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Jesus sat down, called the Twelve to him and said, “If anyone wants
to be first, he must make himself last of all and servant of all.” But “the disciples did not understand
what Jesus was saying,” adds Mark, “and they were afraid to ask.”
But I wonder. I think the disciples did understand, and I think that’s why they were afraid to
ask.
Sometimes, you know, we’re like a man riding an ox looking for an ox, as Thomas Merton says. Or
like the man in the story Harold Kushner tells in his book When All You Ever Wanted Isn't Enough.
It’s a story about a factory that had a problem with employee theft. Valuable items were being
stolen every day, so they hired a security firm to search every employee as he left at the end of the day.
Most of the workers went along with emptying their pockets and having their lunch boxes checked.
But one man would go through the gate every day at closing time with a wheelbarrow full of trash,
and the exasperated security guard would have to spend a half-hour digging through the food wrappers,
cigarette butts, and Styrofoam cups to see if anything valuable was being smuggled out. He never found
anything.
One day, the guard couldn’t stand it any longer. He said to the man, “Look, I know you’re up to
something, but every day I check every last bit of trash in the wheelbarrow and I never find anything worth
stealing. It's driving me crazy. Tell me what you’re up to, and I promise not to report you.” The man
shrugged and said, “I’m stealing wheelbarrows.”
To any disciple who had been listening along the road to Jerusalem, what Jesus was telling them was
about as obvious as the wheelbarrows, as obvious as an elephant in the parlor at a tea party. Because just
before Jesus told them that if they would be first they must make themselves last of all and servant of all,
he had also told them that he would have to go to Jerusalem where he would be delivered into the hands of
men who would put him to death, and that three days after that he would rise again. And he had told them
that if they wanted to be his disciples, then they must renounce themselves and take up their own crosses
and follow where he is going, and that if they wanted to save their lives then they will have to lose their
lives, but that if they would lose their lives for his sake and the Gospel's then they would save their
lives, and that he, Jesus, was on his way to saving his life by losing it in Jerusalem.
But while Jesus was telling them all this while they were walking along the road, the disciples were
pretending there wasn’t any such elephant anywhere in sight, using the time instead to argue among
themselves about which of them was the greatest!
But I think the disciples did understand, because when Jesus asked them what they had been
discussing they declined to answer, and they probably felt about the way you felt in fifth grade when you
were whispering to a friend in the back row about something unbecoming a gentleman and a scholar, when the
teacher suddenly stopped teaching and asked, “Would you like to share that with the whole class?”
The disciples didn’t answer, because they would have been embarrassed to share it, because they did
understand, just as you understood there in the back row of the classroom. And the disciples were all
silent because they knew that Jesus knew that they understood.
At least on one level they understood.
There are, in Scripture, some texts that are hard to understand. “If your eye leads you to sin,
pluck it out” is one of them. What exactly does that mean? Or consider this one: “In all truth I tell
you, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Or think
about one of John's visions in his revelation: “I was taken in spirit to a desert, and there I saw a woman
riding a scarlet beast which had seven heads and ten horns and which had blasphemous titles written all over
it.” These are real mind-benders, which resist understanding even after careful reading and work.
But some texts are not hard to understand; they are, instead, hard to do. And that, I think, is
what was giving the disciples fits about what Jesus was saying to them -- not that they didn’t understand
with their minds, but that they didn’t want to do it with their feet and with their hands and with their
hearts. “If anyone would be my disciple, he must take up his own cross and follow me.” And they knew
perfectly well where Jesus was headed.
“If anyone would be great, he must make himself the least of all and the servant of all.” And then
Jesus sat down. And, in Jesus’ day, for the teacher to sit down to speak meant that what he was about to
say had authority and was the main point, so listen up! And Jesus took a small child and embraced him,
which was about as shocking to the disciples as it would have been if Jesus had taken a leper or the town
drunk or a down-and-outer who had been sleeping under the bridge that day and had embraced one of them,
because the child, as Jesus was using him in his lesson, was a stand-in for all the poor and outcast and
helpless and defenseless and non-productive and useless people of the world, which was what a child was in
those days to the important, grown-ups Jesus was talking to. The ancients, including the Jews, held to the
W. C. Fields view of children: “I like children,” Fields said, “if they're properly cooked.”
So Jesus, by embracing the child, was embracing all those other ne'er-do-wells as well -- the
outsiders, the tax-collectors and sinners, the unclean and the weak. And then he said -- as clear as day,
in good straightforward Aramaic they all understood, without any ambiguity at all -- that “whoever
welcomes a little one such as this in my name, welcomes me, because these are my ambassadors. They speak
for me. They stand where I stand, and I stand where they stand. And whoever welcomes them, and welcomes me
through them, welcomes the one who sent me.”
“If you would be first, you must make yourself last. If you would be great, you must make yourself
least of all and servant of all.”
If you're like me, I suspect that you're not having trouble understanding this word of Jesus so much
as you are having trouble doing it. It's when we encounter teachings of Jesus like this one that we know
what the man meant when he said that Jesus is like a peach. He's soft and a little fuzzy on the outside.
