Sunday, September 20, 2009

Arguments, Questions and Answers


Sunday, September 20thth, 2009

Ordinary 25B

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Warsaw, VA

Mark 9:30-37

30They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it; 31for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” 32But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.

33Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” 34But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. 35He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” 36Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, 37“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

I know you’re probably thinking, “The Son of Man betrayed … again? Wasn’t that what he preached on LAST Sunday??”

The answer is yes, of course. Both last week’s and this weeks passages in the Gospel according to Mark have similar pronouncements coming from Jesus regarding what he is going to experience at the end of his earthly life. Though there are other things that happen between the two sections of scripture, for us to hop from chapter 8 last week to these verses in chapter 9 this week seem more repetitious than if we were to be reading through all of the intervening verses and exploring them.

While last week it was just Peter who didn’t get it, this week it’s the whole group that is exposed as being essentially clueless about what Jesus was both teaching and living. It is, as I’ve mentioned before, profoundly comforting to be able to read that those who became the Lions of our faith were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. God didn’t seek out the best and the brightest, but the ones that, even with their shortcomings and failures were willing to give themselves wholly to the Gospel once they grasped the significance, received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and set out to tell the Good News of Jesus Christ. But at this point in the story they were still providing the model for the keystone cops and the three stooges.

As the passage begins, Mark has Jesus and the disciples traveling southward towards Jerusalem, back in familiar territory, in Galilee, after having traveled to the north. Again Mark makes the comment that Jesus wanted his presence to be as unnoticed as possible, and he summarizes what Jesus was teaching the disciples, apparently taking advantage of the fact that, to some degree, they are mostly by themselves. Remember the small group being easier to teach profound truths to?

Jesus is recapping what he had attempted to teach the disciples earlier, about his suffering and death and resurrection, but again, the disciples just didn’t understand how it could be that the Messiah could achieve victory by suffering; the two just didn’t GO together. Victory just does not follow suffering. Suffering is for the loser. Isn’t it?

I’m thinking those might have been the thoughts that were going through the disciples’ minds as they were listening to Jesus tell them what was coming. I can just picture them, intently listening to Jesus, looking at his face, to see if he was just telling a joke with a REALLY straight face … and they were waiting to see who was going to laugh first … stealing quick glances around the circle at the others … but the laughter never came. So when they set off and continued their walk, the disciples kind of … held back a bit … maybe a few yards behind Jesus. Just enough space between them to allow them to talk among themselves in little more than whispers: what did Jesus mean exactly when he said he was going to be betrayed into human hands, by whom? And why would he be killed, how? And for what? And what does he mean that he’ll rise again after three days?

It’s telling that Mark doesn’t stop at saying that they didn’t understand; he goes a step further and says that they were afraid to ask him. Have you ever been in that kind of situation? I have. In fact, I am right now. And my primary reason for being afraid to ask the question I need to ask is concern for how I will be seen once the question is asked. I guess that’s why I can just hear all the questions churning in the disciples’ heads and coming out in quiet but very intense arguments among them as they follow their questions to THEIR point of origin. Certainly, they reason, Jesus cannot mean that HE will suffer and be killed. Sure, it’s a possibility, since we ARE talking about revolting against the most powerful force in the known world, the Roman Empire, but he comes from God. We’ve seen that in the way he heals people! Even IF we get into a fight with the Romans, he’ll call on his healing powers and heal any wounds we might receive and we’ll get right back in the battle … depending on the wound, it might even TAKE three days to recover … yeah … maybe THAT’S what he’s talking about.

And then … well, then we’ll have to go back to governing ourselves, like we used to. And since Jesus will be in charge, and we’re his closest advisers … hmm … who gets to be Vice Messiah? Peter? Nah. He’s a hothead. No diplomatic skills whatsoever! Who gets to be Secretary of State? John? Too young! President of the Sanhedrin? Thomas? I doubt it. Treasury Secretary? Yeah, Judas can keep that. He’ll probably outlive us all.

When we were in Louisville at the end of August, at one point we were riding with my parents in their car, and Judson and Caleb were sitting in the back with Momma while Daddy and I rode and drove in front. We had told the boys that we were going to give them a certain amount of money that they could spend any way they wanted on anything they wanted – within reason – at the store we were going to. The whole way there I could hear them discussing something, but they were keeping their voices uncharacteristically low, so even though I could hear that they were talking, it was a little hard to tell exactly what they were saying. Occasional words popped out of the conversation; “if you (something, something, something) then I’ll (something, something, something) – yes, I PROMISE I will!!” They were some of the most intense wrangling that I’d heard in a long, long time. When we arrived at the store and we got out of the car, Momma looked at me and kind of smiled and shrugged her shoulders and said something about being amazed at the level of the negotiations she’d just been hearing. They were discussing what to do with each individual piece that came in the set of an action figure and his or her package, trading one for another from another set … if memory serves. Unions renegotiating contracts with management doesn’t hold a candle to THOSE negotiations.

