The 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time: B 23-24

Wisdom 2:12, 17-20 | James 3:16—4:3 | Mark 9:30-37

 O God, who founded all the commands of your sacred law upon love of you and of our neighbor, grant that by keeping your precepts we may merit to attain eternal life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

One of the things that we all deal with, whether we want to or not, is our human nature, and one of the things about our humanity that I think helps all of us understand more fully what we’re dealing with is looking at the history of the evolution of the human being.  We came from a very low level of consciousness that was always focused primarily on self, self-preservation, self-survival, procreation.  It was very, very, in a sense, primitive, yet we know that in this whole process of the evolution of human beings we’re being invited, by the God who created us, to move more and more in a direction where we become more and more like the God who created us to be like him.  So we’re moving more and more out of a sort of selfish, self-centered world into an other-centered world.  Instead of serving self, we learn that our goal is to serve one another, and yet this human nature that we all have is not something you can necessarily completely — how would I say it — destroy it so that you no longer have any selfish feelings whatsoever, no jealous feelings, no envious feelings, no competition.  The beauty of living as long as I have is you know that there is a desire in all of us, when we’re younger, that we’re going to get rid of all of this negative, selfish, self-centered parts of our life, and then we’ll overcome that, and we’ll become these loving, selfless people.  And I have not yet seen that happen in my life.  So 81 years into the mission, I still struggle with jealousy and envy and self-centeredness, and I think to myself, “Does that mean I haven’t grown at all, or does that mean that that’s exactly the way we are asked to live in this world?”  We are not asked to become, through God’s grace hopefully, but if even less selflessly, we just said, “I am going to make myself into this person who never has any jealous or envious or selfish thoughts.  I will do that, and then I’ll present that to God as my performance is now free of all selfishness, and I, I , I become what, his favorite?  Or at least I can go and claim my salvation and my place in heaven after it’s over, because it’s all about me and what I’ve done.”  That’s the danger.  No, we live with weaknesses all of our life.

The first two readings do describe those weaknesses pretty clearly.  When we’re being attacked, maybe, by another idea, another way of seeing things, we get pretty defensive and often attack the one who attacks us.  And so in that first reading, we see the image of a prophet who comes to speak the truth, and then the response to that is not to ponder that truth, to wonder about it, to question ourselves as to whether or not that truth has any value.  No, let’s attack the messenger, and just in a sort of casual way, let’s see if we can torture him and threaten to kill him to see if he’s really, really authentic.  I don’t think that’s the way you question authenticity, by trying to destroy the person who’s bringing you a new idea.  And the next reading is about the kind of thing that happens when someone else in your world does better than you are, and there’s a kind of feeling or tendency of jealousy or envy.  Or you see someone with all the things you want, and you can’t have them.  There’s this separation that is created by your envy and your jealousy.  This is all human nature, and it doesn’t go away.  That’s the hardest thing for me.  

So what is it that we’re here to do?  How do we work with this lower level of consciousness?  The one thing we have to do is accept it as part of what it means to be human.  The other is to forgive it, meaning that we have to have patience with ourselves, and that encourages us to have patience with other people who have not yet achieved this perfection that we all get caught up in, which is really not what the gospel is asking us to become, perfect.  We’re asked to become forgiving, loving servants.  Patient, understanding, compassion, empathy are all the signs of a person who lives in the kingdom, and the kingdom is a world of two elements: the dark and the light, the selfish and the selfless.  And we struggle with those things throughout our life, and so what’s the key?  What do you have to do?  I think the gospel is loaded with some beautiful images.  First of all, the gospel is pretty much presenting — and this is Mark’s gospel.  He’s presenting to us the image of, a not-so-attractive image of the disciples.  Jesus is finished with his public ministry.  He’s done everything he can to bring the people that he wanted to teach and preach into a place of life and goodness, and they’ve rejected him completely, and they’re ready to kill him.  And Jesus knows that, and he’s predicted it to his disciples.  “Get ready.  Everything you think we’ve been working toward that’s going to put us in a position of power and authority, it’s not going to work.  We’re going to be — I, as your leader, am going to be destroyed, but I’m going to surrender to my destruction.  And when I do that, something radically is going to rise and change in human nature.”  Well, they didn’t understand that at all, but in a sense, maybe what they did understand is that, when Jesus was saying all that, it questioned their own images of what it was going to be like to follow Jesus through the whole process that he was here to accomplish.  And their initial thoughts were always that it was going to be — we were going to be in positions — the disciples were going to be in positions of great authority.  They were going to have an incredibly powerfully position in the way Jerusalem was run and the temple.  They must have dreamt and thought about all the esteem and power they would have had.  And so in the process of thinking about their future, they were on this journey with Jesus, which is — I love when Jesus teaches people while they’re walking.  I love that, because it’s like the journey will teach you.  Keep living each day, and learn something each day.  It’s going to be more and more insight as we move along.  And so he’s overhearing them, and it’s interesting.  In looking at different translations of this, some people say the disciples were discussing who was the greatest.  The one I like better is where they were arguing about who was the greatest.  I would loved to have heard that conversation.  And they were obviously caught up in their humanity of wanting and needing to be in a position of authority and power and esteem.  It’s in all of us, and we’re never going to get rid of it.  But it can be tempered, and we can see through it.  And when it comes up, we don’t have to surrender to it and act on it.  

