I have just been reading a fascinating biography of Harold Macmillan by Charles Williams.  It is a study in power and ambition as well as deviousness as Macmillan worked his way up to the position of Prime Minister – an ambition he realized when he took over from Anthony Eden in 1957. He was to hold power until 1964 when ill health and political scandal led to his resignation.  Even then he demonstrated power and deviousness as he ensured that his successor was to be his own choice. So he worked against the appointment of R A B Butler, who could be described as the ‘best Prime Minister we never had.’

Political Parties are prone to power seeking and are often home to those whose naked ambition drives them into deviousness and machinations of the worst kind.  Both our main political parties have suffered from this in recent times – in leadership conflicts and in the self-seeking which was at the root of the expenses scandal.  The words of Lord Acton in a letter to the Bishop Mandel Creighton in 1887 ring true:

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

or as William Pitt the Elder said in the House of Lord in 1770 

Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it.

The desire to be great and to be seek the power which comes from being ‘top dog’ is something the church is not immune to and we see, in today’s Gospel, that it began right at the beginning of the Christian Church.  The disciples are travelling along the road and murmuring to themselves.  Three of them have just been witnesses to the Transfiguration whilst the others have been struggling, without success, to heal a boy who was seized by epileptic fits.  Imagine the scene – Peter, James and John return with Jesus full of the afterglow of witnessing something stupendous – the glorification of Jesus by His Father, whilst the other nine are being accused of not being prayerful enough to make a child well again.  The ‘Chosen ones’ feel self-important.  The other nine feel they are total failures.

So, as they travel along the road, there are dark mutterings about who really was the greatest amongst them.  No doubt, Peter, James and John were basking in their privileged position whilst the other nine were feeling totally inadequate.  So they argued. The humanity of the disciples is quite comforting really!

I have often wondered why Jesus just chose 3 of them to witness his Transfiguration.  The mountain was surely big enough to accommodate all twelve.  However, it may be the answer to that lies in what subsequently happened to the 3 chosen ones.  Despite experiencing a Supernatural event which gave them one of the widest visions of God possible they didn’t really take it in.  Peter was to go on to be a total and absolute failure who denied God and had to be restored before he was any use.  James and John were so fuelled by naked ambition that just a few verses later in St. Mark’s Gospel we find them asking Jesus (Chapter 10 verses 35 to 40) for the best places in heaven on our Lord’s right and left.  What they got instead was the promise of martyrdom.  In James’s case a physical beheading and in John’s case, the martyrdom of isolation when he was exiled on the Island of Patmos.  All three became a study in how real power and greatness lies in humility, service, dependence on God  and an acceptance of God’s will.  Jesus tried to say that to them all, both in the Gospel passage we have just heard and in the passage which follows James and John’s request.  In both cases Jesus stresses that greatness and power lies in servant-hood and in humility.

After James and John made their request, Jesus reminded his disciples that the rulers of the world tended to be self-seekers and some, tyrants – a truth we all know from the history of the 20^th Century.  The followers of Jesus, however, must only seek the power of service and of love. 

At the end of today’s Gospel, he went a step further.  Knowing that the disciples didn’t always understand what he was saying, he gave them a visual aid.  He took a child, and setting it before them said that the child was a symbol of who he was – powerless, vulnerable and with few rights.  One hopes that shocked them into understanding something about power but the later incident with James and John suggests that it didn’t quite succeed.  The benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing and no doubt after the Crucifixion and Resurrection the penny finally dropped but it remains a truth that if we don’t learn real humility we will be humbled in some enforced way.  

Another James – the writer of the New Testament Letter – understands the difficulty.  By the time he is writing, Christian communities – Churches – have already been established and, as with most of the New Testament letters, he was addressing himself to such a community and to situations within it.

In the passage we heard today, he talks of the dangers of envy and selfish-ambition, the lessons of the Gospel, learned the hard way by the disciples, which have still to be learned within the early Christian communities.  Because the letter of James has a Universal and, as some would say, a ‘timeless’ appeal it is also addressed to contemporary Christian communities such as ours.

Within any Church there is always the danger that some groups and individuals believe they are somehow more important than others or that the opinions they hold or their views of how things should be – are more right than that of others.  Within the Church of England as a whole, and the Anglican Communion, this is certainly true but it may well be true more locally.  Selfish ambition may be less about personal power and more about a belief that what we say things should be is the only right answer.

One of the problems of the Ecumenical scene, both locally as well as internationally, churches believe that they hold the truth and unless you conform to that version of the truth then you are beyond the pale.  I remain convinced of something Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said in his book, The Dignity of Difference.

Truth on earth, he says, is not, nor can it aspire to be, the whole truth. It is limited, not comprehensive; particular, not universal.

When propositions conflict it is not necessarily because one it true, the other false.

He suggests that the difference is because we are coming at something from different angles but both are only part of the truth because, he says, only in heaven there is truth; on earth there are truths.  Because of this everyone has something to contribute.  No one’s perception is greater than any one else’s and the real wisdom isn’t that someone knows something absolute which cannot be disputed.  The really wise person, Sachs maintains,

is one who knows all men have some share in the truth and is willing to learn from them, for no one knows all the truth and each of us know something of it.

Forgive the long quotation but it is fundamentally important for any Christian Church whether nationally, internationally or local.

Without the humility to accept this, there will be the very conflicts and disputes which the letter of James warns about and which will result in ambitious power-mongering which Jesus was so anxious to avoid in his disciples – because it is destructive.

Harmony within a community comes from what James says about the wisdom which is not worldly but from God.  Such wisdom shows itself in our being peace-loving towards others and dealing gently with them.  This means we should avoid aggression and accept that people are entitled to views that are different to ours and, indeed, that they may even be right!  Which is why James speaks of our being willing to yield which can be translated as being open-minded  which is another way of saying that we can be persuaded by the view of another rather than hold a defensive position come what may.  An open door is always more inviting than a closed one. Our hearts should be open to one another.  So we deal with each other mercifully or compassionately and we are to be genuine and straightforward respecting each other’s integrity.  Only so do we avoid the hypocrisy of saying one thing whilst believing another.  The bottom line is that we learn from Jesus that true greatness and real ambition is fulfilled when we are working together for a far greater good than our own self-centred desires. 

One of the problems with the Church is that it apes the world in having an hierarchical structure.  We speak of Church dignitaries and we accord them titles like venerable, my Lord, Reverend, Most Revered an so on.  Even amongst the Laity there is a pecking order and within churches some roles are seen as more important than others.  A PCC member isn’t any more important than a Verger and a Vicar isn’t more important than the lady who cleans the toilet.  If only we could see each other as of equal importance, there would be less power-seeking and less ambition.  There would be no trying to force a particular view down the throats of unwilling recipients.  There would be mutual respect, tolerance, acceptance and affirmation of each other.

One of the things about our desire to empower, enthuse and equip people in our Church is to harness the real power which lies at the heart of this community – a power which values the contribution of all and which seeks to encourage everyone – not to just play their part – but much more importantly – to fulfil their God-given vocation to be  so loved by God that the only response is to love which also means to serve Jesus in building up his kingdom of love in our community and in the world – and to do this TOGETHER.

So we need to remind ourselves of a fundamental Gospel truth which Jesus is pressing home in today’s Gospel.  We are to welcome and encourage in each other, the real ambition to greatness which comes from serving God with the deepest love possible -  for God, for each other and for the people of our wider community because it is love which is God’s real power to change the world.

It is really the only power we need.