Introduction

At the end of next month, Llandovery is going to be full of Welsh Mams.

Not just Mam, of course, but also Mamgu … no doubt with Daddy, Tadcu and Uncle Tom Cobley trailing along in their wake.

Yes.

The Urdd Eisteddfod is coming to town and MANY Welsh Mams will be here ‘supporting’ … that’s the expression, isn’t it?

Pushing their children forward in competition.

Oh yes.

Welsh Mam is a phenomenon!

A FORCE in the Land.

Utterly and fiercely dedicated to her offspring ‘getting on’, ‘doing their best’ … performing well and coming away with the big reward.

Now, I CANNOT be the only person who’s seen a certain similarity between Welsh mothering and Jewish mothering.

And it is against THAT background that our text today arises …

Here’s the context:

Matthew 20:20-21

“Then the mother of Zebedee’s sons came to Jesus with her sons and, kneeling down, asked a favour of him.

21 “What is it you want?” he asked.

She said, “Grant that one of these two sons of mine may sit at your right and the other at your left in your kingdom.”

You can imagine how indignant the other Mams would be?

But let’s focus today on the response the Lord Jesus makes to this bold and ambitious request.

Here’s what He said …

1) Son of Man

V. 20a

“just as the Son of Man did not come to be served …”

Jesus is talking about Himself as the Son of Man.

Now, I know there are people out there in this world who take that to mean that Jesus isn’t God.

They use it to try to say that He is only human.

They see the MAN bit, they reckon the ‘Son’ bit refers to human fathering, and … Bob’s your uncle.

They deny the deity of Jesus Christ.

Now, that’s all well and good if you are prepared to ignore the entirety of the rest of the Biblical context.

But in this cotext … the surrounding passage … Jesus is being spoken of as Divine.

So, for example at the end of the previous chapter Jesus says this:

“Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 

Who can DO that sitting on the throne before which people come for judgement and appoint under-judges to carry out the detailed work?!

Surely, only God the Judge?

29 And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life.

Just WHO do you think can determine that?

Who can GRANT eternal life?

30 But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first.”

He has been identifying Himself as the Son of Man for a while now, and speaking about the Son of Man not as a human being that God uses (the way, for example, that Ezekiel is referred to constantly in his prophecy as ‘Son of Man’) but as the figure in Daniel 7:13-14, Wh0 shares the rule of God from heaven’s throne:

““In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”

Here again, in this context in Matthew 20, where the mother of Zebedee’s sons James and John comes and asks that they should be allowed to sit on His right and left in His Kingdom, the idea is of Jesus being the one Who fulfils Daniel 7 … seated on His throne in Heavenly Glory as the Divine Son of Man figure from Daniel.

And, of course, in the previous chapters in Matthew Jesus has been doing the miraculous works of the Messiah, healing with His Word of command and so on, which demonstrates the sort of authority that only God can deploy.

And given that the Biblical context is one in which the Son of Man is described as having the highest hosts of Heaven all bowing down and serving Him, the surprising thing here in this passage is that we’re told that He didn’t come here to earth to be served.

That’s the next thing this passage in Matthew 20 unfolds to us … where the incarnate Christ stands in relation to service.

2) Service

V. 20b

“the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve …”

The word here is διακονέω (diakoneō) translated here 'to serve' … to serve in the sense to wait on, to help, to attend to.

It later was often used to refer to spiritual and practical ministry in the Church.

Now, that’s pretty amazing.

That figure in Daniel 7 is the Mighty One.

He’s the one who rebuked Peter for His violent response to the servant of the High Priest who’d come to Gethsemane with the gang sent to arrest Jesus.

In doing so Jesus said:

(Matthew 26:53-54)

“Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? 

54 But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”

HOW many legions of angels was that?!

Twelve.

Well, twelve legions sounds a lot, but how powerful is an angel?

In 2 Kings 19:35, when Sennacherib came up to besiege Jerusalem and King Hezekiah prayed for deliverance, God sent reassurance through Isaiah the prophet and then we read:

“That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there were all the dead bodies! 36 So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there.”

So we know that one angel is that powerful he can kill 185,000 warriors in one night, no problem.

There’s between five and six thousand men in a Roman legion in the first century A.D. and that night in Gethsemane Jesus is saying to Peter that He could call on twelve legions of 5-6,000 angels … each of which was capable of killing 185,000 warriors per night at a minimum … if He’d wanted to.

But He didn’t.

Why?

Or rather, why not do that because He was definitely being set up at his arrest and throughout His trials before the Chief Priests and Pontius Pilate?

It’s this.

He didn’t come to be served but to serve.

His example is one of NOT serving Himself when He so clearly COULD have done and would have been perfectly within His rights to do so.

It’s because He came not to BE served, but TO serve …

How did that help?

How did that serve?

