This Week: Proper 20B
Gospel: Mark 9:30-37
The second Passion Prediction in Mark gives us three surpsingly significant themes to focus on.
- The failure of the disciples,
- The role of power, and
- The place of children in movement.
Back in chapter six, when the disciples are sent out in pairs to proclaim the Good News and heal people, this isn’t where any of them thought they’d be three chapters later. But here we are, listening to Jesus talk about his path to death for a second time.
As I described in this week’s Between, this follows the disciples’ failure to exorcize a demon from a boy while Jesus and three disciples are experiencing the Transfiguration. This is no small part of the story—nor is it representative of anything permanent. It is not “how things go” or some depiction of the inevitability of human failure. These people made miracles before and here they can’t this one time.
We also tend to relate these failures to two things:
- God wills it or
- We screwed up somewhere and God won’t let us.
This doesn’t seem to be the point of the story, however. And these go-to explanations seem a lot more like projection than theologically-consistent treatises of the nature of God’s dream for humanity.
What does seem to be at the heart of this moment, however, is that they are off their game, their focus has shifted from sharing the love of God to something else, and their general fear of screwing up.
It is not nothing that they fail to heal the boy after hearing about Jesus journeying to his death in Jerusalem and Peter trying to stop it. After Jesus has said that the cross is coming for them, too. That would mess anybody up, wouldn’t it?
Power
The idea that the disciples are able to do things is one example of power. Rome’s empire is another. Jesus, the Temple, and the wider Hebrew culture are other examples. But there is a deliciously headscratching sequence for the disciples between the end of chapter eight and the end of chapter nine.
Here is what they experience in a nutshell:
Jesus predicts his death.
- Jesus predicts his death
- Peter tries to stop it and Jesus rebukes him and
- Jesus predicts their deaths.
- Six days later, he takes his favorites up a mountain alone.
- A man comes to them hoping they will exorcise a demon from his son and they can’t do it and Jesus has to do it for them.
- They argue with one another which of them is the greatest disciples.
- Jesus predicts his death a second time.
After the talk of death, Peter’s rebuke, their public failure, what do they do? They argue with one another about which of them is the best. For real.
I can imagine it like some friendly ribbing or trash talk on the court. But the reality of the situation shows how hollow those reasons really are. Do they actually respond to this stuff by talking smack about each other? Or by blaming the other disciples for their collective failure?
When we take time to interrogate the moment, we are left with only the idea that the disciples are fundamentally off track. And it seems wrapped around the problem with power. They want it. Its like they can’t help it.
Power is what Peter is afraid of losing when he tries to stop Jesus from heading to Jerusalem. It’s what they are afraid they lost when they can’t exorcize the demon. And what they use to judge their siblings in Christ as they fight over the mantle of best disciple.
It’s also about kids.
As much as the challenge of power is the challenge hidden in plain sight—something we should be able to acknowledge about the situation but for some reason just can’t seem to because we tend to see other things first—it may not be nearly as perplexing to some as Jesus’s response at the end of the sequence.
Jesus predicts his death and nobody says anything. Perhaps many of us are prepared to assume it is because of embarrassment over what happened last time. Or what happened with the father and the exorcism. But no. They’re silent because they’re embarrassed by their arguing over greatness. Which means they know that they shouldn’t. Now they’re embarrassed that they seem to be caught indulging in bad behavior.
For us, this behavior connects with what came before it. This isn’t a rebuke of trash-talking or idle chit chat with friends universally—it demonstrates an unseriousness and missed points from the disciples in this situation. And we should connect the two in a way that makes sense for how we see the world.
So, if it’s about power, greatness, control—who is the best disciple—then notice that Jesus makes a visual metaphor of a child who is among them and says to them, essentially, This kid right here? They are the most important person in the world to you. What you do to them, you do to me and what you do to me, you do to God.
Notice that the context is power and greatness.
This isn’t about the future, it’s about the now. Who is the greatest one here? This child. Because the child is as great as Jesus who is as great as God.
This is as much of a headtrip today as it was then. Children are essentially property. They have no power or influence. We control them, train them, protect them until they can handle life on their own. They aren’t powerful or influential or great in any of the ways of the world…
And that should be the biggest clue for us for why Jesus is making this claim. That there is something wrong with the way we relate to children in particular and the way we shape our world at the macro level.
There is also a fascinating bit of particularity of speech going on in this moment, as Jesus takes a particular child and says to the disciples What you do to this one. Not “children” in a general sense, abstracted and othered, but to this child (who remains nameless and unidentified in the text)—the one who is in front of them now. This is the subject of your grace.
I suspect that this dance is a fun bit of theological tango for people—Jesus raises the suggestion of children in general and in particular—and we love to argue over the big, general ideas about society versus helping the single individual in front of us. We pit the two against each other as “the real” purpose of Jesus’s teaching and deploy a political attachment to one view or the other. But this is an immature reading of the gospel, friends.
There is always a particular in front of us and a group of people struggling for freedom in an unjust society.
I think the particularity of this child among them is to highlight precisely how they have ignored her, rejected her leadership, or provided for her use of power within the community of disciples.
Some final thoughts about empowerment of children
At this point, some predictable ideas about the place of children in church might come to mind. We might talk about having space for youth, ministry at church, or the old gripe “we don’t have any kids anymore”. But these, I think tend to be excuses for how fundamentally exercise power and don’t include children in the most important parts of life.
There is a tendency in places to figure out how to carve out a space for children and youth in our governance, which is definitely a step in the right direction. However, let us not mistake that as achieving the point of the lesson so much as correcting a great injustice by making it more just.
The problem isn’t that we don’t allow minors on our vestries and governing boards. The main reason we struggle with doing this is clearly about trust. But the second reason is that we legally can’t. In the United States, we don’t offer legal power to anyone under eighteen. Putting a couple of youth on a board to represent the youth is a demonstrable good—in our terms. The problem is that this is nowhere close to what Jesus seems to be suggesting.
What you do to this child, you do to Jesus, to God.
Does Jesus get a seat at the table? That’s an upgrade from no seats. But that’s not his spot. Jesus’s seat is at the head of the table.
Adults doing what adults want is itself a kind of heresy in the mid of Jesus. Because it is children who are closer to the mind of God.
Please, by all means, empower kids, youth, and young adults in all the things. I am 100% for it. But we must contend with just how paternalistic even these things are—and how unJesusy we are being when it comes to our relationship to youth.
Perhaps this is why the disciples couldn’t exorcise the demon from the child. They couldn’t contend with their own arrogance, power, and need for control.