morality play from the late 1400s in which Every Man — that is, each of us — faces death. He does not want to go alone, but he can find no companion to accompany him. Friends, family and goods all bow out. Only Good Deeds are willing to accompany him (though, without grace, are incapable of the journey, which requires a detour through Confession). That lesson — that our good deeds are the one thing we can take across the threshold of death — again calls us back to the innocence and guilelessness of the child.
Those good deeds, animated by grace, will accompany us in a ledger more ample than the brevity of the Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia. God, after all, has better angelic recorders.