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✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠
Human beings are generally unhappy when we don’t have what we want. Our search for happiness, we think, is to try to get what we want. But if we do get what we want, then that brings a new set of desires that must, in turn, be pursued, and so on and so on in a restless circle of wanting and getting and wanting again. There is no real happiness in that. The whole direction of grasping, wanting, and getting is actually the reverse of the way in which happiness is found.
The secret of happiness is to be found in God and His ways–the God who has nothing to get and everything to give. God has his happiness in giving away His gifts. We need to remember that God didn’t create us to get something from us that He needed or wanted. God was already complete in Himself, in the perfect self-giving that exists between the persons of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The reason God made us is so that His giving might grow and increase. He created and designed us not to serve Him like household slaves but so that He would have creatures upon whom He could pour out His blessing. We are designed to be recipients of His gifts. That’s what makes Him happy.
So also for us, real happiness comes from sharing in those ways of God. The Lord created and equipped us for the same sort of giving to one another, and so for the same sort of happiness. This is seen particularly in God’s creation of husband and wife and the one flesh intimacy of marriage. God designed the giving of spouses to each other, the shared life of mutual giving. 
The action of giving is something that by definition grows. It’s counterintuitive, but the more that is given, the more there is to give, and the greater the happiness. Therefore, God ordained that children should come from the giving of husband and wife to each other. Marriage, family, and society place us in the middle of many opportunities for giving, and so for happiness. That is God’s design. That is God’s happiness that He wanted to share with us. All He asked of His creatures was that they should receive His gifts from Him, allow themselves to be given to, and then find their happiness in the same way, in giving to others.
But all of this was ruined by our fall into sin–our proud refusal to be given to by God and our selfish refusal to give to others. We turned it all upside down. Now we want to get from others what we want out of them, and to give to God, to push our spirituality and our good works up to Him as if He somehow needed those things from us, as if we thereby impressed Him and merited His favor. When we twisted ourselves around like that–away from receiving God’s gifts, doing things our own way instead, and away from giving to getting from others, our happiness was destroyed. No more the happy, quiet mind and contentment; no more the joy in the gifts and the giving; now the fretful, coveting, grumbling restlessness of grasping, wanting, getting, and wanting again.
God could have said, “They don’t want my gifts. They don’t want Me. Fine. I’ve had enough of them!” But instead of simply drawing God’s wrath, our sin drew from God even more and greater giving–the sending of His own Son to save us. In today’s Gospel Jesus tells His disciples the sort of giving He’s going to be doing, the giving of His life at the hands of the very sinners He came to save. Here is the ultimate expression of the nature of our giver God, not only that He becomes man, but that He then lays down His life in our place to redeem us from our sin.
But Jesus’ disciples don’t get it. Their grasping, getting ways are still running the show. James and John come up to Jesus and say, “Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask.” For the moment Jesus indulges their presumptuousness and says, “What do you want me to do for you?” “Grant that we may sit, one on Your right hand and the other on your left, in Your glory.” They figured Jesus was going places. And they were hitching their wagon to Him. They wanted to be first in line. They aspired to be His top advisers and top power brokers when Jesus got to be in charge. This may seem to us like an over-the-top request, but it’s the same with us when we are tempted to use religion as a means for self-advancement and self-fulfillment, when we go to church so that we can get some worldly blessing out of it. Then it’s not so much about loving God but serving yourself, trying to have a successful life and to get where you want to be.
Jesus was indeed going places. But James and John didn’t grasp where it was that Jesus was going, even though He had just told them. Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you ask. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” Jesus there is referring to His suffering and cross. He would drink the poisonous cup of judgment against the world’s sin. He would be swept away in the cold flood of death. There were two people who would be placed at Jesus’ right and Jesus’ left hand–namely, the two criminals who were crucified with Him. They were the ones for whom those places had been prepared.
James and John wanted to be with Jesus in His glory. And it is Jesus’ glory to die for sinners in order to save them. It is His glory to lay down His life that we may live. It is His glory to be the God who is love, who gives Himself completely for us that we might be drawn in to His life.
If you want to share in Jesus’ glory, then, you must share in His death. You must die to yourself and your desires. Repent. Return to your baptism into Jesus’ death. Be emptied of all your own merits and righteousness so that Christ may fill you with His righteousness and His life.
Jesus said, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” After all, what can you truly give to Him who is the Creator and the source of all that is good? Jesus came not to get something from you but to give something to you, to give His life as the ransom price for your soul.
For you were kidnaped, captured by the devil and the power of the grave. A price was demanded that neither you nor any other creature could pay for your release. In time you would have been executed by your abductors and given over to eternal death. But Christ has paid your ransom, not with gold or silver but with His holy precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death. He offered His life for yours. He set you free and then destroyed your kidnappers by the power of His resurrection. All this He did purely by grace, as a gift, for you.
So make sure you don’t get it backwards. We receive from God and give to others. You need not spend all your time fretting about pleasing God; you are already pleasing to Him in Jesus. The thing that truly pleases God is for you to trust in His goodness and to believe in His Son in whom He is well pleased. The true worship of God that glorifies and pleases Him is faith, simply to receive His love and forgiveness and life and to extol and praise and give thanks for these unmerited gifts.
Jesus gave up His life for you at Calvary, and now He gives out His life to you in divine service. It is as Jesus told James and John, “You will drink the cup I drink, and with the baptism I am baptized with you will be baptized.” For them, that meant they would suffer and be persecuted for being Jesus’ disciples. And so it is also for you. But this also refers to the Sacraments. You have been baptized in Christ’s baptism, cleansed by His death. And He gives you to drink of His cup. Because it was a cup of judgment for Jesus, it is now a cup of mercy for you, the cup of His own life-giving blood. Jesus is still the One who comes not to be served but to serve, to give Himself to you in preaching and the supper for your good, your redemption.
And here’s a final key point from today’s Gospel: Jesus’ servanthood doesn’t stop here in church. It continues through you out there in the world. Just as God uses ordinary things like water and words and bread and wine to give His saving gifts, so also He uses ordinary Christians in your ordinary stations in life as a means by which He serves the world. In this sense, you yourselves are God’s Sacraments to the world. Christ is present in, with, and under you His people to show forth His love to the neighbor.
Christians live outside of themselves. You live in God by faith, and you live in your neighbor by love. By faith you get to stand in Jesus’ place and receive His righteousness as your own. By love you get to stand in your neighbor’s place and make his needs your own. Faith looks up to God and offers Him nothing; love looks out to the neighbor and offers Him everything. A Christian receives God’s Service in church and then gives God’s service to his neighbor in whatever stations of life God has put him.
In this way your daily work becomes a sort of worship, the life of faith toward God and love toward others. As your sinful nature is put to death in acts of service, the Lord works life and good for your neighbor, even as He worked the ultimate life and good by offering up His own flesh for our sins on the cross. Through His Church, Jesus continues to be the Son of Man who came not to be served but to serve.
It is better to give than to receive. God knows that, and He wants you to have your happiness in knowing it too.
✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠
(With thanks to Dr. Norman Nagel for some of the above)