So . . . yeah. This is
quite a tale. The Zebedee boys, James and John, ask Jesus to do for them
whatever they ask of him. And right off the bat, I think of the way a lot of
Christians treat their relationship with the divine . . . they want God to do
whatever they want. God is some sort of celestial Santa Claus, and one of the
perks of being a Christian is they get to ask God for stuff. They pray for
something—a good test result, a better job, a better relationship—and the they
expect to get it, or at least get consideration about it. It reminds me of the
old joke about the evangelical preacher sitting at a stop light, praying to God
for permission to get a new Cadillac. “Lord,” he says, “give me a sign. If you
want me to have that new car, make this light turn green . . . now!” We can usually get God
to authorize our desires if we want.
I’ve often thought it
interesting that God grants the wishes of people who are better
off—comparatively, at least—with greater frequency than those who are, well,
not so much . . . I mean, you know
there’s a greater chance that prayers for Aunt Tilly’s recovery get answered if
Aunt Tilly’s got good health insurance . . . is that the way it’s supposed to
be?
Anyway. James and John
ask Jesus to do whatever they ask of him, and Mark ratchets up the irony by
putting this episode right after Jesus predicts his death and resurrection for
the third time.
This always reminds me as if Aunt Tilly—that woman really gets around!—if Aunt
Tilly were to tell her nephews she has a year to live and they start arguing
over who gets the silverware . . . Matthew puts the two together there
too—biblical scholars think he in fact copied Mark’s account—but oddly, edits
it so the boys’ mother
does then asking: “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your
right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.” Now, I don’t want to say
Matthew’s a bit more patriarchal than Mark, but . . .
Well. Here in Mark,
where the boys ask him to do anything they want him to, Jesus doesn’t get all
haughty on them, he doesn’t get up on his toes and say “how dare you treat me, your master like a slave.” No. He
says very calmly, very humbly, even, “What is it you want me to do for you?”
And right here, he exhibits the qualities of a sage (which he certainly was, among other things),
taking even the most objectionable, the most clueless
utterances of his students calmly and seriously, and using them as a teachable
moments. When the ask to sit at his side in his glory, he doesn’t answer their
question directly, but tells them they don’t know what they’re asking. And they
clearly don’t,
even though he’s just told
them, for the third time
what’s in store: “the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and
the scribes . . . then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock
him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him.” And yet they still ask him to sit at his
right and left hand, imagining some kind of royal throne room where they are
the royal flunkies.
His students are once
again mistaking him
for their preconceptions
about him, about how all of this is going to come down. They’re like the rich
dude from last week, whose stuff
makes it really hard to enter the kingdom of God, to live into the reality that
already surrounds him . . . n the same way, their idea of what the Messiah is
going to be—inherited from ideas common to a lotof
Jews at the time—coupled with their own very human desire for power and
influence, has blocked their ability to discern the truth.
This seems to be quite
a theme in Mark, doesn’t it? Everybody
seems to mistake Jesus for their own ideas about him, from his homies, who try
to make him king,
to Peter, who rebukes him, to James, John, theirmother, if you take Matthew’s word for it . . .
I think it’s a part of the human condition, to mistake one’s own idea of
reality for reality itself, we get these ideas about something, some concept about how things
really are, and it blocks our ability to see what is right in front of us. In
the case of James and John and the others, what has been explained to them three times, already. I guess it’s
really true that we see only what we want to . . .
Or perhaps it’s that we
see only what’s in our minds. Everything we perceive is, first, filtered
through our perceptions—via our sense organs—and, second, constructed in our
minds as a concept
or, as Buddhists call it, a mental formation. Thus, as cognitive scientists—and
Buddhists—point out, these mental formations are what our mind thinks about
when we think, not objective reality, whatever that is. We do not perceive and
think about reality,
but a representation
of it, a construct in our minds. And, as in the case of Jesus’ disciples, the
way we construct these representations, and the values we attach to them, can
vary widely from the truth.
Here’s a trivial
example: everybody can agree if something’s bright red, right? But not so fast
. . . what if you’re red/green colorblind? It’s caused by one of the three
kinds of cones in our eye-balls not working correctly. And to those folks,
their reality is different from ours . . . and who’s to say which is the “true”
reality: the one where there is
red and green or the one without? Well, you might say, we can measure those
wavelengths, we know when they’re there, but I didn’t ask whether we know about
the wavelengths, but about the phenomena called “red” and “green.” These are
concepts, symbols invented to represent what happens in the retinas and brains
of the majority of humans when these wavelengths are encountered. In other
words, red and/or green are what we decide it is.
A more serious example,
at least nominally, is when a candidate for office elicits quite the opposite
views in the electorate: his supporters can see the same ads and read the same
speeches and position papers as his detractors, and come to exactly the opposite
conclusions. People who vote one way tend to—not completely, but tend to—have
been raised similarly or be of a different generation—ours is always the
best—or be in a similar economic sector. And for them, reality is based on how
they were raised, what they grew up with, and how much money they have. Each
group can look at the same facts, the same science, the same everything and reach very
different conclusions.
And that is what the
disciples have done . . . they’ve seen the life of Jesus—how he heals the sick
and feeds the hungry, how he puts everybody ahead of himself—and heard him say three times what is going to
happen, yet they view reality the way they have been conditioned. The concepts
in their minds, that they’ve been raised in, their economic position on the
bottom of the scale determine the way they see reality, to wit: Jesus is going
to kick out the Romans and their rich backers and people like themselves—humble fishermen
like James and John—are going to be in charge.
Well. When the other ten
disciples hear the Zebedee’s desire, they get really mad, and we’re not told
why, but based on my own
good, protestant upbringing, I interpret it as them being mad at them for
bringing it up in the first
place. Or, in a more cynical moment, I might think they’re mad because they
didn’t think of it first. Whatever the case, it prompts another teachable
moment: “You know that among the Gentiles—and here he seems to be saying those
who subscribe to the current socio-political system— in that system, those whom
they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are
tyrants over them.” Pretty standard stuff in the ancient world: the powerful
ruled absolutely and pretty-much did whatever they wanted.
But it isn’t like that
among the followers of Jesus, and here I suspect he is talking as much about
the new reality, the one he calls the Kingdom of God. It’s not like that in the
Kingdom of God: whoever wishes to be first in the Kingdom of God must be slave
of all. In this Kingdom, in this new reality, the mark of first-ness, the sign
of greatness, is that one must be as last—and you couldn’t get much more last
that a slave. In other words, as Jesus says at other places in the Gospels, the
first shall be last and the last first.
And now he comes right
back around to where he started: He himself came not to be served but to serve,
and to give his one life for the many. Once again, at the end of this speech,
he predicts his own demise, but this time in a newly disconcerting and
immediate way: as an example for his followers to . . . follow. And a lot of
modern Christians have problems with this—if everybody is a servant, who is
going to lead? Who’s going to make policy, who’s going to make sure the rules
are enforced? It seems, on the surface
at least, to be incompatible with decency and good order.
And I guess I want to
leave y’all here this morning, with a question: how are we to live out Jesus’
teachings? In a life structured by society into hierarchies, where the cream
supposedly rises to the top, how are we supposed to be servants of all? How are
we supposed to serve the person who checks us out at the supermarket, who works
as our secretary or mops our floors? How are we supposed to give our lives for
many and be the face of Christ to a confused, chaotic and hurting world? Amen.
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