Mark 10:35-45
Right on the heels of the rich young man’s challenge to let go of all the possessions and privileges that have shaped his life, we encounter two more young men about to learn a hard lesson from Jesus. When picturing the scene, I find it helpful to remember that many of Jesus’s disciples were very likely teenaged boys, the oldest maybe in their early twenties. I was 15 when I first told another person I was going to be a priest when I grew up, having not even an inkling of the years-long gauntlet of medical and psychological screenings, interviews, internships, assignments, and sacrifices that would involve. Looking back now at my teenaged self, I have both gratitude and a sense of humor about my degree of confidence. There is an arrogance that comes with youth, and it is not always a bad thing. Sometimes, it leads a young person down a difficult but rewarding path.
In the case of James and John, maybe a bit of that youthful confidence is what propelled them out of their father’s boat and onto the path behind Jesus. I think it is definitely a factor in their request for positions of honor and power in Jesus’s kingdom. In a culture built on a complex system of honor, where the patronage of or affiliation with an important person was really the only chance at moving up in the world, James and John are simply thinking ahead. They know Jesus is special, they have witnessed him transfigured in splendor before their eyes. They, like most Jews of the time, believe the role of the Messiah is in large part a military and political one. They trust that Jesus will be enthroned, and they want to get as close to that throne as possible. They want to be his favorites, and they want all the glory that must go with that status.
I think we can understand why the other disciples would be a little annoyed by this. Simon Peter and Andrew answered the call to fish for people first, so they surely have seniority. Some of the disciples have wives and possibly children they have uprooted, aging parents they have left behind to hang on Jesus’s every word, so if it’s a matter of who has made the greatest sacrifice, surely it wasn’t James and John, right? Once a hierarchy begins to form, human beings instantly jockey for the places near the top. But Jesus is about to turn that entire worldview upside down.
“You do not know what you are asking.” I can imagine his response as equal parts exasperated and gentle. Jesus knows what awaits him in Jerusalem, the betrayal and pain and death. Loving his disciples, and knowing them as he does, he does not want that fate for them. He does not want them to know the same pain, to drink the cup that even Jesus will ask God to be relieved of. They really do not know what they are asking.
We rarely do know what we are asking when we make demands, requests, bargains with God. God’s response to Job out of the whirlwind is a reminder of the sheer unfathomability of God. God reminds Job that God is vaster and more incomprehensible than the whole creation, beyond any human attempts to identify a system of reward and punishment. The God who laid the foundation of the earth, who is responsible for lightning and rain and the intricacies of the human mind, for whom the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy—this God is bigger than our ideas about status and power and social climbing, even bigger than our human interpretations of justice, mercy, and love. This God who made all things is the same God who speaks the words “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” Our impossibly big God knelt down to become us, to wash our feet and wipe our tears and share food with us.
The power and the glory that James and John seek, the shiny throne they expect Jesus to sit in, the armies they expect him to wield—they are going to be disappointed. Jesus knows this. He also knows that, like so many of the people Jesus sent out to make disciples of all nations, James and John will suffer for their faith in him. James was one of the first martyrs of the church, and John was either martyred or exiled to a life of hard labor far from home. They will drink the same cup that Jesus will drink on the cross, a death for the sake of the Gospel. But first, their understanding of power must be fundamentally changed.
Ultimately, James and John are making the same mistake that rich young man made last week. They are expecting a transaction, a quid pro quo relationship with Jesus. Just as he thought he could earn eternal life, they assume that they can earn Jesus’s love and any perks that might come with being God’s favorite boys. What they are really seeking is a closer relationship to power, not a closer relationship to God.
“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.” The places of honor and glory that James and John seek will only be found in servanthood, sacrifice, and lovingkindness. The power that they see wielded by kings and rulers and emperors is nothing like the power that stands before them in Jesus. In Jesus, the power that brought the universe into being empties himself to encounter us as one of us. God divested Godself of reality-making power to show us what real power, real honor, real glory looks like. To show us what love lives like. Not like the rulers of this world, whether born or made or elected, but like Jesus. As one who came not to be served but to serve, to give his life and defeat death so that we might truly live. So let us live, remembering the baptism with which we too have been baptized, perhaps even with a little bit of the boldness that led James and John to miss the mark so spectacularly. In a world still obsessed with power, it takes boldness to choose a different way. May we be so bold.
Mother A Writes 