Isaiah 53:4-12; Mark 10:35-45

“Saint Thomas More, on the way to his execution, stopped at the foot of the scaffold, turned to his executioner, and said, “Would you mind helping me up? I can get down by myself.”[1]

I saw a quote the other day that reminded me of a poster in my Hebrew professor’s office, though hers’ was concerned with sheep. The quote said, “Any dead fish can float downstream. It takes a live one to swim against it.”[2]

Then, I’m reading my favorite section of our local newspaper, the Press Enterprise, and come across this quote by Milovan Djilas, an author and politician from Yugoslavia, who said, “The strongest are those who renounce their own times and become a living part of those yet to come.” He qualifies his remarks by adding, “The strongest, and the rarest.”

I am never more disappointed with people than when I see them knocking other folk down or holding other folk back. After all, none of us need help in falling; in like fashion, few of us have the courage to swim against the tide of habit, culture, the expectations of our peers, or the way we’ve grown accustomed to viewing the world. And yet, Jesus Christ insists that the role of discipleship is only fulfilled in doing all of the above.

My wife went to a teamwork seminar the other day at work. She came home and commented that she was surprised to learn how routinely she thinks ‘inside the box.’ She said the professor who led the seminar emphasized that most folk who have experience tend to dismiss, out of hand, anything that challenges their experience. So, for example, when new, young workers arrive on the scene with colorful new suggestions for the way things might be handled, they are routinely dismissed until they become just as old, tired, and grey as those with more experience. What often results is that the company loses its edge. The excitement of doing business is replaced by the dullness of routine. I was pleased to see my wife was moved by this bit of information to review her approach to work and to teamwork, at the same time, I was somewhat saddened.

You see, I was somewhat saddened because I had been reviewing the gospel lesson for this morning. I was saddened because I’m aware of our human capacities to put other people down and make ourselves exceptions. I was saddened because I felt anew the same frustration that Jesus feels all through the Gospel of Mark in his dealings with the disciples. They, like we, just never seem to get it. He, in spite of them, just keeps on trying to help them see it. He grows impatient, he gets angry, and yet, he forgives – he forgives from the very cross on which he died for the love of them.

William Willimon in his reflections on the gospel lesson suggests that it’s not so much that Jesus is hard to understand – rather, it’s that he’s hard to misunderstand. “Sometimes, in attempting to follow Jesus, our problem is not that we misunderstand him, but rather that we understand him all to well – and we don’t like what we hear.”[3]

Willimon goes on to say that he’d once asked a distinguished teacher “– a woman who had served for decades in public schools and whose teaching had been widely recognized throughout the state of North Carolina – “What has been your greatest challenge as a master teacher?”

She replied, “Failure.”

You try to be a teacher, try to lead people from point a to point b, try to open up a formerly closed mind, try to get people to see the world in a different way, attempt to change the way people do things, well, get ready for failure.”[4]

It’s one thing if you’re just in the business of providing information, that’s very easy. It’s quite another if you hope to change lives by sharing that information – not just causing people to think differently, but urging them to live differently.[5] Preachers, says Willimon, get ready for failure.

And while you’re at it, get ready for your service to be suffering.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has just turned the corner on his ministry – in the first half, we see him serving the people on behalf of God, visiting them where they live, listening to their troubles, and teaching them about the Realm of God (which is different from the Realm of Culture – the politics of Israel wrestling with the power of Rome). Long about Mark’s chapter eight and early into chapter nine, Jesus starts to tell them about his future – that he would have to suffer greatly, be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and other ministers, and be killed. He tells them that’s they’re portion, too. Peter doesn’t want to hear it then, and now, James and John, having heard the Lord’s rebuke of Peter for settling for human things rather than divine, are arguing about which among them should be considered the greatest.

Jesus answers: Hey folks, why don’t you spend your time helping others up; after all, they can fall down all by themselves. Why don’t you stop floating downstream like a dead, bloated fish, and start swimming into the current; rather than floating towards the inevitability of your death, why don’t you start swimming towards the source of life? Why don’t you discover the strength of God in doing well, and renounce the strength of armies, of debate, of nostalgia, or of your will for the things you want? Because, says Jesus, unless you’re willing to do these things – unless you serve God and suffer the wrath of ‘naysayers’, you can’t be my disciples.

“Mark Twain, after he truly learned how to be a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, had a problem. ‘Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace and beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river…All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. (Quoted in John Shea’s Stories of God, The Thomas More Press, 1978).”[6]

This is why the Lord tells us we must first die to ourselves if we are sincere about living for God. You see, so long as our lives are concerned with our welfare, our well-being, what we want, and how we want it, we’ll become effective pilots of our culture and time – we’ll use the things and the people around us to have our own way, and we’ll even invoke the name of God in support of our thoughts and actions. It’s only when we die to the selves we have constructed from the Realm of Culture will we again see the Transfiguration of our nature into the image of God’s children. When we start helping one another up and not push each other down, we’ll see Jesus.

I had the privilege last week of joining several other members of our church in the annual Crop Walk, a fund raising adventure for people all over the world, but also for people right here in Berwick and Nescopeck. The slogan for Crop Walk is “We walk because they walk.” It means that, at least for a moment, we put ourselves in another person’s shoes that we might catch a glimpse of the world from their perspective. As I walked, I spoke with a young woman (also participating) about religion, about Christianity, about churches, and about people.

She asked me why she should join the church. I thought about it for a moment, and responded that joining the church has never saved anybody. Joining Christ, on the other hand, has saved everybody. You see, churches can be just as self-serving, vain, and empty of love as any other collection of people. Disciples, on the other hand, are willing to walk in the world the way Jesus walked in the world – lending a hand, helping others up, pointing the way toward the cross, and confident that the pains of discipleship at the hands of others will one day be replaced by the joy of resurrection. We walk because he walked. We love because he loved. We forgive because we’ve been forgiven. We die to ourselves as he did, and we live for God as he did. If we’re not doing those things then our names are on a meaningless register, an empty roll, and we’ve lost the grace, beauty, and poetry of Jesus Christ.