BAD GUYS PLOT . . . On 25th ordinary Sunday (not today but Sept. 21), Wisdom 2 has bad guys plotting against "the just one." They plan "revilement and torture" and "a shameful death" for this man, who says "God will take care of" him. We'll see about that, say the plotters. Nasty stuff.

GOOD GUYS ACT SILLY . . . Then we have James 3 with talk of "jealousy and selfish ambition" that arises from "passions that make war within [our] members" and goads us to persecute a just one. We easily come up with many such passions at war within ourselves; but Mark 9, the third reading, illustrates one of them rather eloquently with its account of the twelve apostles arguing over who's top dog among them.

JESUS SETS THEM STRAIGHT . . . Jesus in Mark 9 had to sit them down and explain something: To be first, you have to be last, "the servant of all." But last is the last thing we want to be. We worry desperately about it and do our best to avoid it. Thing is, we have to let go, in the stoic manner. A hundred years from now, nobody will know the difference, I heard numerous times from my father. It was something he heard at Austin High School maybe, but I doubt it. Rather, it's a sort of folk wisdom mediated in part by Jesus' church.