“..whoever wishes
to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first
among you must be slave of all.” (Mark 10:43-44)
Many years ago, I paid a
visit to a homebound member of my congregation, a true saint of the Lord who
is, alas, now one of the Church Triumphant. I liked visiting Dot, and I usually
found her in a rather chipper mood—or as chipper as an elderly lady who’d had
her leg amputated and was confined to a bed could be. On this particular day,
however, Dot seemed somewhat peeved.
“Oh, Pastor,” she said.
“I just got off the phone with Mary. She’s talking crazy!”
I was familiar with
Mary’s situation. She was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. A lovely lady
when she was on her meds, but prone to some discomforting eccentricities should
she neglect her daily regimen of pharmaceuticals.
“Pastor,” Dot said, “she
thinks her neighbors are stealing her property. She says they’re moving their
fence closer to her house during the night. Have you ever heard of anything so
crazy? I’ve tried to tell her that’s ridiculous, but she doesn’t believe me.”
“I don’t think she’ll
believe you, Dot. She’s got mental health problems, and she’s become
delusional.”
“But that’s just crazy,
Pastor!”
“That’s my point, Dot.
She’s crazy. Off her medication she’s nuttier than squirrel poop. You can’t
convince her of anything because you can’t make a rational argument to an
irrational mind.”
Fortunately, Mary—after a
pretty bizzocko episode which I don’t have time to relate—was eventually taken
to live with her adult daughter somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line. She
was loved, supervised, properly medicated, and—as far as I know—allowed to live
a happy and peaceful life until the Lord called her home. Her phone argument
with Dot, however, was an epiphany for me. Some people are just irrational. No
matter how many times you tell them something, no matter how cogent your
argument, and no matter what evidence you present—once they get an idea in
their heads that’s comfortable to them, they cannot be disabused of it. In
fact, the more you prove them wrong, the more likely they are to double down on
their position[i].
The problem is all of us can
become slightly delusional at times. When we’ve made up our minds to a position
or an idea that comforts us, we’re going to hang on to it like a deer tick on a
fat man’s thigh. We’ll argue to the death for something that’s completely
insane to others but gives us the sense of security or righteousness we our
insecurities crave.
Case in point: the belief
held by Jesus’ disciples that their rabbi and leader will one day start a
revolution which will overthrow the oppressive occupation of the Roman Empire,
elevate the suffering peasants, and put Jesus on the governing throne of Israel
where a son of David ought to be. James and John in our gospel text for
Pentecost 22, Year B (Mark 10:35-45) are convinced that Jesus will enter into
glory,[ii] and they’ll both get
cabinet positions in the new administration in recognition of their faithful
service to the Messiah.
They seem to have missed
the point.
An earthly kingdom based
on earthly power is not what Jesus is all about. If you worship victory[iii], you are, in some sense,
worshiping oppression. If you’re the winner, someone else has to be the loser. If
you are dominant, someone else must be subservient. Jesus is pretty clear about
this. In verse 45 he spells it out: “The Son of Man came not to be served, but
to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
You’d think James and
John would’ve figured that out by this time. At this point in Mark’s gospel,
Jesus has told these boys no less than four times what his intentions are and
how this story is going to play out. He told them when he went to the villages
of Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8:31). He told them again after they’d come down
from the Mount of the Transfiguration (9:12)—where they’d been instructed by
God’s voice from the cloud to listen to him (9:7). He reminded them a
third time as they hiked through Galilee (9:30), and, in case that wasn’t
enough, he told them all a fourth time on the road to Jerusalem (10:33-34). Did
they get the message? Nope. I don’t think they wanted to get it. The
idea of a magnificent earthly kingdom and a fat, juicy reward for the sacrifices
they’d made was just too tempting an idea to let go.
Crazy, demented, looney
as it sounds, there still are Christians who dream of an earthly kingdom. There
are some on the religious right in America who want to march triumphantly over
the bones of perceived enemies of the faith. They dream and espouse a dominant political
hegemony of Christians—their kind of Christians—who will rule the nation
and bring it back to their conception of godliness. I guess the words of Jesus
in the scriptures have been no more convincing to them than they were to the first
disciples. No matter how often they hear it, they just can’t grasp it.
Jesus is calling us to
deny ourselves and embrace a spirit of love through servanthood. And this
servanthood will not carry a guarantee of any earthly reward. Indeed, obedience
to Christ and love of our neighbor will be its own reward. We are called to
find a need and fill it, to find a wound and heal it. We are called follow as
Jesus led the way. Think, for example, of the home caregiver who looks after an
elderly dementia patient. They do what they do out of love and compassion, even
though the object of that love may never recognize the sacrifice or give the
slightest hint of gratitude.
These are the things
which make us great in the way of Christ: the willingness to see ourselves as
vessels of God’s love, and a willingness to relinquish our insane, selfish
desire to be dominant. Such a desire only leads us to frustration, anger, and
ultimate disappointment. It took James and John and the other disciples a while
to figure out that “the last shall be first” didn’t mean an overthrow of
government. It means those who acknowledge their weakness and dependence will
know the peace which comes with gratitude to God. Those who are esteemed highly
by the world will win no special reward but will take their place in heaven next
to the poor, the despised, the infirm, and the lost.
Call me crazy, but I take
comfort from that.
God’s love to you, my
friend. Please come again next week.
[i] Doesn’t
this phenomenon explain the MAGA movement?
[ii] The
word which appears in the Greek testament is doxeson. It’s a form of doxa
which can mean splendor and grandeur, but it can also mean power and kingdom.
[iii]
Fun fact: The Nazi salutation Sieg Heil literally translates as “Hail
Victory.”
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