He talks about loving the little children, and all that. But when you bite into him, you find the taste a
little tart and sharp. And when you hit the middle, you crunch into a stone so hard it can break your
teeth. And with these sayings, we’ve hit the pit, because they run so counter to the way we want to live
and have been reared to live. Just like the disciples. Which of us is the greatest? That's more in our
line.
But that’s not the line Jesus is handing out as he sits down and speaks with authority, with clarity
and without ambiguity, and says, “If you would be the greatest, you must make yourself the least of all and
the servant of all, servant, even, of all the little ones like this little one, servant of the poor and the
powerless, servant of the outcast and the shamed, servant of the dirty and the lonely and all those who
can't do a blessed thing for you.
This is not, for me, a text that is hard to understand. It’s a text that’s hard to do, and it is
one of the reasons we know that Walker Percy was right when he said that it’s possible to make all A’s and
still flunk life. It’s one of the reasons we realize, as William Barnwell says, that knowing Jesus, being
close to Jesus, even having great spiritual insight -- all that does not, in itself, assure us that we are
walking the way of Jesus. No one has ever been closer to Jesus than Peter, James, and John, and they were
among those arguing about which of them was the greatest while Jesus was walking his way to the Cross and
inviting them to pick up their crosses and go with him.
“There is only one standard in God's service,” wrote Joost de Blank some years ago in a little book
appropriately entitled Uncomfortable Words. Being close to Jesus won’t cut it by itself. Because “there is
only one standard in God’s service -- not how much we can get, but how much we can give. Those who think of
their religion in terms of success and rewards have not begun to understand what Christianity is all about.
The only measure that has validity in the Kingdom of God is that of love. To him or her who loves much,
much if forgiven -- and in the relationship of friendship and love, it is all the recompense a sinner
seeks. ...The self-satisfied and envious disciples have not yet understood this utter
self-abandonment.”
The disciples were still impressed with those things that pass away, not, as the Wisdom of Solomon
and our Collect remind us this morning, with those things that endure.
“Whoever welcomes one of these little ones in my name welcomes me,” Jesus says. Not whoever says
he does, but whoever does it.
I think this is what Rabbi Kushner is getting at, too. And the preacher in Ecclesiastes, and James
in his letter this morning. We spend so much time in life jockeying for position for that which does not
endure, arguing about who is the greatest and accumulating wealth and power. We spend so much time in life
with things like these that often it’s only late in life, if ever, that we realize that these things are not
what life is all about. Life is not about success. Life is about “eating our bread in gladness” this day,
and about loving and being loved, and about welcoming one of these little ones, and about standing with the
suffering and the shamed, and, in doing so, standing with Christ himself.
The disciples were walking along the road talking about their “Big Dream” in life: “Which of us is
the greatest?” And what Jesus is telling them, and us, there in Capernaum with the little child that day,
is this: that if you truly open yourself to God’s grace, then something of the miraculous will take place
within you. You will become younger and younger. You will become “littler” and “littler.” You will become
a lot less concerned about achieving and protecting your position in the world. You’ll feel sillier and
sillier about building your life around career enhancement , and about living other people’s lives for them,
and about worrying whether others are righteous or not. You’ll care less and less about getting ahead of
others, and you’ll spend more time trying to understand their world and how to reach out to them in the
moment without thinking much about personal payoff. In other words, you will become genuine, and in this
genuineness you will want to serve those whom God gives you. Not for credit, not to “get to heaven,” not to
acquire a position, not to earn a reputation or gain a badge of honor, but simply because the truth that
Jesus is talking about has taken root in you.
As Rabbi Kushner puts it, “Sometimes in life we have to become less to be more. We become whole
people, not on the basis of what we accumulate, but by getting rid of everything that is not really us,
everything false and inauthentic. Sometimes, to become whole, we have to give up “the Dream.” We become
whole by giving up “all we ever wanted” when we find that “all we ever wanted isn't enough,” and by taking
on that which is enough -- by “eating our bread in gladness” each day, by enjoying those good things and
loving and serving the people God has given us to enjoy and love and serve.
Today’s is not a hard text to understand. Today’s text, for me anyway, is a hard text to do. It’s
like remodeling your house. It takes longer than you hoped. It costs a lot more than you planned. And it
makes a bigger mess than you ever thought possible.
But the good news, as Peter and James and John discovered, is that it’s never too late to start.
It was only after Peter had flunked life big time, only after he realized that his “Big Dream” in
life wasn't enough, it was only after Peter had denied in a clenched-teeth whisper that he had ever laid
eyes on Jesus, it was only after that, only after the Resurrection when Jesus appeared to the disciples on
the seashore that morning, that Peter finally gave up his Big Dream and began to “eat his bread in
gladness.”
“Peter, do you love me?” Jesus asked him. And Peter answered, “Lord, you know I love you.” And,
again, with gentleness and compassion, once again Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. I love you, too, Peter. And
Peter, you still have time. How great do you want to be? You still have time to take up your cross and
walk with me to Calvary. You still have time to make something of yourself, time to make yourself least of
all and servant of all.”
And so he says to us today.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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