In the car, there is at least SOME ambient noise, whether it is noise from the road, or the air conditioner, or the radio, there is SOMETHING going on that would provide SOME interference with being able to hear each and every word that is spoken when those kinds of conversations take place. Walking is a whole different ballgame. Unless it is a windy day and you are walking into a stiff headwind, it is difficult to come up with something that would make it hard to hear a conversation that is taking place near you – even one several yards away. So I’m pretty sure Jesus heard most of what the disciples were arguing about. And I suspect that, when he asked them what the topic of discussion was, his tone conveyed to them the fact that he already knew the answer, and it probably conveyed just as clearly what he thought about them STILL thinking in THOSE terms – after all, they HAD all been there when Peter made his statement, followed by his quick fall from grace when he tried to explain to Jesus exactly what they were all thinking – and STILL thought – about what Jesus was saying about suffering and dying… nobody wanted to feel that wrath from their Master anytime soon.

But Jesus doesn’t respond with wrath.

He responds with a sad note in his voice and tries to again explain to them what this whole ‘Kingdom of God’ that he’s been talking about for the last three years is all about. Once again he tries to distill it down to it’s very essence. And he comes up with this:

“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

William Loader, Research Professor at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, puts it this way:

Human beings have mostly attributed value to those who have power. At some levels that has been physical power: an army. It is equally about having wealth, political power, family power. It is having a sense of one’s own importance on the basis that you can make others inferior, putting yourself up by putting others down. Such powerful people are engaging in the subordination and demeaning of others. It can also be that some people are powerful and have authority without such motives. They may simply be physically strong. They may have been placed in positions of responsibility. People then attribute greatness to such people – because of their power and authority. They are saying such people are of greatest value. Traditionally in most societies this related also to gender: fathers and kings, although in principle and in practice the tendency is not gender specific.

Jesus is challenging both stances: people wanting to use power to establish their own value and people using power as the measure of value of human beings. Jesus subverts both. True greatness is not about either of these relations to power. True greatness is to be like Jesus, a truly powerful person, but who valued himself not because of power but because of his being and his doing the will of God, which meant lowliness, in his case including following the path to the cross. That is all implied in the context of Mark’s story. Jesus in Mark subverts the standard values. He is a king, but wearing a crown of thorns. He is the Christ, but broken on the cross.

When Jesus says the greatest is to be the slave (9:35; 10:43,44), that is a shocking contrast. The use of the Greek word ‘diakonos’ as well as ‘doulos’, both words for slaves, helps us to see that the focus is not only the status, ‘slave’, but also the function, ‘serving’. Greatness is being a loving and serving person. Mark 10:45 makes that clear: ‘The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many’. We should not assume double standards; disciples should be like that, but not Jesus. Or Jesus and the disciples are like that, but not God! If the latter were true, we would all the time be undermining Jesus’ message every time we tried to be like God or to value what we would be valuing in God. Such has been the experience in Christian history, because people have been unwilling to be fully subverted by Jesus’ values and have found ways of reverting to the old value system when talking of Jesus and God. Our poetry, our hymns, our liturgies are often very revealing. When we hail Jesus as king and mean by it the king of love, the servant king, we have to work very hard not to allow that to be subsumed under the more popular images of greatness, which Jesus was trying to subvert.

Jesus then seamlessly gives the disciples an object lesson. He reaches for a child who is standing nearby … or maybe she was running, playing ‘catch’ with some of the other kids around, and puts his arms around her and says,

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

The image of the child, in itself, throws the focus more on the lowliness than on the service. The child is vulnerable. But then the focus shifts from the child back again to caring, this time for the child. Caring for vulnerable human beings is part of what caring is about. To take on a child in this way is to take on Jesus and to take on Jesus in this way is to take on God. In Matthew 25:31-46 we see the thought spun out into the parable of the sheep and the goats.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

Behind the thought is a sense of solidarity with lowliness and vulnerability and an affirmation that in acts of caring and love we come face to face with the divine. Elsewhere the same thought is applied to those whom Jesus sends and commissions in ministry. Verse 41 speaks of giving them a drink. When people take on lowliness like this they are going to need to be cared for. The Jesus tradition assumes communities where that kind of caring is real. This will have been fundamental in the early Christian communities where leaders (apostles) needed to travel and faced all kinds of dangers. It remains an issue today: real lowly service (both for people who have power and enormous responsibility, and for those who do not) entails vulnerability. Jesus is not promoting ‘heroic loners’, but speaking of community, which provides mutual caring and support. His brokenness will become their food, the central symbol of divine presence and being – in communion and in community.

Let’s pray.

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