So, we’re continuing our march through
Mark, so to speak, as Jesus and the boys trek through Palestine, healing and
teaching and preaching, and it reminds me a little of a Hollywood road movie,
the classic of which may be Easy
Rider, about a couple of hippies riding motorcycles across America
and irritating the locals wherever they happened to stop. Or maybe Smoky and the Bandit, with
the late, great Burt Reynolds in a Trans-Am, running interference for a
truckload of beer. The plot—such a it is—is always the same: some characters
are placed in a vehicular conveyance—maybe a plane or a train or an
automobile—and they interact with each other and the people they meet along the
way. And before you get mad at me—how dare
you compare Burt Reynolds and Peter Fonda to our Lord and Savior—that’s really
not what I’m doing, I just want to point out the similarities between their
stories and Jesus’ on a couple of levels.
First is the structure: both gospels and
road movies are episodic, with the episodes—called pericopae by pointy-headed Biblical-studies
types—tied together by a thin ribbon of road. Asphalt in the movies, dirt in
the Gospels. In literature this kind of structure is called picaresque, and
what overall plot there is can be called an “arc:” it starts somewhere and ends
somewhere else. This is certainly the case in a location sense—it is a road movie, after
all—but usually holds on different levels, as well: the characters learn
something about themselves, say, or society learns something about them. In Smoky and the Bandit,
Frog—played by Sally Field—gradually falls in love with Burt as they get
physically closer and closer to Atlanta.
In Easy
Rider, things get darker . . . the road trip becomes scarier and
more dangerous until in the end, the protagonists are murdered. And of course,
that’s the same thing that happens to Jesus—it’s the place we all know the
story is going when we read these passages. And in one sense—again, don’t get
mad—in one sense, it’s for the same reason: like the characters in the film,
Jesus has irritated a peck of people over the course of his travels. In Easy Rider’s case, it’s the
squares, the representatives of the dominant culture. In Jesus’ case, it’s the
scribes and Pharisees and Temple authorities . . . the representatives of the
dominant culture. In fact, this shows another point of similarity between the
Gospels and road movies. The protagonists —Jesus and Smoky and the hippies—and
what they do are
often deeply counter-cultural. In Easy
Rider, its drug use—among other things—and in Smoky and the Bandit, it’s
speeding and hauling contraband and just general cussedness. In the Gospels,
Jesus violates cultural and religious laws all over the place which, as I
pointed out earlier this Summer, were equivalent to civil law in that day and
age.
And that might be one reason that while
traveling the Galilee Road, Jesus didn’t want anybody to know it. He’d
certainly irritated enough of the authorities, and we know they were out to get
him . . . perhaps he didn’t want to get arrested too soon, before he’d done
what he’d come to do. Or perhaps it was a bit more complicated than that: as we
saw last week, Jesus shut Peter up when he declared him Messiah, and it seemed to be because he
didn’t want everyone to make the same mistake Peter did, expecting him to be an
earthly king and all. One other
time, you’ll remember, the people tried to kidnap him and make him king, and he
quickly slipped that
particular noose . . .
Like we saw last week, he was teaching
them the exact opposite
of what everyone expected: he’d be betrayed, killed and resurrected which, resurrection
aside, was not what anybody
wanted. Now they come to Capernaum, one of his regular hang-outs (he’s likely
staying at Peter’s mom’s house), and he asks them a question: “What were y’all
arguing about on the way?” And they shuffle their feet, and look all
shifty-eyed, because they’re embarrassed: they’ve been caught in the act,
fighting about who was the greatest. And this just after we’re told a second time that he’d
predicted his death. It reminds me of one of those classic Seinfeld episodes where
the gang is so self-absorbed that when bad things happen to others, they make
it all about themselves.
That’s why I imagine it’s with a heavy
sigh and maybe a roll of his eyes that Jesus sits down and calls them over. And
though this little detail would go right over our heads, folks in Mark’s time
would know that by doing this, Jesus is assuming the formal attitude of a
master teacher, and it emphasizes
that what he’s about to say, it underlines its authority. So what he says next
should carry great weight: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and
servant of all.” And in fact, this is
a cornerstone of Jesus’ teaching, and here is the first time he says it. But
certainly not the last . . .
