Sermon text: Matthew 20:20-28
This passage sits at a pivotal point in Matthew’s Gospel—Jesus and his disciples are on the road to Jerusalem, heading toward his arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection. Into that solemn journey walks the mother of James and John, kneeling before Jesus to ask that her sons be seated at his right and left hand in his kingdom.
It’s worth noting that Mark’s parallel account (Mark 10:35-45) has James and John asking for themselves directly, without their mother present. This isn’t a contradiction—it reflects the different audiences each Gospel was written for. Matthew, writing primarily to a Jewish readership, emphasizes family and lineage throughout, which explains why the mother appears in his account. Mark, writing largely for a Gentile/Roman audience, moves at a faster, more action-driven pace and omits that detail. Different framing, same event, both inspired by the same Spirit.
James and John—nicknamed “Sons of Thunder”—were clearly ambitious, dynamic personalities. Their request reveals they were still picturing an earthly kingdom, imagining Jesus enthroned in Jerusalem like David or Solomon, with power and status to go around. The other ten disciples were indignant when they heard about it—not necessarily because the request was wrong in principle, but because they hadn’t thought to ask first. It’s a very human impulse: wanting proximity to power, wanting to be near greatness, wanting recognition. That desire for status and closeness to influence is a common thread of human nature that runs through every generation.
Jesus’s response is striking: “You do not know what you ask.” He then asks whether they’re able to drink the cup he’s about to drink and be baptized with the baptism he’s about to undergo. In Old Testament imagery, “the cup” often symbolized God’s wrath—the same cup Jesus would later ask the Father to remove from him in Gethsemane. “Baptism” here points beyond ritual immersion toward being immersed in trial and suffering. James and John answer confidently that they’re able, not fully grasping what they were agreeing to. History bore this out differently for each of them: James became the first of the twelve apostles to be martyred, while John lived into old age, enduring exile and persecution but dying a natural death decades later. Neither escaped suffering, but their paths through it looked nothing alike.
What’s remarkable is the timing—this request comes immediately after Jesus had just told his disciples plainly that he was about to be betrayed, condemned, and crucified. It’s a familiar human pattern: hearing hard truth and immediately filtering it through personal ambition rather than letting it land. It’s a caution worth sitting with personally, since believers often absorb difficult teaching about self-denial or service and quietly assume it applies to someone else.
Jesus’s correction reframes the entire question of greatness. Worldly rulers “lord it over” their subjects, but among his followers it must be different: “whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant… whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave.” Then comes the passage’s anchor: “Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” Jesus had every opportunity to claim earthly power—even Satan had offered it to him in the wilderness—and refused it every time. He operated from the margins, not the halls of power in Jerusalem, and gave his life not for accolades but so that many could have life through him. Philippians 2:5-11 makes the same case from another angle: Christ emptied himself, became a servant, and was exalted precisely because of that self-emptying service, not despite it.
The sermon lands on a simple irony: what began with a mother’s ambitious request for her sons becomes, by the end, a lesson about servanthood itself—fitting, since mothers are often among the most consistent, unheralded servants anyone knows. The greatest model of that servant posture, though, remains Christ himself.