In 1932 the German writer Hermann Hesse published a short novel entitled The Journey to the East. It’s about a group of men, members of a religious sect called The League, who set out on a difficult and demanding pilgrimage in search of Ultimate Truth. the travellers make progress because of the presence of a man named Leo. Leo does all the menial chores and, just as importantly, he does his best to keep everyone cheerful. He raises their spirits by his singing and by his very presence.

Then the travellers find themselves in a deep gorge and Leo mysteriously disappears. From that point, everything goes wrong. Disagreements break out among the pilgrims about who is in charge – people wanting status and power, like James and John in today’s Gospel. The travellers blame Leo for leaving them, wrongly accusing him of theft and they abandon their pilgrimage, angry with Leo whom they hold responsible for its failure. 

Years later, one of the travellers finds Leo and discovers that he was and still is the President of the League and that his disappearance was a test which the pilgrims failed because they hadn’t recognised and emulated the leadership that Leo was exercising by taking on himself the form of a servant.

Though Hesse was deeply interested in eastern religions, the influence of today’s Gospel on his story is clear. James and John are ambitious, hungry for glory. They boldly and rashly assert that they are willing to follow Jesus in order to attain that glory. Jesus tells them that his servanthood will involve suffering, the suffering prefigured in today’s passage from Isaiah, taken from a section of that book which is often called “The Servant Song”. The final words that Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel echo the Servant Song, for he says:

“…the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

The second part of that saying – “to give his life as a ransom for many” – refers to Jesus’ unique vocation. The first part “not to be served but to serve” was the vocation to which Jesus was calling his disciples. For some of them, including James, that would lead to martyrdom. It’s unlikely that our call to Christian servanthood will cost us our lives in a physical sense, though it will involve setting aside our own wishes and desires in order to respond to the needs of others. 

Some people have made the mistake of assuming that when Jesus talks about being a servant, he’s talking about being a doormat – being one of those passive people who always does what others ask and, as a result, lets other people walk all over them. That’s absolutely not what Jesus meant. Rather he point us towards the fulfilment that is to be found in loving service to others.

Nor did he mean that aggressive form of servanthood identified by C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters when he wrote of a person “…who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression”. We’re called to discern the needs of others, not to view them as problems to be solved. And we’re not called to a hyper-active do-goodery. One of the things that makes Leo in Hermann Hesse’s story such an attractive character is that his servanthood is quiet and cheerful. His very presence infuses his fellow pilgrims with love and, once he is absent, they fall out one with another.

We are called to give of ourselves, our energies and abilities as freely as possible. Jesus is urging the disciples to concentrate on that, rather than chasing status and power. James and John wanted to be great men in the kingdom that Jesus was inaugurating, and Jesus’ response was to offer them a radically different view of what true greatness is. 

If servant ministry sounds demanding and difficult, it’s worth remembering what Martin Luther King said in a sermon on this Gospel passage. His point was a simple one - Christian servanthood is something of which all of us, without exception, are capable. The only qualification we need is one that we already possess if only we would cultivate it to the full - our humanity. 

But rather than paraphrase Dr King’s words, I’ll end with an extended quotation from that sermon. As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris contest the final stages of a presidential election and as Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick contend for the leadership of the Conservative Party, King’s words seem very topical: 

“If you want to be important - wonderful. If you want to be recognized - wonderful. If you want to be great - wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. 

That’s a new definition of greatness. And…the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.

You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of Relativity to serve…You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you can be that servant.”