22 September 2024
Mark 9:30-37
30 They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it, 31 for 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.” 32 But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.
33 Then they came to Capernaum, and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” 34 But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. 35 He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” 36 Then 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.”
A recurrent theme throughout the Gospel of Mark is that the disciples remain oblivious to what’s happening even when Jesus spells it out for them. In the passage from last week, Jesus explicitly stated that he was going to die and rise again, which prompted Peter to rebuke Jesus, and here again he foretells his impending fate. “But”, the text tells us, “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him”.
If we’re inclined to charity toward the disciples we might observe that it’s often the case that, no matter how much someone explains a thing - especially an unusual, bewildering, disconcerting thing - it’s more or less impossible to understand it until you actually see and experience it for yourself. We really can’t imagine events without precedent, or which - like rising from the dead - violate what we think we understand about reality. And so it is that, when Jesus appears to the disciples after rising from the dead, their eyes are opened, the truth that had been right in front of them finally revealed.
When we read about the disciples we might forgive their ignorance and fear because we have the advantage of knowing the rest of the story. Things have been revealed to us which, at that point in the story, remained hidden. We understand what Jesus is all about, the mystery is solved; we possess knowledge and the confidence comes with it.
Well, perhaps it should be like that, but the reality, I think, is that we would-be disciples find ourselves in more or less the same place as those ignorant and fearful disciples. In fact, we might consider that the Gospels recount the journey these disciples went on in such detail exactly because this is the journey all disciples must take. Words, even Jesus’ words, are no match for experience. The cross only make sense after you’ve encountered the risen Christ.
So when we read about the disciples arguing along the way which of them was the greatest we should should recognize ourselves. Here they are, concerned about status, recognition, how they measure up with their peers. There’s nothing more human than that. And Jesus, rather than getting frustrated - which he sometimes does - gently shows them that they’ve got it more or less exactly wrong.
On the one hand, the disciples have made significant sacrifices to follow Jesus, a fact Peter reminds Jesus of in the next chapter. While that should not minimized, it’s still always true that, even the best of us operate according to our self-interest. We can do no other. We never act entirely from pure motives. Having left everything to follow Jesus, these guys are wondering what’s in for them? How will I benefit? What will be my reward? And, of course, they come with preconceived notions of what benefits and rewards might look like. They assume they know what their self-interest is.
So they find themselves preoccupied with the social hierarchy even as they follow the self-denying Son of God. The passage subtly reveals the absurdity of the situation even as it issues a warning to would-be disciples who might find themselves in the same position. And many Christians have found themselves in that position.
For most of Christian history the church existed in places where it was the official religion of emperors, or kings, princes, or eventually of the nation-state. Because the boundaries of church and state were essentially the same, the church easily became an arena to exercise worldly power. It was inevitable that in Christendom some would use the faith as vehicle of their own self-aggrandizement, as a means to achieving other ends. While Christendom is effectively dead, the church still wields power in many places, and those with that power tend to enjoy having it. One way to think about think about sex-abuse coverups in both the Catholic Church globally and the Southern Baptist church in America is that those with power - even those who were not directly implicated in the scandal - were more concerned with how such revelations would affect them than they were with the truth, or with justice for victims. By their estimation they had more to lose than to gain. Or even where the institutional church no longer exists, there are more than few pastors out there whose primary goal seems to be celebrity and all it trappings.
There’s a certain kind of pleasure that comes with roasting such folks, but I too am alert to the reality that, mixed in with the good reasons for starting a new church is my own desire for power and control, to create the potential for success that redounds to my credit. It could be just another way to get the status and praise just all about all of us crave.
You might be thinking that, as someone who just goes to church and has no authority, that you’re not in danger of instrumentalizing the faith. But in this age and place, in a wealthy, capitalist, post-christian society, we don’t even notice the extent to which our orientation to church is consumeristic. For us, going to church exists as one potential choice among an array of consumer options, it competes with other activities (or with doing nothing at all) for our time, energy, and - yes - money. And the basis on which we decide whether or not to make that investment is, basically, “what am I going to get out of it?”
The problem isn’t so much that this is the wrong question; the problem is that few of us know what a truly satisfying answer to that question would be. The problem is not that we act in our self-interest, but rather that we don’t actually understand what our self-interest is. We have internalized the notion that the good for us is primarily stuff that can be consumed, stuff that we receive. Rather than coming to church to learn what we ought to desire, we arrive with our desires and expect church to meet them - and a lot of churches try hard to give people what they want.
I’m not going to pretend like I disregard your expectations and desires, not least because I’m confident that many of your expectations and desires are indeed good. You’re hoping that there’s something more to find; you want to encounter the truth. And Jesus is here to show us the way. Rather than using God as means of getting what you want, which is just a “spiritual” way of putting yourself first, Jesus tells us that if we really want to be first then we should make ourselves last, that rather than exalting ourselves we must humble ourselves. This is in our self-interest not just because if we suffer through life then God will give us an eternal reward, but rather because living that way is, in fact, it’s own reward, it is blessedness, it is to be like Christ, it is to be one with God. Jesus was telling his disciples then and is telling his disciples now, that a life like his own is what we should desire for ourselves. That is the good for us.
And then he gives a simple demonstration of what this means. He takes a child in his arms and says that to welcome a child in Christ’s name is to welcome Christ himself, which is to welcome God into your midst. Looking to the interests of others is your self-interest.
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