Request of James and John for prominent seats

The timing is what makes this episode painful. Jesus has just described being condemned, handed over to Gentiles, mocked, spat on, flogged and killed. What comes next is a request for promotion.

Who made it differs between the two accounts. In one, James and John come themselves; in the other, their mother comes and kneels, asking on their behalf. The two are easily reconciled if she spoke and they stood behind her, which is why Jesus answers them directly and not her. Their mother is most probably the woman named Salome who appears among the women at the crucifixion.

The request is put carefully, and its opening is a child's manoeuvre: teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask. He declines to agree blind, and asks what they want.

Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.

Those two positions were the highest in a royal court, occupied by the men closest to the king, and asking for both is asking to displace the other ten, including Peter.

You do not know what you are asking, he says. Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptised with the baptism I am baptised with?

Cup in the prophets is regularly the cup of God's wrath, handed to a nation to drink, and he uses the word again in Gethsemane. Baptism here means being submerged, overwhelmed, and the word had that ordinary sense before it had a religious one.

They answer, we can, which is either courage or complete misunderstanding, probably both.

He tells them they will indeed drink that cup, and it is worth knowing how that turned out. James was executed by sword on the orders of Herod Agrippa about a decade later, the first of the Twelve to be killed. John, by the earliest traditions, lived to old age and died of natural causes after exile on Patmos.

But the seats are not his to grant; they belong to those for whom they have been prepared.

When the other ten hear about it, they are indignant, which is not an improvement, since their annoyance is that somebody else asked first.

He calls them together and describes how power works elsewhere. You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Anyone in Judea watching a Roman prefect or a client king knew exactly what that meant.

Not so with you. Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.

Then the sentence that explains the pattern: the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. Ransom was the price paid to free a slave or a prisoner of war.

Salome, if she is the woman who came with the request, appears at the crucifixion among the group of women watching from a distance, and at the tomb on the Sunday morning carrying spices. Whatever she had asked for in Perea, she was still there when the men had gone.

The reply about the cup is also the only place he tells anyone what their future holds in concrete terms, and he does it in answer to a request for privilege. They wanted to know where they would be sitting. They are told what they will be drinking.