The Key to the Way of Jesus

A sermon on Mark 9: 30-37

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Liana S. on Unsplash.com]

Show of hands. Would anyone here identify the gospel story we heard today as the turning point of Mark’s entire gospel?

It seems really unlikely, right? It’s not that this story is unimportant, but there is no major feast day in the church to commemorate the second time that Jesus predicted his own death,

nor is there a preponderance of hymns or sacred art about the time when the disciples argued about who was the greatest. The story is just not that inspiring of faithful creativity.

OK, second question: does anyone remember several years ago when we held a forum after worship and read through the entire gospel of Mark in one sitting?

The one-sitting reading is a technique for Biblical study that helps us to make connections to the entire arc of the narrative, and to see patterns in the way that the author tells the story that we miss if we only read one scene at a time.

(I’m gonna go Bible-geek for a minute here, but it’s relevant. I promise).

OK, the over-arching pattern in the gospel of Mark is what scholars call a chiastic pattern, named for the Greek letter chi, which looks like an “x.”

It has this name because, if we chart out every scene in Mark’s gospel, we discover that it looks like one half of a “chi”, with each story in the first half of the book mirrored, in reverse order in the second half, so we get an order of A… B… C, etc., then reversing back, a parallel story in C’, and then B’, and then A’.

We looked at a break-down of the gospel of Mark in that forum years ago, and it holds true.

There was clearly intention behind the order that stories were put into the gospel of Mark by the author.

And the reason behind that very careful ordering… was because the chiastic structure is like one huge arrow, pointing to the pivotal, focal moment in the narrative.

Anyone want to guess what that pivot point is?

It’s the story we read today: with Jesus’s second (of three) predictions about his coming death and resurrection, followed by his disciples’ uncomprehending reaction.

If that seems like a weird focal point to you… I’m not surprised. I’ve had to wrestle with it a bit to embrace its significance.

It makes a little more sense when we realize that it’s really the three passion predictions & responses grouped together in rapid succession that are the turning point, with the second one being in the middle of that grouping, obviously, so that’s the ultimate focus.

Mark is telling us that Jesus’s knowledge of what he is moving toward… and the contrasting confusion of his followers… is the interpretive key of the whole story.

But that raises the question: what pattern do we find in this scene that can serve as an interpretive key? What does this story tell us that can help us to better understand our own experiences of faith?

I would summarize the key points of the story this way: after Jesus predicts that he is going to be killed and rise again (revealing that he was deliberately going to take the path of self-sacrifice) …

his followers first respond with confusion and fear, afraid to even ask Jesus what he is talking about;

that pushes them to overcompensate with an urge for dominance by arguing about their respective greatness;

and then Jesus corrects them with a call to serve others, welcoming those whom society put at the bottom of the greatness ranking.

In brief: Jesus takes a path of suffering-with; his people get scared; they try to comfort themselves by asserting control; and Jesus says “no… follow my way.”

Once we break it down, I imagine that pattern sounds familiar. We have probably all seen it in our own lives and world.

As it happens, I have a rather dramatic personal experience of the whole getting scared & then over-reacting with efforts to regain control. That was precisely the story of my eating disorder in my late teens.

In response to some life traumas, I developed a form of anorexia, and whenever my life was feeling particularly scary, I would restrict my eating.

It wasn’t about losing weight (I was already pretty skinny). It was about feeling like I could control something as fundamental and essential as my own body’s hunger. It was a way of fighting fear with evidence that I had power every time that my body sent hunger signals, and I shushed them.

But the parallel to the gospel pattern did not stop there. The solution I found was the same as Jesus’s redirection as well.

When his disciples tried to suppress their fear by making themselves feel powerful, Jesus said, “no. Be a servant. Instead of trying to make other people feel small, make literal small people feel welcome. Love is the true remedy to fear.”

And that was what I found as well. When my eating disorder morphed into my first depressive episode, it was love for other people that pulled me out of it.

I could only get relief from my own pain when I paid attention to the pain of others and tried to care for them.

It’s a powerful truth, but it’s counter intuitive.

The reason that fear makes us want to assert control is because that’s the model of the world around us.

We see it in the plot tropes repeated in popular media, in which it’s when the hero has their back to the wall that they find the strength to push back and take control.

We see it in the multibillion-dollar industries devoted to helping us “beat” the aging process, as though that were possible.

And we definitely see it in politics.

Machiavelli wasn’t wrong when he argued for the power of fear, and political figures down through the centuries have leveraged that power to pull people’s strings.

If you can first make people feel afraid, they will do whatever you promise will make them feel safe and powerful again.

But this is why Mark chapter 9 is the central interpretive key of the Jesus story:

Because it sandwiches this familiar human pattern inside Jesus’s revelation about an alternative approach.

The human pattern of fear triggering a reactive power grab isn’t the whole story.

Jesus’s revelation that he is choosing to empty himself and take the road to the cross is what first triggers the fear…

But it’s also what offers the way out. Servanthood, not greatness, is what breaks the cycle of fear… because it is in welcoming those without power that we welcome God.

Mark is telling us that in order to understand the story of Jesus, we need to understand that he is changing the pattern we are used to.

We are used to letting fear drive us and to seeing power as our solution.

He is saying that he knows how fear works, and how our instincts tell us to respond, but we can make a different a choice through following Jesus.

Jesus chose the way of the cross with full awareness of what it would bring.

And when we follow his model, the fear will lose its power, because we will see God.

This topic actually came up last Sunday during our forum discussion on the ELCA’s draft social statement on Civic Life and Faith.

Talking about the church’s role in engaging in civic life I went on a bit of an unscripted tangent about the way of the cross, and the revelation through Jesus that God is not a coercive God.

Because that is what the cross shows us. When God saw how broken the world is, the response was not, “Right, time to send my son to whip these reprobates into shape with some fire and brimstone!”

Quite the opposite. God’s response was, “time to prove the limitless quality of my love, by submitting to the brokenness of the fear-and-power based system and letting it kill me, so that I can prove its futility and rise again.”

That is the interpretive key, not only of Mark’s gospel, but also of our faith. The assertion that self-giving love, rejection of fear, welcome of the weak is the way to see God.

In our forum discussion, we talked about how this makes it clear that Christian Nationalism is Christian in name only, and never an option for guiding our faithful engagement in civic life.

Because Christian Nationalism is all about fear and power. It is the complete opposite of the way of the cross.

In our lives in general, this teaching offers a daily invitation to join Jesus on the way of the cross, rejecting that lie that the solution to our fears is to try to grab onto control, and instead trusting God’s way of welcome and love.

I won’t pretend that the way of death and resurrection is an easy path to follow.

It’s been almost 30 years since I first battled my eating disorder, and it still tries to whisper in my ear at times.

And when my news feed is full of 24-hour presidential polls, I feel that tug of anxiety and frantic wondering about what I can do to tip the balance.

And the example of Jesus himself demonstrates that we still need to engage in the world around us, even as we reject the lure of greatness, because that engagement is what actually got him hung on the cross.

But even if it earns us a negative reaction too, we have a witness to share about God’s will for the healing of the world!

That witness is about welcome, and healing, and love… and even when love looks like laying down our lives… and our fears… and our control… we do so in the assurance of resurrection.

Thanks be to God.