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[Music] [Music] Do you know what you are asking? A message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music]

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Let us continue in worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's word as it is recorded in the gospel according to Matthew, the 20th chapter, Numbers 20. "Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came up to him with her sons, and kneeling before him she asked him for something.

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And he said to her, 'What do you want?' She said to him, 'Command that these two sons of mine may sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.' But Jesus answered, 'Do you know what you are asking?

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Are they able to drink the cup that I am to drink?' They said to him, 'We are able.' He said to them, 'You will drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left is not mine to grant,

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but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my father.' And when the ten disciples heard it, they were indignant at the two brothers. But Jesus called them to him and said, 'You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them,

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and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you, but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave,

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even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.'" And may the same God who inspired these words align our hearts to their understanding.

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You pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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I would like to extend my personal greetings to all of those parents who are with us this morning. And if I may, I would like to direct my words from this sacred desk directly to those parents who are with us this day.

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As the Dean of the Chapel, I have five principal responsibilities as a colleague. And one of those is to counsel with your sons and daughters. And my counseling calendar is always crowded. It might interest you to know what your sons and daughters come to talk to me about most often.

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After the pleasantries have been passed, and we have managed to become open and trusting and vulnerable to one another, what subject is it that your children most regularly call to my attention? The thing they talk about the most is you.

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Their conversation usually goes in two directions. First, they tell me how much they love you. I hope you will never doubt or question that. And secondly, they ask me,

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"You know, Dr. T, I really wonder if my folks know what they're asking." That's a good question for discussion. I thought it would be a good question for us to talk about this morning.

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After all, there's not much difference between this situation and the counseling situation in my office. Your sons and daughters are here, and I, the college pastor, am here, and you are here, and I hope there is some pleasantness amongst us and trust and openness and vulnerability.

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So why not talk about the question they most regularly bring? "Do you know what you are asking?" Once there was a woman who came to Jesus. She came with a question.

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Now, this woman had been a follower of Jesus for quite some time, from the earliest days of his ministry. Not only a follower, but a contributor. She must have been a person of some affluence,

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and she did not hesitate to give her money to his ministry. But she gave Jesus more than her money. She also gave Jesus two of her sons. They were aggressive, ambitious young men, rather thunderous in personality,

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named James and John, and they became disciples of Jesus. Now, interestingly enough, these two young men were cousins of Jesus, and they were cousins of Jesus through his mother. You see, this woman who came to him with the question was, in fact, Jesus' aunt.

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Her name was Salome, which is the feminine form of the Hebrew name Solomon. Unfortunately, she did not have the wisdom of the one for whom she was named. In any case, she came to Jesus and she asked him this question. "Lord, make my two sons to sit at your right and left hands in the seats of power

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as you establish your kingdom." Well, you do it. And Jesus, looking at her, said, "Do you know what you are asking?" The same question, you see. "Both your kids and your Christ are asking it of you, Mom and Dad.

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Do you know what you are asking for your children?" I think the first implication of the question that Jesus put to Salome was this. "Do you really believe that greatness is to be found in positions of power and prestige?" Salome wanted her boys to have successful lives,

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and she understood that successful living was most enjoyed in positions of prominence, so she wanted the top spots for James and for John. Jesus looks at her and is sad because of her mistakenness. Power and prestige are not the answers to real success in life.

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If they were, well, then why is it that there are more suicides amongst the rich than there are amongst the poor? If being able to dominate others and to say to them, "Go," and they go and come and they come, if that is the answer to really victorious living,

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then why are there more mental breakdowns in mansions proportionately than there are in the homes of the middle class? If it is in the things of the world that one discovers what victory in life really is, why is it that there are more rich alcoholics than there are poor ones?

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We're all sophisticated enough to understand, aren't we, that there are some individuals who try to dovetail their understanding of their faith with their uncontrolled ambition and greed. There are some people who try to make Jesus into the leader of a success cult,

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even though he was crucified at 33 years of age. We're sophisticated enough to know that there are some people who try to do that, to make their faith and their economics one, and to let that oneness be more dominated by their acquisitiveness than by their devotion.

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And understanding that some people do that, why do we so often let ourselves do that very thing with regard to our children? Dr. Howard Love, the noted social psychologist, conducted some interesting investigations in the Midwestern cities.

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He was trying to determine how children cheat in school and why. He gave these children a test, then invited them to correct their own tests, and then he examined their test papers with scientific instruments. He was able to tell when the children had changed an answer,

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in other words, when they had cheated. His surprising discovery was that children from affluent, successful, upper-middle-class homes cheated far more often than children from more deprived environments, indeed more often than children who went to that school and who lived in a nearby reform school.

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And he learned why. It seems that these children from upper-class homes had in fact been taught what honesty was and that honesty was important, but they had been taught first of all that success and accomplishment

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and the achievement of one's goals was of first importance, and they understood that that being of first importance, you did whatever you had to do to accomplish that goal. And so they cheated.

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How sad that is. A wrong goal and a wrong way to get there. So a young man comes into my office, and he's wondering what course is to take and what direction his life is going to move in,

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and he's prayed about it, he's sought the counsel of God, he's examined his own gifts, he's searched his heart, he's talked to his faculty advisor and to others available to him here, he has spoken to his friends in Christ on the campus,

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and he now has a goal and he takes it home and he tells his mother and father, and his mother says, "No, that's not the goal for you. You want a goal that will get you a better job, or that has a faster rate of crime, or greater security attached to it."

