Integration (for discipleship)

There’s a time when Jesus tells his twelve: when all is made new, you will sit on twelve thrones.

After hearing that, the mother of two of them (brothers), like all good mothers, asks Jesus if he would bump her two up in line, to get the #1 and #2 thrones.

The rest, understandably, get a bit annoyed at this.

But what’s interesting in this episode is not the jealous, but that it all happened in front of everyone.

Often, we think of Jesus talking to the twelve in isolation. But usually that wasn’t the case.

Here he is predicting the intimacy of his death (Matthew 20:17-19) as well as describing the future world and its state (19:28-30). He walks the twelve through this. And he does it in front of the watching crowd.

Throughout his entire ministry, Jesus made himself transparent to all that wanted him.

He wasn’t creating an exclusive club by ‘picking’ some. He was creating a model for the rest of us to follow.