It’s evident from this and many other passages in Mark’s gospel that, unlike the other evangelists, he isn’t afraid to touch raw nerves or display real emotion. And, as Jesus and his disciples get closer and closer to Jerusalem, some pretty uncomfortable emotions come to the surface. Despite Jesus’ increasingly explicit predictions of his fate, the disciples still haven’t got a clue what he’s talking about. And Mark ominously adds: “And they were afraid to ask”. They still think they’re headed for glory, in the slip-stream of the Messiah; and, judging by their conversation on the way, what they’re worried about is precedence and prestige when the Messiah’s finally vindicated – rather like politicians speculating about a cabinet reshuffle and no less undignified.
Which is why, when Jesus asks them what they were talking about, their guilty silence speaks volumes and their embarrassment is palpable. In fairness to the disciples, however, and in contrast to us, who have the benefit of hindsight, what Jesus was saying about his fate in Jerusalem wasn’t just personally upsetting: it must have been profoundly and painfully confusing, as it would have been to any Jewish mind. After all, the very notion of a suffering Messiah was an oxymoron.
But, as we’re all are prone to do, the disciples set aside the unpalatable parts of what Jesus was trying to teach and concentrated only on what was in it for them. And so, to jolt them out of their complacency, Jesus, not for the last time, uses a child as a teaching aid. But the lesson will be lost on us if we forget that children, even more than women, were ‘non-persons’ in that world and at that time. If a woman’s status as a chattel of her husband was minimal, and even less that of a widow, a child’s status in the ancient world was non-existent.
So there was nothing sentimental or crowd-pleasing about Jesus taking a child in his arms: the child didn’t symbolise innocence or unspoiledness, but powerlessness and insignificance and unimportance; and in making this striking gesture, Jesus is really rebuking his followers’ crass ambition and thirst for influence, as well as showing them why, in the end, it’s so futile and stupid to lust after power.
And he does this by comparing the ‘greatness’ the disciples so clearly crave – a ‘greatness’ that hangs on the ‘blast of men’s mouths’ (St Thomas More) – with another kind of greatness altogether, a greatness that’s theirs, not because they’ve distinguished themselves or made their mark – and certainly not because they’ve been chosen for the royal retinue of the Messiah; but because by their very existence, they (and we), like this child, are bearers of the divine.
That’s their (and our) claim to greatness; and it has nothing to do with anything they (or we) have done or achieved. This greatness, in other words, doesn’t distinguish them from anybody else, not even from this child, because it’s a greatness they share with everyone else, even this powerless, insignificant child.
Now that very idea would have seemed demeaning in a world which, then as now, placed such weight on status and the regard of one’s peers. But Jesus makes the identification explicit: “Anyone who welcomes one of these little children in my name, welcomes me; and anyone who welcomes me, welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
And, perfectly complementing the gospel, the second reading from the Letter of James adds a hard-headed, pragmatic point about the dire consequences of ambition for power, status and influence. Craven ambition, he tells us, inexorably gives rise to jealousy and envy; and jealousy and envy breed in their turn, not only disharmony but, James says, “all manner of wicked things”.
All arising from the illusion that we’re somehow better than others. Entertaining that deadly and deadening illusion or, better, delusion makes it easier to give advice than to take it; to tell others what to do, without a thought for what we ourselves are doing or, more to the point, what we’re not doing.
As I was saying last week, the uncomfortable truth is that we find most intolerable in others what we dislike most in ourselves. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45), the young Lutheran pastor murdered by the Nazis, says something pertinent about this: “nothing that we despise in the other…”, he says, “is entirely absent from ourselves….We should regard others first and foremost less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”
This gospel and the second reading, then, are a charter for a different way of relating to one another, a way of relating rooted in compassion and sympathy, rather than power and influence. Of course, all kinds of things conspire to conceal the radical and revolutionary nature of this outlook and its call to be at the compassionate service of one another.
We usually think, for instance, that it has immediate and primary reference to the exercise of authority. But its relevance is far wider: it concerns all our relationships, not just between those in and those under authority. Jesus isn’t merely reversing the master-servant roles: he’s collapsing the distinction altogether.
We are all servants of one another. And that’s the point of Jesus’ other lesson to the disciples in this episode: “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all”. This is much more than philanthropy or yet another teasing paradox. He’s revealing something about our very nature: namely that, made as we are in the image and likeness of a God, the God who empties himself for our sake, the only way to fullness of life is to do the same.
So, in this gospel, by laying bare our God-given rather than manufactured dignity, our Lord invites a radical re-appraisal and re-ordering of all our relationships.
And, if we dared to take it seriously, even for a moment, it would lead to a revolution - politically, socially, economically, psychologically, spiritually and, not least, ecclesiastically
What do you think?
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