As Above, So Below (Mark 9:30-37)

"Jesus Teaching the Disciples 2" ©Das Plenarium

This sermon was originally preached at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN on September 22, 2024

The livestream of our service may be viewed here (with the excerpted sermon at the end of this entry). Today's Gospel text is Mark 9:30-37 .

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Good morning, Gethsemane. Before we really begin, I want to share something that’s come to mind multiple times this week as I’ve pondered today’s text, which is simply this: In today’s gospel, what

we will see is that while disciples are fighting over who’s the G.O.A.T. … Jesus is inviting them to follow the LAMB.

GROAN. It’s okay to groan. I just really had to get that out of my system. 

But in all seriousness, because today’s text is so deep and so rich, and so much more than goofy but irresistible one-liners, I’m not going to waste any more time; I’m just gonna take us straight into the Word, because I want to go slowly and move with attention and intention from the shallow end into the heartbeat pulsing at the deep center where I know, we’ll see ourselves -- and also Jesus.

Today’s gospel is the middle part of a Markan sandwich, bracketed by two stories of exorcism: Verses 14-29, tell of a boy whose demon the disciples were unable to cast out; in verses 38-41, the disciples complain of a person “who is not one of us” driving out demons in Jesus’s name. In both cases, Jesus rebukes them.

This sandwich, though, is situated within an even bigger sandwich -- a Big Mac, if you will. For this is the second of three times that Jesus will predict his suffering and resurrection to bewildered and scared disciples.

The first prediction was in last week’s text - Mark 8:31-33 -- when, Immediately after Peter’s confession that Jesus is the distinctly and, critically, divine “Messiah,” Jesus abruptly pivots to adopt a distinctly human identity as “The Son of Man”, and declares  “quite openly” that he will suffer and be condemned to death by the political and ordained authorities, and will rise again on the 3rd day. Not understanding any of this, Peter rebukes Jesus who in turn rebukes Peter for having in mind not the concerns of God but merely those of man.  

Quick note here: The Greek word, phroneó which reads as “has in mind,” “is difficult to translate into English because it combines the visceral and cognitive aspects of thinking”. But, essentially it equates to “personal opinion fleshing itself out in action” (see J. Thayer). So when Jesus lovingly rebukes Peter immediately after Peter confesses him as Messiah, he is naming Peter’s double-mindedness. And this, Ched Myers writes, “attests to a ‘fierce contest raging over messianic theology in and around Mark’s community’” between the Messiah they expected to overthrow the political landscape and bring an oppressed people into Greatness; and the Messiah in front of them who embodies a reign which is utterly antithetical to that.  

Jesus Goes on to tell the disciples and his crowd of followers that the Kin-dom of heaven comes not by way of power but by way of the Cross; salvation comes by way of loss; and the way to life passes first through death. And then, Chapter 9 opens at the close of this discourse as Jesus promises that some of his hearers will not die before they taste this Kin-dom -- which underscores again that the Kin-dom of Heaven is not a future promise but a current reality made manifest in and through his ministry. So that was last week. Literally.

It is now six days later in the text, and Jesus has just been transfigured on the mountain before Peter, James, and John. Jesus tells them on the way down not to share what they’ve witnessed until the Son of Man has risen from the dead. They’re confused anyway, so they agree, but quietly among themselves, they “question what this rising from the dead could mean.” 

Then, when they come to the bottom of the mountain, they meet up with the rest of the disciples who have just failed to cast out a demon. And a visibly frustrated Jesus wades through a chaotic crowd, to intercede and heal the tormented boy. Notably, verses 26-27 of Mark 9 use the “language of resurrection” to describe Jesus raising up a boy whom everyone thought was dead.

This, Beloveds, is how we come to verses 30-32, which are the heartbeat of this text. So let's linger. 

For here, as Dr. Amy Oden writes, Jesus is “telling them who he is, and not for the first time. Thus far, they’ve been eager to follow and be associated with the Messiah who works miracles for the exiled and transfigures in front of their eyes -- not least, I suspect, because being hand-chosen by such a powerful and popular figure has gained for these 12 nobodies some status and recognition which we know will come back to haunt them in the end. But it’s also more than that.

Indeed, as scholar Raquel St. Clair posits in her book Call & Consequences: A Womanist Reading of Mark, one reason this gospel’s first eight chapters are so heavily devoted to narrating the power and purpose of Jesus’s ministry -- and the disciples’ ministry in turn --  is so that by the time we come to these deeper, disorienting, and even scary revelations, the 12 will already be fully committed, ready and willing to shape and carry on Jesus’s ministry. And this ministry is, she writes, “primarily characterized by the alleviation and eradication of agony — whether [it] is a named, recognized experience of pain or the unmetabolized, unscrutinized agony of suffering…. Jesus heals the sick, restores withered limbs, opens blind eyes, feeds the hungry, and exorcize demons.” (p. 163). This is Jesus’s model for discipleship and ministry -- and, frankly, who wouldn’t want to be part of that? They are all in.

