a Homily for Proper 20B

Text: Mark 9:30-37

Location, location, location

Three times Jesus foretells his death in the gospel we attribute to Mark. Three times. In chapters 8, 9, and 10. Each one has a similar impact: Jesus’s teaching is misheard, misunderstood, and ignored by the disciples. Last week, we had the first of the three. This week, we get the second. And it’s a doozy.

In Mark, there is constant motion. Jesus is always walking, going from town to town healing and teaching. The disciples are always at His heals, following, observing their rabbi. Then they turn their focus on Jerusalem and begin the journey to the Holy City for passover, and ultimately the crucifixion. Jesus’s language and encouragement is similarly active, pushing and prodding, full of action words like do and go. He compels His followers to follow Him where He is going. In some ways, this gospel is all about movement.

Which is why we must mark the places in Mark where Jesus and the disciples stop moving. When they arrive at a town and go inside a house and just…stop.

Last week, we had the walk and talk with the two basic questions. This week, He tells them of His death while walking, then they head into the city, walk into a house, and stop. It is here, in this secluded space, after they have finished moving and become still, that He asks them what they’ve been arguing about. It is here that they are to plumb the depths of their souls to figure out what is most important. And it is here that they refuse to admit to Jesus that their conversation was about ego, power, and social order.

Life and Death and Resurrection

When Jesus is talking about life and death, about how one of them will betray Him, and about transforming death into life, they are arguing about something so unkingdomlike as which of them is the best disciple. Which is the best Jew. Which is the best follower of Jesus.

When we gather in our secluded place in the middle of our ongoing journey, when we step through those doors and enter into this place to be together, to be a bit apart from this world, and to raise ourselves up to GOD, are we doing so recognizing that Jesus has been talking to us out there before we came in? On the other side of those doors? Were we listening? Did we hear Jesus tell us about life and death and resurrection? Did we hear the message that Jesus has been giving us in the midst of heartbreak and pain? In cancer and in injury? In poverty and homelessness? In outrageous conditions and silent martyrdom? Have we heard the cries of those around us? Have we even been listening?

Or were we arguing? Were we arguing about who is right and who is working hardest and who believes? Or maybe we were arguing about who isn’t right or working hard or believing.

What Jesus Says

When Jesus turns to teach them about the child, I honestly don’t know how Jesus knows that the disciples were off-target. They don’t fess up to it and the text doesn’t say. Based on Jesus’s response to their silence with a teaching about what and who is important, it is clear what Jesus thinks of their little debate. He takes the disciples into a house, calls them around Him and then teaches them about order. The first will be last and the last will be first. This certainly isn’t the first time Jesus has made that claim. But in light of last week, in which Jesus turns to put Peter back in his proper place, behind, Jesus is giving them another chance to understand their place. He then finds a child, seemingly out of thin air, and puts her in the center of the room and says to those disciples “treat this child the way you would treat GOD.” Taking these two teachings together we come to understand why the disciples had such a hard time understanding Jesus on this. He was not only telling them that they weren’t favored for their presence or perseverance, but that they had to take a backseat to a little kid. A random child was to be treated by them as more important to GOD than they are.

They also didn’t know what we know: that the story doesn’t end in Jesus’s death, but well after his resurrection because we’re still writing it. As Jesus describes what is to happen to Him, he tells the disciples that He is going to be betrayed and killed. But He also tells them that He will rise again on the third day. Jesus will destroy death and those who spent their lives in service will be first in line. We aren’t collecting jewels for our crowns, but following Jesus at the back of the line.

Get Busy Dying So We Can Get Busy Living

We need this gospel story at St. Paul’s. We need to hear this. We need to be reminded about who our minds are on: GOD and our neighbors: and who they’re not to be on: ourselves. And Jesus has given us the perfect example of who that neighbor is: a child. We don’t need more children here so that they may perform for us; that’s just another way of our making it about us. It is about making sure GOD is at the center of what we do, and GOD is manifested in our world in the weak and the powerless, the innocent and the hopeful. GOD is at the center when other peoples’ needs are met before our own. GOD is at the center when we dismiss our hierarchies and preference for ourselves: our tastes and our ambitions.

All of this must be understood through that very first teaching:

“The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”

To understand Jesus is to understand that we are not in the business of preventing death, but of embracing it, for it is through death that we find the resurrection. Last week we were instructed to take up our crosses and follow Jesus. That is to death. Death to ourselves. Death to our failed systems of power. Death to self-preservation. Sometimes we need to die. Because death isn’t the end. Death is how we get born. Death is the fertility that produces new life. As Easter people, as resurrection people, we are to see a new way forward in life that rejects human power and embraces divine love and generosity and hope and forgiveness and mercy. A way that helps us reject our privileged place and embrace that space at the back. Not in the back pew, but back of the line. We don’t need saving, we need dying. Because death is not the end.

Related articles

• It Is Not About You! (Eating Scripture) (drewdowns.net)
• Two Questions About Jesus (drewdowns.net)