There
is a tendency for us to define ourselves by what we do, and not by what
we are. ‘What do you do?’ is not just the Queen’s favourite question;
it is part of ordinary small talk. To a certain extent, what we do does
indeed define what we are. The woman who rescues someone is a rescuer;
the man who robs someone is a robber. What we do makes us what we are.
But at the same time, what we are has a certain priority over what we
do. The man who steals is a thief, but he is more than a thief to begin
with, and even after the theft he can become something more. He can
become a forgiven thief, a restorer of stolen goods.
This temptation to prize doing over
being manifests itself in our words. We start to use the word ‘useful’
as a synonym for ‘good’. We say, ‘I hope you find this useful’ when what
we mean is ‘I hope this is good for you’.
An overemphasis on our actions leads us
to prize our jobs. People are proud of being a manager, a supervisor, a
boss, a director. Indeed the term ‘manager’ has mostly been emptied of
its original meaning because of euphemistic overusage. And it is
overused precisely because rank and status are confused with our
identity, and because they are prized.
No one wants to be the lackey, the
understudy, the peon. The mistake is to think that important jobs make
us important people. They do not. Nor does the lack of such importance
make us unimportant. The mistake is to believe that one is either a
somebody or one is a nobody.
A similar confusion exists in the
Gospels. The rulers among the Gentiles, Jesus says, lord it over them,
and their great ones exercise authority over the lesser ones. The
exercise of power to serve one’s ends, no matter how good, is often a
bad thing. But worse is the desire for power as an end in itself. The
desire to be a lord – a signor – is a misplaced desire. St Catherine of Siena wrote to a particularly pompous prince, saying, ‘You desire lordship (signoria)
over others, but have no lordship over yourself.’ There is no point in
‘managing’ other people when we cannot even ‘manage’ ourselves properly.
And good intentions cannot justify our bossiness; in fact it is a
greater corruption to boss people around out of good intentions, because
we will then make good look evil, and portray love as something hateful
and hateworthy.
Jesus offers himself as a model for his
disciples. The Son of Man ‘came not to be served but to serve, and to
give his life as a ransom for many’. The words he uses here mean ‘for
many’, in Greek, hoi polloi – for the riff-raff, the general
rank and file of humanity. Indeed it is for ‘the many’ that Jesus sheds
his Precious Blood, as the new translation of the Mass conveys to us.
Jesus, who dies for the rank-and-file,
warns us against seeking lordship, and reminds us that he – Our Lord –
came to serve us, the riff-raff. He does not remind us of this to
humiliate us, but to remind us of how much he loves us. Although he is
Lord, he has shared our life with us, as the second reading says, ‘For
we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our
weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet
without sin.’
Our dignity is not drawn from the things
we do or can do. We are not valued for our quality of life. Instead our
dignity and value come from what we are, (human beings – rational
creatures made in the image of God) and from what we are being made into
(the children of God by adoption through grace). The lordship we
Christians have is one of service to each other, just like the lordship
of Jesus who came to save us, to save the hoi polloi.(Leon Pereira O.P.:torch.op.org:here)
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