 But now, after witnessing and experiencing his Power at work, Jesus enumerates its consequences, saying he will suffer and be killed for it -- and will rise again -- and so might they. In telling them back in chapter 8 that true discipleship is to deny the self and carry the cross, he explicitly names the tragic irony of this sacred ministry for which he has come and to which they are being called. That by devoting themselves to relieving the agony of the oppressed and outcast, they will suffer oppression and be outcast. That in caring for the socially shamed they will become socially shamed. That for confronting societal injustices and evils, they will suffer societal rejection and alienation. That by alleviating the agony caused by the powers of Empire in this age, they will become targets of Imperial Weapons. 

This is the real-real, and friends, they are not ready for it. As Dr Oden underscores: The prospect of the Messiah being taken and killed does not compute.” It’s not just that they don’t understand some piece of information. It’s that they don’t understand this specific teaching, at the very heart of the Incarnation. How is it possible for the Son of God to suffer and die? And why should it happen?” None of this makes sense.

And so, what happens next, is a doubly tragic irony. They are shaken and disoriented by the inversion of Messianic theology which promises not a killer Messiah but a killed one, not a conquering king but a conquered one. And, critically, they’re afraid to ask questions. 

And so, with all that’s led up to this moment in the text, the disciples are in a State when the arguing begins, and “those arguments have four roots, according to Dr Alyce McKenzie:

• fear that they have fallen in Jesus ’estimation (9:19)
• insecurity at their failure to heal the boy (9:29)
• resentment toward one another as Jesus chastises them
• eagerness to compete to regain his approval

“They become so focused on their reputations” before a teacher who is entirely divested from the kind of status they’re fighting over, “that their arguments over who is greatest make them all look small.”

In this moment, not only do they not embody Jesus’s ministry of mutuality and solidarity; they take on the panicked one-upmanship of men made to scramble for a ladder lest they be crushed under hierarchy. Their immediate and most instinctive response to learning that the Truth is bigger and crazier than they’d ever imagined, is not curiosity and openness among their trustworthy and beloved community; but self-defensive jockeying for domination with fellow dunderheads. In other words, they embody the precise opposite of all Jesus has been living out before them in their shared ministry. 

Folks, I do not hate or harbor anything but compassion for the disciples here. Rather, I’m agitated by what this moment among the disciples reveals to us about ourselves, standing at the end of a long line of dunderheaded christians. Because, as Drs. Matt Skinner, Joy Moore, and Karoline Lewis discussed this week, “This is about more than just 12 men [with big egos] bloviating about who’s greater…it is also about the church’s history of dominance over peoples, and the ways in which nations, communities, and churches …make qualitative judgements about who is deserving and who is not.…” 

This isn’t just “about us looking at those twelve morons back in the day. It’s about looking in the mirror, at a “church that still doesn’t understand the calling of the Cross, and [still] makes decisions about who is better, more deserving, and more worthy” instead of welcoming without condition those who are most excluded and most invisible.

Like them, we are afraid of engaging with curiosity and humility the life-and-death questions of who-we-want-to-be, what-we’re-really-called-to-do, and who-we-are-here to-serve. And When churches & its institutions are afraid to ask those critical questions, or to grow according to the answers we already know but don’t like, we head straight over to the always-full dumpster to fight over garbage.

Indeed, as Dr Moore said, “This is, unfortunately, a living Word, because what was happening there among the disciples of Jesus in response to the [ministry of Jesus]” is exactly what’s happening right now, 2000 years later “post-resurrection, when we know the power of the Risen Christ” but still get wrapped up in all the wrong conversations.” We still favor competition over curiosity; We still are so afraid of losing that we fail to love. And we still choose, over and over, rightness over  relationship. What a mess. We are all such a mess!

And still. And still. There is Good News for us, even still, as we look to Jesus whose response to his disciples’ fear when it comes out sideways in contests for domination that leave them all silenced and ashamed, is kindness. He doesn’t join their arguments. He doesn’t argue back or even try to explain the most important piece of all this, which is that resurrection comes three days after death, meaning everything they think they know about life and power and greatness are wrong and upside down. He doesn’t go there. He knows that they cannot begin to imagine what they cannot conceive. And that in the face of the suffering and death he has now shared with them twice, which are coming for him and those who take up their crosses to follow, resurrection is beyond inconceivable. No, answers and explanations will not, in this moment, ease their anxiety or quell their fears about the consequences of this calling.

So instead, He turns up the volume on its heartbeat: He receives them as they are. He offers them the ministry of his presence. He draws a no-power, no-status, nobody child onto his lap and into his divine embrace. And he liberates them from their burdensome need for imperial greatness which cannot be attained and will not ever satisfy, by reaffirming that True Greatness is diákonos. Literally, it is ministry. 

Great are those, he says, who minister at the margins and expand them. Who welcome into communion all the social, cultural, religious, and political nobodies, and who, by receiving them honor and alight their intrinsic somebody-ness. Jesus says that when servants and ministers train their attention and intention on Becoming Beloved Community with the stranger, the silenced, and all who are suffering, powers of empire are disarmed and dismantled, and the Kin-dom of God draws near. 

And so that, Beloved of God, is my fervent prayer for us: That we will aim with pure hearts and razor sharp focus on Becoming Beloved Community to everyone without condition, but especially to those who cannot increase our status or reputation, because as we do we WILL see God’s Kin-dom come to us: As above, so below. Amen.