If you haven’t been following the major league baseball playoffs, you may not have heard that the Royals are not in them this year. Again. But something happened already this yea= r that I was happy to see. Neither of the= wild card teams advanced beyond the first round. You see, baseball has 3 divisions in each of 2 leagues, but they nee= d 8 teams to have playoffs, so they give a berth to the second-place team in ea= ch league with the best record. More = than once that wild card team has advanced all the way to the World Series and e= ven won it. It just doesn’t seem right= to me. A second place team has no bus= iness competing with first place teams at all, and it’s unfair to first place tea= ms to have to beat a team they have already beat during the regular season. But sometimes life is not fair. You can be very disciplined, practice hard, execute your skills, be recognized among your peers, and still fail to gain a prize that by all rights should be yours. Nonetheless, we teach kids and live wit= h the expectation that if you follow the rules and keep your values in order, you will receive your reward.

So who can blame James and John, the sons of Zebedee, for expecting that advice to pay off in their lives? They had already forsaken all else to f= ollow Christ. They did it as brothers. Jesus admitted them to the inner circle= of disciples, together with Peter, taking them along for some of his most memorable experiences, such as the Transfiguration. They probably felt a little competitive= with Peter and wanted to get Jesus to promote them when he entered his glory. They were following all the rules; they= should get the right reward.

Jesus saw it differently. There were real rewards – some would sit in glory with him; he doesn= ’t deny that. But he implies there are other rewards – the good feeling that comes from serving others, the self-respect you feel when you sacrifice for a greater good, and the approv= al of God for those who listen to Jesus and obey him. Unfortunately for James and John, none = of those spiritual and emotional rewards guarantees material glory. What’s more, the path to reward is stre= wn with strife. You will drink a cup = of suffering; you will be baptized with challenging circumstances that call forth your be= st judgment. The path to material glory involves some suffering, but the only part of this experience that Jesus is willing to guarantee is the suffering – not the glory. Even if you do all the right things, even if you suffer as a result = of them, you still may not experience the material glory that you believe is y= ours by right. If your reason for accep= ting suffering is to attain merely material benefit, you are setting yourself up= for disappointment. But if you accept suffering because you know that somehow it benefits others, that it will strengthen your resolve in the face of adversity, and that it will make you= a better person, you’ll be OK. You w= on’t even need those material rewards because you will experience the inner peace that comes from following Christ.

Sometimes a second place team gets the prize you deserve.= Sometimes you work hard and don’t see t= he results. But we can always experience the presen= ce of Christ when we serve others, and no reward is greater than that.