“Whoever wants to be first must be last
of all and servant of all.” How countercultural is that? Back then, but especially nowadays. If
everyone followed that rule, it would be difficult to implement free-market
capitalism, wouldn’t it? I mean, doesn’t all that depend on being first?
Striving to dominate in a market? Look at Apple, the first trillion-dollar
American company, which ruthlessly aspires to world domination, and pretty-much
achieves it. Or Amazon, which lost by just a nose in the trillion-dollar
sweepstakes. What could be more emblematic of free market benefits than these
two companies? And is that do bad? After all, a rising tide lifts all the
boats.
Unless, of course, you’re the
brick-and-mortar stores that Amazon has run out of business, that employed many
more people in many more places than does Amazon . Or the thousands of
third-world workers in near-slave conditions that make all those shiny Apple
gadgets I love so much. Is this what Jesus means when he says the last will be
first in the Kingdom of God? Because they certainly aren’t in the Kingdom of Humankind . . .
Of course there are multiple levels to
all this, it could be that he’s talking on a more interior, spiritual, level.
Perhaps we’re to be last in line, to put others before ourselves. Certainly
that jibes with being the “servant of all.” Servants put their employers above
themselves . . . and here Jesus is advising that we put everyone’s needs before our
own, if indeed we want to be first . . . where? Certainly not in society,
certainly not in the business world . . . where is this place in which to be
first we need to put ourselves last? Are we talking the Kingdom of God here?
Are we talking about being first in that spiritual and earthly realm?
Saint Benedict of Nursia saw it as being
last in both physical ways—owning nothing, living simply—and spiritually as
well. The heart of his celebrated Rule for monastic living is a ladder to
heaven, which you ascend by becoming humble. It’s a ladder of humility, and the
word itself derives from “humus” or soil, so in in a sense, you’re going “up”
to heaven by going down. And one step on this ladder is giving up the desire to
have the best of everything, to be first . . . that we must be content, as he
put it, “with the lowest and most menial treatment.” Notice that there is a
psycho-spiritual dimension here; elsewhere he says that we’re to be convinced in our hearts that
we actually are
one of the least of these. Because only if we’re convinced, if its more than just an
intellectual proposition, can we live out Jesus’ admonitions.
And that brings us back to this passage,
and Jesus’ illustration of it all—he takes up a little child. And again, the
optics, as political types would put it, are important here. Details we might
gloss over are important: first, he takes the child and puts among them, showing
that it is one of them, a child of humanity. Then he takes the child up into
his arms, and it symbolically becomes one with him: “Whoever welcomes one such
child in my name welcomes me,” and the staging of the scene reinforces what he
is saying, as the child who is at first among the disciples becomes unified
with Christ.
Whoever welcomes one such child, whoever
welcomes someone who is convinced she is last of all, who in fact knows no
better, who is soaked in the innocent conviction that she will be taken care
of, and at the same time is at the beck and call of everyone else, is everybody’s servant,
welcomes Jesus. The child is an avatar, a model
of Jesus, just as Jesus is an avatar of the child. But not just of the child, he’s is
the avatar of the one who sent him, who is the Lord God, whom he calls Abba. In
fact, in some way Christians have argued about for millennia, Jesus incarnated God, made Godflesh, so whoever welcomes
one such as this child welcomes God into their hearts and lives as well.
Sisters and brothers, this is flat-out,
pure-D Good News. We don’t have to go up on a mountain-top, or into deep
meditation to welcome the Christ into our hearts. Nor do we have to chant
Psalms, sing hymns or pray twenty-four hours a day. No—to welcome Jesus into
our hearts and lives, all we have to do is welcome the last and the least, the
innocent and naive, the powerless and weak. In other words, all we have to do
is welcome one such as a child. Amen.
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