Jesus teaches about God’s dream for creation, even as those closest to him misunderstand. Even as we misunderstand.
Even when the disciples get it so wrong
Proper 20B | Mark 9:30-37
How did we get here?
How did we get to the point in which disciples are arguing about which one of them is better than the rest?
It is a disgrace. I can only imagine how Jesus is putting up with it. And how he doesn’t blow his top. Have they learned nothing?
Many of us have become a bit desensitized to the idea that Jesus’s followers get confused. That even the disciples can be quite petty.
And yet, what we see is not a moment that came from nowhere. Nor is it something we ought to dismiss as normal.
We ought to consider this behavior as serious: because they all should know better. Jesus has been crystal clear about hierarchies and who gets to be considered “great” in the eyes of God. And it isn’t the winner of a disciple olympics.
The Turn
Last week’s gospel was from Mark 8: when Jesus asks his disciples who they say that he is. Messiah Peter says.
Then Jesus describes the coming struggle: torture and death. And Peter gets out of line to protect the Messiah, the commander and king, and ultimately to save the gathering army. And Jesus rebukes Peter for tempting him with safety and power. No. That isn’t following God’s command.
Instead, we follow him into sacrifice. We save our lives only by giving them up. Not by trying to save them.
Then Jesus takes three of them with him up a mountain for the Transfiguration. Meanwhile, a man comes to those who remained below to have them free his son from demons. And unlike before, the disciples can’t. Apparently they lack the power.
Jesus, fed up with the crowds in chapter 8, is fed up with everybody in chapter 9. But he does what the disciples cannot. And from there, they head to Galilee and Jesus tells his disciples the second prediction of suffering. That he will be betrayed, killed, and raised.
This time there are no interruptions. No rebukes. No invocation of the temptor. They were silent. Because they didn’t understand.
What a poor excuse.
Afterall, they’ve been following him from the beginning. He’s taught them and shown them. Given them the chance to do it all themselves! Jesus has warned them of the treachery and shown them how the leaders think. He has proven himself trustworthy and revealed the depths to which others will stoop.
The disciples shouldn’t be surprised or confused. And yet they are.
It was all the way back in Mark 3, when Jesus named his disciples apostles and sent them out to do his work in the world. Particularly healing, exorcising of demons, and preaching. Long before they had heard all the best stories or had seen all of the miracles, he sent them out with his power within them.
I don’t know about you, but just thinking about that raises all sorts of questions, doesn’t it? But the thing is…
For the disciples, it’s all downhill from there.
They are able to do what Jesus does! And yet they become afraid of Jesus’s power while ignoring their own. And they become concerned for his safety. Confused about what’s really going on.
In other words, they’re following Jesus, but they’re having a hard time keeping up.
In business and leadership circles we would blame Jesus as the leader. He is ultimately responsible for the success of his students. Though, as Christians, we admittedly have a hard time saying Jesus is messing anything up. And besides, our savior doesn’t have an MBA.
It is too easy to see this as a problem to solve and blame to assign instead of what it really is: teaching. Teaching for us.
We get to see that these followers were there through it all. They saw the signs and participated in miracles. So there is every reason that they would be on it. And for some reason, they aren’t.
I think that reason is simply fear. They were afraid.
What is confusion but misunderstanding heightened by fear?
By the time we get to this point, where Jesus is leading his followers to Jerusalem, the disciples are struggling to adapt to the kin-dom Jesus is showing them. They want to hang onto the past, what they’ve been taught, the human traditions that make so much sense.
And we all know just how tough Jesus’s teaching is! Loving people we would rather hate, reconciling with people who have hurt the community, making food and shelter basic human rights: this stuff isn’t easy. Especially when we’re tempted to go in the opposite direction by our friends and neighbors.
This confusion is most pernicious.
Because evaluating ourselves and each other is so ingrained. It is what we do. We think it is how we are supposed to engage the world. To be the best version of us we can be, right? Competing with ourselves and others to make life into a sport with winners and losers.
In other words, a world in which some get food and others don’t.
When God gave everyone enough.
And Jesus teaches us that prayer is seeing to it that we all have enough.
And yet we want to preserve a vision of the world where some don’t get enough. No wonder we’re confused. We aren’t following.
And we protect that precious idea by saying that some deserve more than others. That we are somehow better. More deserving.
And to protect that precious idea, we suggest that the poor must somehow deserve their poverty as we deserve our abundance. Thank you circular logic!
We’ve been chasing that particular delusion for at least four thousand years.
The silence is telling.
It is the loudest part of the story. The silence when Jesus tells them about his death. When he asks them what they’ve been talking about. They’re silent.
Of course they don’t know what to do! No doubt they’re thinking about what happened last time! And Jesus is their teacher: they don’t want to give the wrong answers!
So they say nothing.
In the face of struggle. Nothing.
Total disaster. Nothing.
A promised miracle. Nothing.
And when it’s pointed out that they have indeed said very little to him, but have had some things to say to each other? Nothing.
Silence.
Being in the shoes of those disciples is really easy. No one has to tell me about not knowing what to say. Being confused. Not understanding what is really going on. I have tons of experience with that. I’m sure we all do.
Getting in the way of God’s work is not the right answer. But neither is silence.
Especially guilty-conscience silence.
Still Jesus keeps teaching.
Obviously he knows what they were talking about behind his back, the boasting, competing, comparing, evaluating, judging, ranking. All the self-protecting meritocratic talk. He reminds them that they’ve got it backward. Greatness to God doesn’t give you VIP access, weakness does. Greatness gives you a job in the kitchen.
All this striving is sending us in the wrong direction.
And he brings a child into the middle of the group and says welcoming her means welcoming God. A child: the one the adults would silence. The one who has not “earned the right” to speak by virtue of being alive long enough to count as fully human.
Welcoming, including, listening to children, the silenced and the discounted, empowering the disempowered, acknowledging that God puts children at the front of the line with the immigrant and the refugee, the hungry and homeless utterly repositions greatness, success, authority, and kinship in the kin-dom of God.
And that reveals to us how God sees our work – and how different that is from what everyone else teaches.
So the more we embrace the internal logic of Jesus’s teaching, the far less confused we are by any of this. The far more capable we are to hear it and see it in our lives and work. The more we understand what it takes to be servants of the kin-dom. Opening doors. Including. Feeding. Comforting. Loving. Following.