Here’s the big take away …

3) Ransom

Matthew 20:28

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

What’s this big idea here, ‘ransom’?

I was speaking to a man this week who had just come back from a certain African country where he’d been working as a security contractor.

The story is that a certain high-profile person was needed in that African country for a filming project.

But the trouble with being a high-profile white person in certain parts of the world is that you are both very noticeable and you are very much more wealthy than the more lawless people living in such a place.

As a result, the bad guys can see you as a pay cheque.

They reckon that if they can capture you and post video of you looking sad in their custody, they can persuade your friends and family to send cash to release you.

And, obviously, the task for the person I was chatting to was to make sure this didn’t happen.

This man’s job, then, was a bit like the Old Testament’s Moral Law which was there to warn people not to drop into captivity to sin, and a sinful lifestyle.

It was to try to PREVENT sin.

But it never could because of how deep sin runs in human personality.

Happily, it sounds as if my contact’s instructions were adhered to and no-one got kidnapped and held to ransom, but the Old Testament Law could never keep sinful human beings from sin’s captivity.

A ransom was needed to set sinful human beings free from captivity to sin by paying the price of sin so they could be set free at the payment of that price.

And so the Son of Man came, not to be served but to serve, and give His life as the price for the ransom of many.

God Himself, paying with the life of God the Son, the fine that God’s perfect justice must require, so that His people can be as it were ‘bought back’ and set free at the payment of that price.

The language used here is explicit:

λύτρον (lutron) 'ransom' 

A ransom is the price of release.

It’s what makes redemption possible.

In the ancient world this expression refers to the payment of a price in order to purchase the freedom of a slave. 

The idea of Jesus as the “ransom” is that he paid the price with his own life by standing in our place as a substitute, enduring Himself the judgment that we deserved for sin.

Notice, His life wasn’t wrenched from His grip.

He, as God in the flesh, laid it down.

He was a willing sacrifice, a willing Saviour, willing to have His death, which He didn’t deserve because He never sinned, pay the price of sinful humans’ sin.

Jesus had been trying to explain this along the way (so, Matthew 20:17-19 says …)

“Now Jesus was going up to Jerusalem. On the way, he took the Twelve aside and said to them, 18 “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!”

That’s what He tells them is going to happen … the events … but if they can’t grasp the events how on EARTH will they grasp the SIGNIFICANCE of these events?!

And it’s the significance that He spells out just a few verses later in v. 28, the verse of our text this Easter Sunday … that the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Conclusion

So, what the events of Easter entail for us and our lives is firstly that sin is real, it’s a problem because it has consequences and salvation is an urgent necessity for every living human being.

Not to be sneezed at, to have been sold out to sin as its slave and in need of a benefactor to buy you as a slave in order to set you free … having paid the price.

We need that person who is both able and willing to do such a thing for us.

But when someone has done that for you, has bought you back from your slave-master and set you free, how do you feel towards them?

Pretty grateful.

Pretty keen to show it?

It’s the sort of thing to make you want to please them with the use you make of your freedom, isn’t it?

You see, under legalism, religion was the rules and ethics came from fearfulness.

But with Christ, doctrine is grace and ethics flows from gratitude.

A totally different motivation in life flows from this being bought and set free at the payment of a price.

A totally different attitude and mentality flows from this … its fruit is quite different from religion or legalism or morality.

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and that should impact the attitude of the mother of Zebedee’s sons, James and John … and Jesus makes this very clear in its impact on what we should aspire to for ourselves and those we love.

The fellowship brought about by the events of that first Easter is a fellowship of people not climbing to the top on the shoulders of competitors.

It sits on a foundational understanding that but for the grace of God in the Gospel we can’t stand at all before God, let alone stand there on the shoulders of our competitors.

There IS no competition, because the ground is level at the foot of the Cross where every single human being must come as a sinner to Jesus … all in the same boat.

There can be no justifiable competition for supremacy, but there can be a shared joy and liberty in the experience of ransom and the redemption that it pays for.

Look how what started as the mis-placed ambition of a proud and competitive mother reveals something crucial at the heart of Biblical Easter.

The HEART of the incarnate Lord Jesus, and the purpose he followed and then fulfilled that very first Easter.

He came with a deeply servant-hearted motivation, to bear everything that Easter week threw at Him and persevered right up to and beyond the Cross where His own saving, atoning blood got poured out.

The Son of Man bore that humiliation and that anguished cost to buy the slaves of sin back again.

And it was the Son of Man Who rose to life again to set His people free.

Pride and ambition suddenly seem quite totally out of place, and competition to rise up on the shoulders of others that you push down beneath you to rise higher run stark contrary to the ways of God in Christ.

As we rejoice in the liberty the crucifixion and resurrection bring us through the Gospel, let’s also remember the implications of this central Christian message of redemption and the One Who came not to be served but to serve and to give His life for the ransom of many.