Proper 20B: Mark 9:30-37
The Rev'd Cameron Partridge
September 22, 2024
Good morning, St. Aidan’s.
This morning, as we continue to make our way through the Gospel of Mark, the unfolding of Jesus’ story and that of the disciples on the road marks our discipleship call as a path of transformative journeying, of learning and unlearning along the way, that we might uphold and affirm the vulnerable in our lives and in our world.
Last week, you may recall that Jesus issued the first of what biblical scholars have called the “passion predictions”: that Jesus would be handed over to human authorities, that he would be made to suffer and die; and that after three days he would rise again (Mark 8:31). He said this as he and the disciples were on the road to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, just after asking them “who do people say that I am” and then “who do you say that I am?” (8:27-29) Peter had, amazingly, offered a spot-on response, the Messiah, which Jesus had followed with that first passion prediction. Peter’s horrified reaction to the prediction inspired Jesus to say to Peter, to the larger group of disciples, and to the whoever could hear them among the gathered crowd, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:34-35). There is reversal, a kind of undoing, at the heart of this call to discipleship. It is highly unnerving, and to those who already counted themselves disciples, likely terrifying. This man whom we have now heard identified as the Messiah says he is going to his death, and to follow him means that in some fundamental way we too will be undone.
Right after this interchange in Mark’s Gospel the story of the Transfiguration takes place (9:2-8). We of course don’t hear it now—we hear it at the conclusion of Epiphany season and perhaps at the Feast of the Transfiguration at the beginning of August. But for Mark it occurs in this spot, as if in our passage through Jesus’ story, like and as disciples, we need to be reminded that indeed this Messiah who has just declared the terrible pattern of his own outpouring, is the Holy one of God, clothed with power. And so James, John, and especially Peter – the one who had rebuked Jesus after first hearing the reversals entailed by Jesus’ Messiahship – went up a mountain with him and saw him bathed in glorious light, flanked by Moses and Elijah, standing on holy ground in what we might think of as the fullness of time. Peter had wanted to keep them there with three booths. This vision, this glory – this was a vision of Messiahship that even in its ineffable qualities made some sort of sense, expressing as it did a power so obviously, immensely greater than any notion of human might. But no, this form of revelation was not how Jesus would continue to make his way through the world, nor was it an indication of the full shape of human discipleship.
And so, once down the mountain, now making their way through Galilee, Jesus again reminds the disciples what messiahship will cost him and them, what will happen: he would be handed over to “human hands,” they would kill him, and three days after that he would rise again (9:31). If after the first passion prediction the glorious power of the Messiah needed revelation, now another prediction was needed to underscore the vulnerable outpouring of the coming Passion, as if to say both of these revelations are true. It does not work to pick one form and ignore the other. Jesus’ life and teachings, his healings, his being handed over to suffering and death, his resurrection, is a paradox of power lived out in breathtaking beauty. Can we take it all in? Not easily. Not all at once. And we’re in good company. As Mark says of the disciples’ reaction: “they did not understand what [Jesus] was saying and were afraid to ask him” (9:32).
This incomprehension didn’t prevent them from responding to Jesus’ unsettling reminder in another way. As the story continues, once the group arrives at a house Jesus asks them to recount an argument that he had likely overheard snippets of (or maybe all of) along the way. The disciples, like children being asked to recount something they did that they know was wrong and do not want to own up to, remain silent. In fact, we hear that what they had been arguing about was “who was the greatest” (9:33-34). As biblical scholar Adela Yarbro Collins remarks, “Just as they do not wish to hear any more about the suffering of the Son of [Humanity] and do not wish to suffer themselves, so here they not only wish to be ‘great,’ but each wishes to be greater than the others.”[1] It’s like a Marvel movie, each of them trying to outdo one another in heroism. And why? Because, living as they do in an imperial Roman context, power is expressed through dominance. Power-over is what greatness looks like to them. They cannot conceive of power that divests itself, that unfolds with and among other human beings through collaboration, through sharing of resources, through interconnection that uplifts and seeks the healing and honors the wonder of all creation, and especially creation’s most vulnerable members.