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And the boy is confused. He says to me, "Do they know what they are asking?" You see, he's coming to a liberal arts college, a college that believes it's more important to turn out whole persons than robots designed to fit successfully or not into our contemporary technocracy.

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He goes to a school where we seek to produce not automatons, but human beings who are rich and warm and whole. Dr. Giamatti, the president of Yale University, was being interviewed on television last week. Dick Cavett asked him, "What do you do when a father comes and says,

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'Just teach my kid to get a good job and skip all the frills'?" And Giamatti replied, "I tell him to take his kids somewhere else. We're not in the business of turning out mannequins here. We're trying to turn out men."

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Our colleague says amen to that. That's what your students learn here. And they also learn that Jesus never sought the power and the things of the world that they're often encouraged to seek by others. Jesus never pursued power.

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Jesus often went to the homes of the rich and the powerful, but it's never recorded at any point that he asked them for anything. You never see Jesus asking for money or for influence or for intervention on his behalf. Nicodemus came to see him. He ministered to Nicodemus.

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There is no evidence whatever that he asked Nicodemus to do anything for him. When Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate, the paragon of power in that day, he asked for nothing. Pilate entreated him to ask for something.

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"Do you not know that I have power over you, and yet you say nothing to me?" And Jesus did say nothing to him. He asked for no pity, no sympathy. He asked for nothing. Jesus does not ask for the things of power.

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And this young man sitting in my office understands that the goals of Jesus are beyond the things of the world. But he says to me, "My mom and dad are pushing me in this direction, sir. Do they know what they are asking?"

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And when I hear the boy say that, I remember the words of the Apostle Paul. "Fathers, provoke not your children, lest they lose heart." But there is more to this query of Jesus than that. Because Jesus, by asking the woman, "Do you know what you are asking?"

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is also pointing out a moral flaw in her question, not just an intellectual one. Why did Salome want her boys to be in the top spot? Was it because she was principally concerned for them? Well, probably not.

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There is nothing in the text which suggests that she even discussed the question with the boys before she put it to Jesus. Was she then asking because she was concerned for the other disciples? Oh, no. Her question irritated the other disciples.

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She took no thought of them or of their parents. Was it then out of her great concern for the kingdom? Well, perhaps. If she was like most mothers, she did think that her sons were the best in all the world,

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and maybe she thought they could lead the kingdom better than anyone else. But there is no real suggestion here that her first concern was for the kingdom. What Salome wanted was Jesus to set aside his will and accept hers. What Salome wanted was for Jesus to abrogate his authority as the king in the kingdom,

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to choose those who would sit at his right and left hand, to abrogate that and to accept instead her judgment. What Salome wanted was for Jesus to do her will. And that's a selfish request.

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And Jesus, looking at her, said, "Do you know what you're asking for?" It's a very sad thing to see that kind of selfishness in a parent, a parent trying to gain things for himself or herself through the life of their son or daughter.

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It's easy to see. A fifth-grade student was asked once to define the word "transparent." He said, "Transparent" was a parent you could see through. Well, you can see through that kind of thing very quickly. Whenever I read this story of Salome, I remember another Salome in scripture.

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This was a young girl who was the stepdaughter of King Herod. And one night Herod had a stag party, and everybody got drunk. She did a dance, and everyone liked it so much that Herod offered her a reward, the evidence of his drunkenness is seen in the amount of the reward.

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He offered her anything that she wished, up to half of his kingdom. And the girl, with that kind of an opportunity in front of her, immediately went to her mother for counsel. Her mother's name was Herodias. And she went and said, "Mother, what should I ask for?"

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Now, what an opportunity for that mother! Why, you can ask for the wisest teachers in the world to be brought here to explain to you the things of God. Why, you could ask for travel and associations and fellowship with others who will enable you to be everything that God has given you the capacity to be.

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The girl could have anything up to half the kingdom, and the mother was in the position, the invited position, of leading her to ask for whatever would be best for the girl. But instead of doing that, this selfish mother, who was more interested in fulfilling her own wishes than the wishes of her child,

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remembered that in King Herod's dungeon there was a man named John the Baptist who had called her a whore, which she was. And so she said, "Ask for John the Baptist's head on a platter." No concern for the future of her daughter!

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Concern instead for the future of herself! She used her daughter for her own purposes! So the girl went and made her wish, and her wish came true.

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Of course, it really wasn't her wish. It was the wish of her mother. It's a desperately sad thing to see children used to fulfill the selfish desires of their mothers and fathers. Last week, one of our girls who spent last summer in Nepal and India doing medical mission work

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said that in some of those countries, parents cripple their children when they're very young so that when the children grow up, they will be more pitiable and thus more successful beggars. Well, it's possible to cripple a child's mind just as readily as you cripple its body.

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And selfishness does that. And in the face of it, Jesus says, "Do you know what you are asking?" Well, let's follow another tack for a moment.

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I think when Jesus put his question to Salome, he was also querying her in this direction. "Do you believe, woman, that the positions of honor in the kingdom of God can be had just for the asking? Do you really believe that one can move to the places of prominence in the things of God with a quick, cheap prayer?"

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He goes on to say, "I myself will come to leadership in my kingdom by suffering. When I am lifted on my cross, I will draw all men unto myself. Are your sons ready for that? Are they ready to drink the cup of suffering that I will drink?"

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Now, I'm not saying that you should be ready to drink the cup of suffering. I'm saying that you should be ready to drink the cup of suffering. And I'm not saying that you should be ready to drink the cup of suffering. I'm saying that you should be ready to drink the cup of suffering.

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