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So if you are going to follow Jesus, you are following the way of the cross. And what does it mean to follow the way of the cross? Is it to do nice things and be generally like-able? Can you follow the cross by denying the world, erasing your desires through asceticism? Does following the cross mean embracing anguish, to say that suffering is purifying? Does the way of cross mean martyrdom, dying for the cause of Jesus, to become a hero?
Biblical scholar Ched Myers asks, “…does this not immediately suggest a new elitism? More importantly, how is it that the cross is the way to revolution and not mere tragic failure?” Myers reads Mark’s Gospel for clues how Jesus is building a new way of life—first of all, Jesus proclaims the kin-dom of God as a reign of healing, made evident in miracles, and now in this part of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus turns to teaching about the practices that will bring about God’s kin-dom, the new order.
This new order is not just about resisting political oppression, but experimenting with “a genuinely new way of social organization, called by Mark’s Jesus the vocation of ‘servanthood.’” Myers writes, “So deeply has the practice of domination infected human relationships that it must be eradicated from the roots: the radical way of nonviolence thus takes us into the deepest paradoxes of life and death.”[1]
In other words, when you find out that the person you’ve been following, believing in their power to save, to make things better, when you find out that person is not only going to suffer but will also fall out of popularity and die—and their followers are going to look like fools, including you—what do you do?
Well, the disciples are not stupid. They are too afraid to ask Jesus for specifics, but they’re pretty sure they understand what he means about being betrayed and killed, so they start organizing for the new order—who will be Jesus’s chief of staff? Which disciples will head up which cabinet positions: who will be in charge of the treasury, the minister of defense, the head of diplomatic relations? Now, this will take some discussion, some negotiation, maybe even some campaigning—but all Jesus hears is arguing.
He asks them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” What were you arguing about?
What does Jesus hear when it’s our own voices clamoring for power? When we’re agonizing over whether to cut off another relationship because that old friend or that sibling is voting for a different candidate than we’re planning to vote for. When we worry for our children’s safety and make enemies out of neighbors. When we line up behind our respective news sources, dunk on our opponents on social media, and let our blood pressure rise every time we see a bumper sticker or a flag with the name of a politician we don’t want to vote for…yeah, it’s important, yeah the stakes are high, and into all of that noise, Jesus speaks with a whisper: “What were you arguing about?”
You see, Jesus knows that hatred is where it all starts. As the letter-writer James elaborates: “These conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?”[2] Those desires for power, for success at any cost, for victory—for what?
Even if you can make your desires look righteous—and we’ll get into that more next week, that’s gonna be fun—even if you can fool other people, do you really think you can fool God? As James puts it, “If you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be arrogant and lie about the truth.”[3]
Do you think God is not aware what you need in life? Do you think Jesus hasn’t already considered the outcome of his teaching, thoroughly evaluated with a risk/benefit analysis, and come to the conclusion that unless your social movement has its foundations in nonviolence, it’s eventually going to all fall apart?
Come here, Jesus says to his disciples, gather round. Sit down. Pay attention. Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all. Oh wait a minute, we don’t have everybody—somebody bring me a kid. Ah, yes, this kid! This is who I was looking for. Alright disciples, pay attention: whoever welcomes a kid like this in my name welcomes me AND welcomes the one who sent me.
Now what kind of nonsense is this? Jesus gathers his disciples for this deeply foundation teaching, and you know it’s important because Jesus gathered the disciples privately, in a house in Capernaum; they’re not in public out here! This is the insider conversation, the secret knowledge, and the million-dollar stock tip is: welcome the child.
What, are these twelve men supposed to run a day care now? Will their success be in an orphanage or a children’s hospital or a kindergarten? Or, huh, wait a minute, does this mean men are supposed to be doing women’s work, taking care of kids in the house?
Jesus doesn’t say any of that, of course, because it’s all beside the point, and the point is this: the only way to get great is to serve, and if you aim to be absolute first, serve the absolutely powerless.
What if we really did consider children first? What if we served children, and future generations, with gratitude for all that God has given us, and let our actions speak of a future we proclaim with certainty will be suffused with God’s grace? What if we let a child listen in on all the things we want to argue about? What if we let them ask questions? What if we let their questions expose our vanity, our pride, our weakness? What if we took a look at history again and tried to really learn it, and maybe do better this time? What else do we have, than the hope of our enduring legacy in God?
The prophet Jeremiah records this profound insult: “Let us destroy the tree with its fruit; let us cut him off from the land of the living, so that his name will no longer be remembered!” It’s an insult to suggest that someone be cut off from their family connections, cut off from their ancestors, no descendants to speak their name. Jeremiah testifies that God judges righteously—we’re not in charge!—and God tries the heart and the mind, knows us inside and out, and prepares for us a future with hope.
If legacies are not convincing, if the prospect of children and future generations can’t grab your heart, then will you listen to your elders? How about elder adults who were themselves little children in 1945, living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese cities attacked by the United States when they dropped atomic bombs, ushering in the nuclear age. In Japan, they’re called “hibakusha,” which means “bomb-affected people,” and they’re now in their 80s and older, a generation dying.
Kentaro Takahashi, a photographer who captured images of these hibakusha in their elder years, said, “I had to question myself and imagine a landscape without the survivor in front of me. What will be left in this society to actually hand over the story that happened in the past to the people who will live in the future? Are we ready for that kind of world? Will the monuments talk to the people in the new era? Is the memorial park enough?”
Kathleen Kingsbury, a New York Times opinion editor who visited Japan for this story about these war survivors, wrote, “One of the more striking themes from our reporting: In the United States, we talk about the 1945 bombings as the first use of a nuclear weapon. In Japan, the survivors and their compatriots stress the need for those to be the last bombings.”[4]
From the wreckage of war, beneath the rubble, can you hear the echo of Jesus calling out to the wise: what were you arguing about?
What story will future generations tell about you? What will creation say about your life?
Amen.
Pastor Cheryl
[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, Orbis Books: Maryknoll, New York, 1988, page 257.
[2] James 4:1
[3] James 3:14
[4] New York Times Opinion Newsletter, August 6, 2024; https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/08/06/opinion/hiroshima-nagasaki-atomic-bombing.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20240806&instance_id=130891&nl=opinion-today®i_id=88135140&segment_id=174314&te=1&user_id=a87bcd586f057fbc5b5dd7f49790643b
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