Sunday October 17, 2021
Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Scripture: Mark 10:35-45
This past summer when I was visiting my family, one of my nephews came up to me and asked, “Aunt Kate, will you do something for me?” I replied, “Maybe. What do you want me to do?” He came back, “First, promise me that you are going to do it.” You can probably guess where this was going – I was very reluctant to promise to do something without knowing what it was that I was promising to do!
When I read today’s bible story, this is where my mind went immediately. Two of Jesus’s disciples, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, the Sons of Thunder as they are named elsewhere – they come up to Jesus and say to him, “Hey man, could you do us a favour?” And Jesus, just like Aunt Kate, replies, “Well, that depends. What do you want me to do for you?”
It turns out that James and John wanted prime seats when Jesus came into his glory. They trusted that Jesus was going to be glorified and they wanted to be right in the centre of it all, one of them on his right side and the other on his left side. They wanted to be able to bask in the reflection of Jesus’s glory, and probably hoped that some of his power would rub off on them.
And Jesus, well, I can just see Jesus shaking his head at them. “Don’t you get it yet? Weren’t all of you just arguing a while back there on the road about who was the greatest? Didn’t I tell you that greatness isn’t what you think it is? Didn’t I already tell you that the people who are rejected by society, they are the ones who are the greatest in the kingdom of the One whom I call Father?”
Jesus ducks the question that James and John have asked him – it’s not within his power to decide who will be on his right and on his left. But he turns to teach all of his disciples again, just what it means to be great. Greatness isn’t about lording over other people. Greatness isn’t about favouring people who happen to be on our side and oppressing or punishing those who aren’t. Instead, true greatness is about serving other people – Jesus himself didn’t come so that other people could worship him and serve him and treat him like an Emperor; instead Jesus came so that he could serve the world.
I think that maybe Jesus’s disciples were looking for some sort of superhero leader that they could follow – someone like Superman, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Iron Man, or Captain Marvel. I think that maybe James and John, by asking to be on Jesus’s left and right side, might have been hoping to take their place in history as the superhero’s sidekicks.
But God didn’t choose to become human as a superhero.
Instead, God chose to be born as a red-faced baby who cried and who wet his diaper and who needed to be rocked to sleep. God chose to befriend ordinary people, and wept when his friend died. And spoiler alert – God eventually ended up nailed to a cross, naked and vulnerable and abandoned. There on the cross, he did have two others with him, one at his right side and one at his left, but it wasn’t James and John. There, at the end of his life, Jesus was flanked on either side by two bandits who joined the crowds in mocking Jesus.
God didn’t become a superhero like Superman, who could have smashed the cross to pieces. Instead, God chose to become mortal. Vulnerable. Human.
And Jesus says that to be human is a good thing. To be gloriously, vulnerably human, with all of the messiness of joys and sorrows – this is who God created us to be.
We aren’t called to strive for greatness as the world defines greatness. We aren’t called to become superhuman. Instead, we are called to serve one another. We are called to seek to put other people’s lives ahead of our own comfort. We are called to walk each other home in our messy humanity, helping each other along the road.
When we claim to be followers of Jesus, then we are claiming to follow this nobody from Galilee who hung around with people on the margins and who ended up nailed to the cross. When we choose to follow Jesus, then we are choosing to hang out with the same people whom Jesus hung out with, and we are choosing to embrace a life of service. When we choose to follow Jesus, then we are choosing to follow him all of the way to the cross; we are choosing to embrace vulnerability rather than power; we are choosing to reject the things that the world values and embrace the love that Jesus lived.
I know that we’ve talked about embracing the cross this fall – our autumn readings really seem to be pointing us more towards Holy Week and Easter than Christmas! But when we take up our cross, we are choosing not to turn our backs on suffering, we are choosing to turn our back on worldly power instead. In some ways, maybe it does come full circle, because in taking up the cross, in embracing vulnerability and loving service, maybe we are preparing our hearts just a little bit more to receive the wonder of God being born as a baby at Christmas.
James and John, when they spring their question on Jesus, they assume that sitting at Jesus’s left and right mean that they will have more honour and power than they could ever imagine. Even though Jesus has told his disciples several times that he is going to suffer and die, they still assume that Jesus is headed for earthly greatness. They don’t realize that Jesus isn’t just going to shuffle the deck so that a different group, a different party ends up in charge – instead Jesus is totally flipping the world structures on their head so that service and greatness are the same thing. It’s not that you are to serve now so that you can be great and powerful and important later on – true greatness is to be found right there in the middle of service.
I think that there have been so many lessons that the world has learned and continues to learn in this pandemic. We have learned that the truly essential workers are the ones who previously weren’t valued by the world. We have learned that our lives are more interconnected than we ever imagined, and our actions impact everyone around us. We have learned that sometimes we need to embrace a little bit of discomfort – a mask over our mouth and nose, or a vaccine in the arm – in order to keep everyone around us safe – people we know and love, and people we may never meet. When we do this, we are embracing the cross, we are embracing the life of service that Jesus calls us to, and we are living lives that are great in God’s kingdom.
And may the love that Jesus lived and taught grow and grow and grow, so that the whole world might live this love. Amen.
Embracing the Cross, Embracing Service
Westfield United Church
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