As I was saying… now that the Bishop has visited and a profoundly beautiful confirmation liturgy has become a wonderful memory, we gather back here to continue listening to the story that the Gospel of Mark has been telling us. Unless you’ve noticed this before, the disciples seem to continue to draw the short stick and put themselves in a position of completely missing the point that Jesus has been teaching.
Let me get you caught up. We’ve gone from, to quote the title of a surprisingly good movie, we’ve gone from Dumb to Dumber when it comes to the disciples. They seem to be completely clueless to what Jesus has been doing and teaching. The Gospel being proclaimed by Jesus just seems too messy, too disorganized and certainly too inclusive for their tastes. After all, they’ve heard of the God of the Hebrew scriptures with all the violence, war and gnashing of teeth. What’s up with Jesus’ gospel?
But let me relieve any sense of confusion we might have. The God of the Old Testament is the same God of the Gospel, it’s just that Jesus has revealed God in God’s fullness. To see Jesus is to see God and quite frankly, the Law and the Prophets revealed Jesus but there seems to have been a lot of confusion when it came to seeing the Gospel through the Law and Prophets. God is there but only from a distance. Now, in the fullness of time, God completely reveals God’s self in the person of Jesus. So if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.
What is it that you see? Or better who is it that you see? I love Rachel Held Evans help here. She says that we need to be careful to not “overlook one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross. Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.” Evans, Rachel Held. Inspired (pp. 11-12). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
Maybe this helps us give the disciples a pass with their consistently clueless enjoinders that reveal a truth about human nature. We want to be important, be considered as an insider and enjoy all the benefits that come from that: fame, perhaps wealth, significance and influence. To date me a bit, when I read these encounters that the disciples had with Jesus, I can hear, very quietly in my mind, some lyrics in the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The scene I am thinking about happens at the Last Supper when the apostles break out into a catchy tune, singing, I quote “Always hoped that I’d be an Apostle. Knew that I would make it if I tried; Then when we retire we can write the gospels; So they’ll all talk about us when we’ve died.” Now don’t get me wrong; I am not suggesting that Jesus Christ Superstar is accurate here, or it’s even good theology but I think this specific scene is spot on. I mean if fame and renown isn’t the point of the struggles, they faced by following Jesus, what is?
OK… maybe they weren’t seeking money. That’s us. Money can bring us so much and if we sign on to follow the messiah, wouldn’t that be part of the deal? No? Well, how about prestige, fame, kudos, praise, distinction, success, honor, renown? Have I stepped on any toes yet? I mean if we’re honest, we can see the appeal that made this whole apostle-gig so attractive. And in an almost redundant way, enter James and John from stage left.
I kind of feel sorry for them. I mean couldn’t Mark just say “a couple of apostles came to Jesus and asked a question?” But he didn’t. He specifically points out that James and John, nicknamed Sons of Thunder because of their strong, and I suspect, loud and boisterous ways, approached Jesus with a rather embarrassing and self-serving question. “Teacher we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” If you are a parent, you’ve probably heard something similar. It’s part of the same genre that is spoken when you here a loud, crashing sound coming from the other room…. You know the room that has all those China and crystal memorabilia inherited from a long forgotten relative. You hear the crash and then a small, sheepish voice say “It wasn’t me; I didn’t break it.”
What I find a bit surprising in this exchange is the audacity of the disciples and Jesus’ reaction. “What is it you want me to do?” Jesus asked. Then without hesitation, the disciples say, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at our left, in your glory.” Every time I hear this story, I am surprised that Jesus doesn’t just shake his head and walk away. Instead with great patience and curiosity he encourages them to come clean with their request. And to top it off, the disciples don’t pause but quickly make their request.
If you think about it a bit, it’s easy to see what these two brothers not only are asking Jesus, but we can even see that they feel entitled to them; after all these two guys, along with Peter are part of the inner sanctum; they have a special role to play where they are on the inside, next to Jesus’ power and glory. They are unique among the disciples. Surely this isn’t too big of a request.
