October 20, 2024 Sermon
Sermon title: “Not again! Who's the Greatest?”
Scripture: Mark 10:35-45
(Other lectionary suggestions include Job 38:1-7, Psalm 104:1-9, and Hebrews 5:1-10.)
Mark 10:35-45
The Request of James and John
35James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” 36And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” 37And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” 38But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” 39They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.” 41When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42So Jesus called them and said to them, “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. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
James and John still have not gotten what Jesus has been talking about. Jesus is talking about serving others, while James and John want to be treated like royalty. I titled the sermon as I did because it is still amazing to me that after all the things that Jesus has said will happen to him, the disciples, especially James and John, just don’t get it. At this point they seem to think that Jesus will be an earthly king, and they want to get on the inside so as to be his right-hand men. Jesus tells them that they don’t know what they are asking, and in a way makes a cruel joke: Yes, one of you will sit on my right and one on my left. But Jesus doesn’t mean a throne - he means a cross! And tradition has it that all the disciples, with the possible exception of John, died a painful death. (John may have lived a long life taking care of Jesus’s mother Mary. We don’t know that for sure, but that’s what “tradition” says.) So, what is amazing is that all the disciples came back after deserting Jesus at his crucifixion, so they finally “got it” - but so far not in today’s Scripture lesson.
Our faith is strange, isn’t it, that we try to follow a Messiah who bids us come and die. That’s not original with me – some theologian said it before I did. But James and John get the stark news early, and we can read about it elsewhere in the Gospels. “If any man would follow me, let him pick up his cross daily and follow.” Why do we do that? One place Thomas says that Jesus has the words of Eternal Life, and he also asks, “To whom shall we go?”
When Jesus tells the disciples what is going to happen, it’s the third time that he has told them. And it’s not a surprise to Jesus, and it shouldn’t be to his followers, either. The idea that Jesus must be God’s suffering servant as described by the prophet Isaiah has been with Jesus since at least the time of his baptism. “The great central section of Isaiah (chapters 40-55) has as its main character, after Israel’s God himself, an anointed, messianic figure who suffers and dies for the sins of Israel and the world. This is YHWH’s servant, and at the end of the passage Jesus refers back to Isaiah 53, the fourth servant song, which speaks in awe and gratitude of the servant’s redeeming death.” The quote we heard near the end of today’s Scripture reading, the part about giving his life as a ransom for many, comes from that Isaiah section.
{{Read Isaiah 53 -- 1Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? 2For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. 3He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. 4Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. 6All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. 7He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 8By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For he was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. 9They made his grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. 10Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. 11Out of his anguish he shall see light; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. 12Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.}}
Incredible, isn’t it, that these words were written some 500 years before Jesus was born, and yet Jesus felt that he must be that Suffering Servant. The author of the Gospel of Mark wants us to understand that there is no following Jesus without the cross. James and John thought that the way might be tough, but ultimately Jesus and his followers would come out on top. To quote N. T. Wright, “But the cross is not, for Jesus or for Mark, a difficult episode to be got through on a way to a happy ending. It is precisely God’s way of standing worldly power and authority on its head.”
Wright goes on to say that “The cross isn’t just about God forgiving our sins....(though of course that is central to it). It is God’s way of putting the world, and ourselves, to rights {and} it challenges and subverts all the human systems which claim to put the world to rights but in fact only succeed in bringing a different set of humans out on top. The reason James and John misunderstand Jesus is exactly the same as the reason why many subsequent thinkers, down to our own day, are desperate to find a way of having Jesus without having the cross as well: the cross calls into question all human pride and glory. This is bound to carry political meanings, and dangerous ones at that.”
Pretty powerful, right? Do you still want to follow Jesus? Amen.
Pastor Skip
