On Still Not Getting It (2nd Sunday in Lent; Mark 10:32-52; February 21, 2016)

On Still Not Getting It

2nd Sunday in Lent
Mark 10:32-52
February 21, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

The disciples were confused and Jesus' other followers were afraid. That about sums up the situation, doesn't? It's not a bad description of how things stand with us either. Confused and afraid.

Oh, we cover it well and so did the circles around Jesus, the inner circle of the disciples, and the outer circle of his other followers. The disciples were confused because they had their notions of what God's anointed should be like. They lived as a subject people in a colony in someone else's empire and they didn't like it one bit. Roman power and the collaborators among their own people kept them under their thumbs and they wanted freedom. The experience of Jews living in the provinces of Palestine, though, was that any credible effort in the direction of the freedom they believed was their birthright was met with Roman ruthlessness and Roman iron.

Power was needed to oppose power, ruthlessness to oppose ruthlessness, steel to oppose steel. But Jesus talked of being killed before the battle had even been joined. This defeatism had them confused.

Jesus' other followers were afraid, afraid of the violence that could break out at any minute. One provoked the eagle of Rome at one’s own risk, but Jesus, the man at the center of a movement as he was, would not bring down destruction simply on his own head, but on theirs as well. As much as they liked him, as much as they could hear hymns of liberation in the words he spoke, as much as they could see God's dream taking shape before their very eyes in the healings that he performed, they were afraid that it would all blow away like the figures that can be seen in the clouds that are there one moment and gone the next. They loved this dream but they were afraid of what would happen when the battle trumpets blew and they woke up and the dream faded into memory and they were left with a violent and oppressive reality.

Perhaps Jesus' other followers took the journey south, the road up to Jerusalem, as an opportunity to slip away from Jesus, to return to their homes or to their home towns and pick up the threads of the lives they had abandoned to follow Jesus.

But Jesus' disciples, that inner circle of the women and men who had been with him the longest, maybe they were too identified with Jesus to slip away. James and John seem to have been part of an inner circle within the inner circle, but they were confused and afraid like everyone else.

Fear and confusion are difficult feelings to deal with. I think, too, that fear and confusion are often linked. At least I've seldom felt one without experiencing the other. Fear is what we feel when we are threatened. We all know that it is a very basic emotion. We used to say that fear leads to the fight or flight response, but recent work with returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans suggests that it might be more accurate to speak of the fight, flight, or freeze response. These responses are all very primitive and start in the part of our brains that we have in common with lizards and birds. When we are thoroughly afraid, we become bird-brained, twitchy and reactive.

My theory is that, in the flood of chemicals released in our brains by fear and our responses to fear, the part of our brain that analyzes and classifies the things in the world around us becomes overwhelmed. We are no longer able to separate things that we would under normal circumstances. When we are unable to tell one thing from another, when they blend into each other, when they are fused together, they are literally "con-fused". And that's when we are confused.

Confusion is uncomfortable. We'll do a lot to resolve it. When we're afraid in a group, one of the favorite things for humans to do is to look to powerful figures who will tell us what to do. Or we seek to become those figures ourselves.

This, I think, is why it makes sense that James and John took Jesus aside and asked for him to make them his Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Homeland Security. It was a grab for glory, sure, but it was also a plea to give them the helm, to put them in charge (under Jesus of course), to give them the power to set a course that would give them a way out of their fear and confusion. Maybe in this way they could put an end to all Jesus' talk about dying at the hands of the authorities.

Jesus answers them by asking whether they can drink his cup and be baptized with his baptism. We all assume he is talking about their dying the sort of death he will die and we're probably right. But drinking wine is not a way to resolve confusion, quite the contrary. And being baptized, being lowered under the water, doesn't soothe fears. It is as if Jesus is telling James and John, "You want power as a way to protect yourself from fear and confusion, but if you are following me you will go through more not less fear and confusion." That may be a stretch, but this is the unfamiliar meaning I'm now hearing in these familiar words.

When the rest of the inner circle found out what James and John have done they were angry. Why? Was it simple jealousy? Was it because they didn't think of it first? Was it because the want an "open process" for the selection of Jesus' cabinet ministers? Or is it simply that when fear and confusion increase, the first casualty is mutual trust?

But the way out of the uncomfortable place that the disciples are in, this place of fear and confusion, is not authoritarian leadership. The way out of the uncomfortable place is mutual care and service. I say "mutual" because care and service are often not mutual. Care and service change nothing when done by people at the bottom of the social pyramid for the people at the top. Jesus suggests that mutual care and service are the path through fear and confusion. They remind us of who Jesus is. They remind us of who we are. They focus us on our core values. They are like a light in the darkness.

If we decide that being powerful, or tough on our enemies, or ruthless in the pursuit of the way we think things ought to be in the world or in our community or in our church, are the way to be, then we will have a lot of company. Every ruler, every petty tyrant, and every local despot does the same.

We are easily blinded by the images of power, toughness and ruthlessness conjured up in stump speeches and political ads. The disciples and we are all in need of healing from this blindness. Like the blind beggar Bartimaeus, when we are healed we will be able to follow Jesus. Jesus' path is vulnerability, tenderness, and mercy. That path leads to Jerusalem, to rejection, to suffering, even to death. And then to resurrection life. That path, the way of vulnerability, tenderness, and mercy, that and no other is our way.

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