For this to make sense to us, we shouldn’t just dismiss this scene immediately and say to ourselves, “there they go again.” Look at how Jesus responds. Or better, look at how he doesn’t respond. He does not just dismiss the two as having asked yet another dumb question. Or laugh at them. No. Jesus starts off with curiosity and then addresses them with compassion, not condemnation.
I don’t know about you, but I am reminded when, in a moment of fatigue and short-temper, I replied to a student once who asked a completely irrelevant question to me in the middle of an important lecture I was giving. I said to this student, “there is no such thing as a stupid question. There are only stupid people.” I know I shouldn’t have said that, but I did say I was fatigued, right?
Jesus does none of that. Even though the two brothers were asking out of ignorance, immaturity and selfishness, Jesus doesn’t chastise them. Look at this exchange in comparison to how Jesus responds to the Pharisees. There are no serpents or vipers or whitewashed tombs here. It’s fascinating that Jesus goes after the religious people but shows nothing but patience and compassion to those who don’t get it but know that they don’t. Really there is not much difference between the two types of people other than those who think they have it all figured out, the religious people, seem to be further away than those who know they don’t have it figured out. There’s a truth here that we shouldn’t miss: you don’t have to have the right answers or even ask the right questions. Just be honest. Be honest with God and God responds to that by taking our immaturity and speaking right into it. You see, James and John just want to be close to Jesus. They aren’t asking for anything more than to maintain a closeness to Jesus that they have already experienced. So when it is all said and done, they are ultimately asking, can they still maintain their role as part of the inner circle? It was friendship they were after. They had it and wanted it to continue. The Pharisees on the other hand, were not interested in friendship or even truth for that matter. They wanted Jesus to stop doing what he was doing.
I am not saying that James and John had pure intentions. Indeed, implicit in their request is a sense of entitlement. After all they had given up so much; didn’t that count for anything. I can also hear in their request almost a demand that because they had given up so much, they were due for a fat paycheck. In other words, what’s in it for us?
Listen, again, to how Jesus responds: “what is it you want me to do for you?” Again, we have heard to story so many times, that response doesn’t hit us like it should. Jesus doesn’t reprimand them and say something like, “whoa. Hold on. You shouldn’t be asking me what I can do for you, you should be asking what you should be doing for me.” After all, he’s the Rabbi, the teacher. Where do these students get off questioning the teacher? You know what I’d say: “there’s no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid people.” Yet Jesus even teaches amid asking a question. He says them “I am here to serve. How can I serve you?” Not what we expected. But thankfully, it is what we get.
Serving. That’s how it all began. Remember “Jesus is the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.” This Jesus enters the messiness of God’s own creation, red-faced and crying, as an innocent baby. Every time we expect thunder laced displays of power, we get rides on a donkey, washing dung-caked feet and being nailed to a cross. Even on the other side of the resurrection we still get a God who invites his frightened, agnostic friends to a fish fry on an abandoned beach. This is no power-hungry God who has to remind us that God is God and we are not. Instead as Paul told the church in Phillipi, Jesus
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
This is not the stuff of Marvel Comics and superheroes who never pour themselves out or surrender their lives for loved ones. Jesus is different than that as he empties himself of all privilege and then calls us to do the same.
It’s rather ironic that the other disciples were angry with the question that James and John asked. You see, they all, except for John will abandon Jesus at crunch time. Things didn’t turn out the way they had hoped. So, once again, Jesus teaches:
So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.
But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
In other words, to follow Jesus is to let go of privilege and entitlement. There seems to be no room for either when we are busy serving others.
Who could have guessed it: the world is changing but not through the usual ways of power and conquest. It is changing, one person at a time through serving others, especially those who feel they don’t deserve it. That’s the way God has set it up to work. We have an important role to serve, and God has empowered us to make a difference. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu, preaching at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, in 1999 said: “God, without us, will not; as we, without God, cannot.” Crossan, John Dominic. How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (pp. 165-166). HarperOne. Kindle Edition