This is the point at which Jesus invites his most trusted leaders, the twelve, to gather around him and sit down. He then pointedly interrupts their “who’s the greatest” narrative, knowing that even in its silence, in their refusal to tell it, their idea of power was still very much in the room. “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (9:35). Whoever wants to be first – he acknowledges their craving for the head of the line but then flips it – must be last. Other places in the gospels repeat elements of this last/first principle. One chapter after ours, for instance, Jesus declares, “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” (Mark 10:31). But in our passage this reversal is pointedly directed at leaders and leadership: do not dominate; follow; serve; and also, welcome. At this point Jesus brings a small child into their midst, gathering the child into his arms. He says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (Mark 9:37). The figure of the child in Jesus’ context was not so much a symbol of innocence, as contemporary Western contexts so often assume. The primary symbolic and very real dynamic Jesus was evoking here with this child was vulnerability. Children in his context were truly among the least of these, among those most vulnerable to oppression and violence.[2] Welcome the most vulnerable in my name, he said, and you welcome me, and God the Parent who sent me. Center the last. Let them be first. Be sent into the world, into all creation, to uphold the vulnerable, to strengthen our inter-connection, to proclaim the coming of the divine dream.[3]
As I was sitting with the image of the seated Jesus bringing in the child, I was reminded of a story from my childhood. One afternoon when I was a baby, napping in my crib, I am told that there was a group of boys in the park across the street playing baseball. As happens, they got carried away and one of them hit the ball so far it bounced off the window of my room. Had it broken it might well have shattered right onto me in the crib directly below it. My mom, who saw and heard what had happened, marched right out the front door, walked across the street to those boys and called them over to her. They stopped in their tracks. Then she called to them to come and sit in a circle. So they did (I imagine them all cross-legged, because she similarly intervened with me and my friends in the years to come…). Then she explained to them that she had a baby sleeping just below where they had hit the ball, and could they imagine the harm they might have caused? I can easily imagine a scenario in which a parent might have yelled at those boys, but there was something about my mom’s interruption of the flow of power, redirecting and reframing it, asking them to stop and consider the impact of their actions on someone who was vulnerable. And by God, they responded. Years later the roles would be somewhat reversed: I was in my grandfather’s backyard, playing baseball way too close to the basement studio where he was teaching music lessons. And I hit the ball right through the window – I’ll never forget the cringing moment I saw it make a perfect hole. Gramps’ response was unfortunately not in the manner of my mom’s, though I will admit the lesson was still learned… There is great power in action that interrupts the flow of power to turn it in another direction, to center those who are vulnerable, to transform our way of walking through the world, to remind us of our interconnection and our responsibility to and for one another.
Our path of discipleship calls upon us to confront the working of power in our lives and in our world. The first are to become last and the last first, Jesus proclaims in his words and with his life. We are to welcome the most vulnerable, knowing that we are welcoming the one who sent the Christ, the one who sends us. We are to open ourselves to the question of what such a discipleship of reversal might look like in our lives, how we are called to live the questions that Jesus and his disciples open out to us. In her book The Spiritual Landscape of Mark, Bonnie Thurston remarks that this middle section of Mark’s gospel in which we are located right now, frames the disciples as pilgrims of a sort. “They are walking question marks,” she writes. “We are the living, breathing mystery of incarnation and identity. We are full of questions about the meaning of our lives and discipleship. And the place we will get our answers is precisely on the journey.”[4] And so, dear friends, fellow living question marks, that question comes to us this morning. How might we be called to a ministry of welcome founded upon, fueled by, the world upending transformation that Jesus lived and proclaimed. How might we be called to unlearn things we have learned, that the first might become last and the last be made first?
[1] Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 444.
[2] William C. Placher, Mark: A Theological Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 134-135.
[3] Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call To Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Press, 1991).
[4] Bonnie B. Thurston, The Spiritual Landscape of Mark (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2008), 35.
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