And so what Jesus does, which is so fascinating, is after he’s kind of basically exposing who they are, then he does something.  He sits down.  There’s a child nearby, I guess, and he takes the child.  And I love the details of this.  He takes the child, and evidently they’re sitting in some kind of circle, as they must have done when he was continually teaching.  They must have been resting on their walk.  He puts his arms around the child.  He just doesn’t place him in their midst but puts his arms around the child and said, “If you receive one child in my name, you receive me, if you receive me, not just me but the one who sent me.”  What’s he saying?  Well, one of the things it might seem at first he’s saying is that here is a child.  A child is vulnerable and has no rights of their own.  So you should always go out there and take care of children and anyone else.  It’s a way of saying, “This is what you should be doing.  You should take care of people.  That’s the whole notion of who I am as the Messiah.  I’ve come to awaken people to the joy and the challenge and the joy of being there for others.”  And it flies in the face of our self-centeredness, but nevertheless, what I love about the way Jesus continues to use this image, he shifts it away from simply saying, “You should take care of the people who don’t have anybody taking care of them,” and it goes something like this.  The child is not just someone who should be served, but he says, “Unless you receive this child —”  Now, what does that mean?  What?  Serve him, or does it mean become like a child?  I really think what Jesus was doing was saying, “Look, I want you to understand that there is something in you that, like a child cannot accomplish, doesn’t have the wherewithal, the wisdom or whatever, or the position of power in the world to be able to accomplish what they want to accomplish —” And so what he’s saying is, “What you have to do is become like a child who is in need of something outside of themselves to be able to accomplish the things that they need to accomplish, and if you can become like that, then you’re going to be able to do something that is so crucial and so essential for this journey you’re on.  You’re going to be able to receive me.”  

Now, what is he saying?  Think of it.  Jesus has been giving them information, information, information, insight after insight and saying, “Take this in.  Receive it.  Ponder it.  Wonder about it.  Try to figure it out for yourself, because I’m giving you not a simple, clean answer to all your questions.  I’m giving you a way of finding a wisdom that can only be accomplished by your own figuring it out and your coming to a decision that this is the way it is.  I know it is.  I feel it in my gut.”  And so what he’s saying is, “If you could allow me to enter into you —”  Let’s take that as, “Take everything I’ve shown you and everything I’ve been.  Take it in and ponder it.  Hold it inside of you, and when you receive who I am and what I’m teaching, you know what’s going to happen?  You’re not just receiving me the messenger.  You’re not receiving me, Jesus.  You’re receiving the one who sent me, meaning you’re receiving the one who gives me,” Jesus is saying this, “Who gives me the strength to do whatever I am asked to do.”  And Jesus had to be so conscious at that moment in his ministry.  He knew it was going to end badly.  He knew he was going to have to be crucified.  He knew he was going to die, and it was a struggle for him to be able to accept that.  And so he knew he couldn’t accept it on his own.  He had to have someone in him enabling him to accept it, and that’s what he’s trying to tell the disciples.  

You will always be selfish.  You will always have these struggles.  You will always — there will always be something in you at war with the person you know you would like to be or who you should be.  That’s always there.  So how do you deal with that?  Well, because human beings are so fond of autonomy, the way I’d like to do it is, ”I’ll work on it.  I’ll get myself past all that selfish stuff, and I’ll be this wonderful, loving person.  And then I present myself to you, God, and you’re going to say, ‘Wow, well done, good and faithful servant.  Come in.  You deserve heaven.’”  That’s what an autonomous, kind of self-centered human being wants to do, and Jesus is saying, “Look, guys, gentlemen, my beloved friends that I’ve spent my life with, don’t fall into that trap.  The only way you can become who you’re called to be is allowing something to be inside of you that’s like inside of me.  And every time you see me doing something that goes way beyond my human nature, I point to God.  I keep saying to you, ‘This is not me.  This is God in me doing this work.’”  So he’s trying to teach his disciples, “Can you really grasp this?  Receiving a child is like becoming like a child where you don’t have the ability to handle your life in the world.  You don’t have enough stuff.  So you become like I am.”  It’s funny.  Jesus is actually saying, “I am a child of the Father.  I am able to do the things I do, because the Father is in me.”  At no time in his ministry could he have been more sensitive and aware of that than the time that he had to face the ending.  The fact that God says to him, “Instead of being the one who accomplishes all these great things and becomes the hero of the world, I want you to surrender to all the enemies out there and let them do all the negative things they do to someone, destroying them.”  And when you say yes to that, meaning a human being has a really hard time saying yes to being destroyed because of its deep, deep commitment to being self-preservation — self-survival — he surrendered to all of that and said, “No, the only way I’ll be saved is my God, my Father in me enables me to do this.  That’s the key, gentlemen.  That’s what you have to understand.” 

And you wonder if this moment couldn’t have been the one they might have turned to most when they realized what had happened in those days between the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit into these men, and they understood and saw things finally as they really are.  And they knew God was in them.  God was there for them.  God took them from a place of arguing about who is the greatest to men who wanted nothing more to do but to serve each other and other people.  That’s the transformation that is the will of God.  It’s the transformation we work with as we struggle with these scripture stories.  It’s the thing I pray most that I’m able to share with you and learn it myself, and we enter into an entire new world of peace, confidence, not in our self, but in the God who made us and who loves us.  

Father, the key to everything that you invite us into is a relationship with God the Father. Help us to feel his presence in us as you knew and felt him in yourself. And enable us somehow to be able to convey to others the goodness that we find in this relationship and to never get caught up in our own self-importance, our self-value, but know that everything that you call us to be, everything you call us to do is through you, with you, in you so we can find peace, a peace that’s beyond any kind of understanding that human nature has by itself, but only that can be taught by you. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.