The Greatest
Proper 20B
Mark 9:30-37
September 23, 2012
Mark 9:30-37
September 23, 2012
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
I’m not especially
fond of lines, you know, the kind you stand and wait in, what they call a
“queue” in the UK.
When I was in grade
school lines were a quick way to sort the popular and unpopular kids. When our class was told to line up, there
would be a scramble and a line would emerge.
But then there were a series of “cuts.”
Kids would let their friends into line with them and, rather quickly,
there would be a line with the high status kids at the front and the rest of us
behind them.
As we got older that
sort of thing stopped. Anyone attempting
a “cut” would be booed and jeered and generally made to bear the brunt of
public disapproval.
I understand that in
the UK there are very strict rules about standing in line. My parents lived in England for several
years. My mother tells about a time when
she was in line for a teller’s window at a bank. There were two or three windows open, each
with its own queue. She noticed that one
had moved rather rapidly and was shorter than the other two so she switched
queues! A hush fell and everyone in
the bank glared at her. You’d have
thought she had said bad things about the Queen Mum! Such things are simply not done.
As I say I’m not
especially fond of lines but what really riles me up are the ways that people
get around lines. I’ll be driving on a
highway and see a sign that is all too common in the summer: “Road work ahead –
4 miles.” As I get closer a sign will
announce something like “Right lane closed ½ mile ahead.” Now I’m the sort of person who will move to
the left lane as soon as I can. Most
people do. But not everyone. There are always some, you know, who wait
until the last possible second. They go
zipping past everyone who has done what they were supposed to do. And then they expect that I’m going to
let them into my lane. And if
someone uses the shoulder, well, let me tell you. There is this little part of me that hopes
that, when they try to merge, no one will let them in and they will be rewarded
for their cheek by being forced to wait for hours. I think that this little part of me needs
some work, but it’s there.
I have a similar
reaction at airport check-in desks. The
airlines have these labyrinths of rope stands and ropes so that ordinary people
like me have to weave their way back and forth and navigate their luggage
around corners. I try to be
patient. But I have to confess that my
attitude tanks when I’ve been waiting for half an hour or more and someone
saunters past all that and presents themselves at the express check-in
desk. No waiting for them. I know in my heart that these are the same
kids who always cut into the front of the line when I was in grade school.
Of course, it’s
thoroughly American to want to get ahead.
A competitive streak runs deep in our national psyche. I sometimes wonder what that phrase means,
“to get ahead.” Get ahead of what? or
whom? Clarence Day had the title
character in the play version of Life with Father say that “the measure
of a man’s poverty is five dollars. If
he had five dollars more at the end of the week, he’d be rich.” Most of the country lives from paycheck to
paycheck. The end of the paycheck comes
and there’s nothing left. If they had
just five more dollars at the end of the week, they could start to get
ahead. Maybe that’s what “getting ahead”
means.
Or maybe getting
ahead just means getting ahead of the rest of the people in the line: not
merging until the last second, or paying extra to use the express check-in.
In Jesus’ day I
wouldn’t have had to ask the question, because getting ahead meant both of
those things. Imagine a line in which
the high status people are in front and the low status people are in the
back. Only, if the low status people are
connected to a high status person then they might move a little closer to the
front. They are in line for everything and
there isn’t enough of anything. The
people at the front control who gets what.
They, of course, get the most. The
farther back in the line you are the less you get.
The front one
percent get ridiculously more than they need.
The next twenty-nine percent get about what they need or sometimes a
little more. The next sixty percent get
a little less than they need. And the
back ten percent get nothing at all. Now
imagine the jockeying that would go on in that line.
Their economy was
quite different from ours or from what ours used to be. It used to be that we used money to buy goods
and services and we worked to produce goods and services that we exchanged for
money. More recently we have been using
credit to buy goods and services and producing goods and services to pay off
our debts and using our payment history to obtain credit. I’m not sure how well that’s working for
us. Less well than we had suspected at
least.
In the ancient world
honor and prestige complicated this picture.
The coin of the realm, the thing that really made things happen was not
silver or gold but honor. It was honor
that gave access to goods and services or to the relationships that allowed
someone access to goods and services. Money
was used to obtain honor. People worked
to obtain honor directly or the money used to obtain it.
Like other forms of
wealth, there was a fixed amount of honor.
The flip side of honor was shame.
Honor for me meant shame for someone else.
Scarcity, an
honor-based economy, the impossibility of creating either money or honor, and
the resulting situation in which gain for one is always loss for another, all
go to explain both the disciples’ eagerness to be known as “the greatest” and
their jealous concern that no one else claim that title.
It was the way of
things in the ancient world but we are not so far removed from it
ourselves. Watch children on a
playground, co-workers in a company, or politicians in Congress and you can see
that the game in all those places is governed by very much the same rules.
It was the Roman
way. It was the way of things in Roman
Palestine. It’s the American way. Maybe it has been that way in every human
group or realm. But that’s not the way it is in the realm that
Jesus proclaims.
As the gospel
progresses the disciples seem to understand less and less of Jesus’
proclamation rather than more and more. This
time when Jesus told them of the coming confrontation in Jerusalem, they said
nothing at all. Instead of trying to
talk Jesus out of it, as Peter had done the first time Jesus raised the
subject, they engaged in a private debate about which one of them had the most
status.
I can imagine Jesus’
frustration. “All right,” I can imagine
him thinking, “is it status you want? I’ll
show you how to gain status.” “Whoever
wants to be first,” he said, “let them be last; let them be the servant of the
last and least. Then they will be
first.”
Then he staged a
little direct action for the benefit of the disciples. He took a child, a little child, and placed
it, him, her, in the midst of the group.
“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever
welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
Now let’s understand
something about this. Jesus is not
offering us this child as an object lesson because of a child’s innocence or
sweetness or anything of the sort. No
one in all of history thought children were innocent or sweet until the middle
of the nineteenth century. It is only through
the lens of the Victorian era’s Cult of the Child that we think anything of the
sort. It’s not that people didn’t love
their children or do their best to raise them well. It’s just that they were under no delusions
about their moral purity. I can say with
full assurance that neither Jesus nor his contemporaries had a Victorian view
of children.
Notice that the text
doesn’t mention the gender of the child.
That’s because the text doesn’t care about the gender of the
child.
The Roman world in
general was very casual about children. Male
children were important for inheritance, but only if they lived through their
infancy and early childhood. They had
less than even odds of doing that. Female
children were considerably less important, even if they lived. Romans regularly practiced exposure of
infants, especially of infant girls. These
exposed infants would either die or be picked up by strangers to be raised as
slaves of one kind or another. In fact
we have a letter from a Roman to his wife that casually instructs her, “If by
chance you bear a child, if it is a boy let it be, if it is a girl, cast it
out.”[1]
Among Jews
infanticide was forbidden, but that does not mean that children were high
status individuals. Children were low
status individuals. Children were
non-persons and that is why Jesus made an object lesson of one.
So, what Jesus told
the disciples was something like this: “If you have to indulge that competitive
urge, if you really have to be number one, here’s how to do it: Give yourself
in service to non-persons, like this child.
This child is a non-person. I
come to you as a non-person. And that’s
because the God who has sent me comes to you as a non-person. If you want to be somebody, serve nobodies. If you want to get ahead, step back. If want to get to the front of the line, go
to the rear of the line. If you want to
see the world rightly, stand on your head.”
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