Confusing. Disorienting. Abrupt. Amazing.
I recall a trip I took to the Pentagon City Mall back in the '90s as a kid. My grandmother and I were meeting my uncle for lunch. We rode an escalator down to the main level, the three of us together, to return to our car after eating when without warning the escalator halted. My uncle and I along with all the other passengers were jolted forward, and my grandmother was thrown from her feet and into the arms of a soldier returning to the Pentagon after meeting his own family for lunch. He was as surprised as my grandmother. You could say that was the first disciples' experience with Jesus. Up to this point in the Gospels, the disciples' experience following Jesus sounds as though they were riding on an escalator that changed speeds, directions, and at times shut off altogether, without much warning.
One minute the disciples were watching feedings and healings, and the next, Jesus is talking about suffering, rejection, and death. One minute they were walking alongside Jesus, hearing about the glories of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the next they were being chastised because they did not listen closely enough. Their experiences in the world were etched into their brains, and often contradicted what Jesus told them.
Giving up the ways of the world was easier said than done.
Giving up the ways of the world is easier said than done.
Every time Jesus’ teachings and actions contradicted what the disciples thought they knew they experienced the jolting of an escalator slamming to a stop and then changing directions.
Confusing. Disorienting. Abrupt.
Our scripture reading is the second time the Gospel of Mark records Jesus delivering the confusing, disorienting, and abrupt news that the culmination of his ministry would be on a cross, preceded by suffering, humiliation, and rejection. Just a chapter earlier Jesus said that he, “must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”[1] Jesus echoed his own words saying he would, “be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again."[2]
The disciples were afraid to ask for clarification in both instances. Peter was called Satan and this time the disciples kept quiet. Living under the rule of Pax Romana, Roman Peace, the disciples knew exactly what Jesus meant when he said he would suffer, and experience humiliation and rejection, and then threw in a reference to the cross. Roads throughout the empire were lined with crosses with dissenters and troublemakers nailed to them, slowly dying, made an example of in their final moments. Their clothing and humanity were stripped away. This is the fate Jesus pointed toward.
As jolting – confusing, disorienting, and abrupt – Jesus’ declaration was, he did not leave the disciples to reorient themselves. In their declaration to seek first, after Jesus had sought them out, Jesus invited them to a new way of living. The disciples were told that if they wanted to be first, the greatest, they must become a servant of all, they must welcome the children. Those two things make sense, not perfect sense, but hey, there’s more clarity provided by Jesus in this statement than most of his parables. Yet, to be the servant of all and welcoming of children, in the first century, was confusing, disorienting, and abrupt. In order to undomesticate the gospel, we must know that the servant of all in the first century was the one who ate, received the daily bread required for survival AFTER everyone in the home including the other servants had received their fill. The servant of all is the recipient of the leftovers and scraps wanted by no one else. These servants, along with children, were people of no, zero, social standing. Sorry kids, it did not matter how cute or well-mannered you were. Your social standing added up to a big goose egg.
Jesus told his disciples that was the cost of being the greatest and the cost is confusing, disorienting, and abrupt when compared to the ways of the world – then and today.
The disciples could not catch a break. We read the gospels and at times it appears the disciples just did not get it. They would say the wrong things at the wrong time. After seeing Jesus take a child into his arms, they would try to prevent other children from coming to him. They were anxious and afraid while at sea when they should have been asleep, maybe leaving one awake to steer the boat. The disciples continually misunderstood Jesus’s actions and teachings, resulting in them placing their apostolic feet in their mouths.
We might roll our eyes or scoff at their inability to seek first and ask questions later, and yet the disciples are the apostolic mirror through which we locate ourselves in the story. Their missteps are our missteps. Their feet in the mouth moments of embarrassment are our moments. Their confused, disoriented, and abrupt mistakes and misreading of Jesus based on their experiences of the world mirror the confusion, disorientation, and abruptness we feel when Jesus calls us away from the ways of this world and invites us, after seeking us first, to seek him, to follow, just as the first disciples did, just as disciples have for centuries.
And this is where we find Christ’s Good News.
If the disciples are a mirror to us, if their mistakes and missteps mirror our own, we can take heart, we do not have to live in fear, because through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ we, just like the first 12, have been claimed and redeemed. Like them, called away from their families and occupations, we have been set to a new task.
We have been set to follow.
Follow Jesus where he leads us – individually and as a community. As individuals we cannot follow Jesus without the community he has called us to and as a community, we cannot follow Jesus without welcoming everyone he has sent to us.
Jesus blew the first disciples’ understanding and expectations of the Messiah out of the water. They expected someone who would overthrow the empires of the world. And like the first 12 Jesus has blown our expectations of the Messiah out of the water. In doing so an invitation to seek him out has been extended to all of us, regardless of our ability to always make sense of him or where we are sent. In the church, we call this Grace, and Grace is as confusing, disorienting, and abrupt as an escalator jolting to a halt but, that very same Grace is also AMAZING.
[1] Mark 8:31
[2] Mark 9:31
