What Toddlers and Jesus Can Teach Us About Genuine Relationships

A sermon on Mark 10:35-45

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by OPPO Find X5 Pro on Unsplash.]

When Maddox was little, he developed this strategy when he wanted me to do something that wasn’t part of our normal routine.

He would put on this bright-eyed, full-face smile and say, “Momo! I has a good idea!”

Spoiler alert: it was never that good of an idea.

For example, one such brain wave was: “I has a good idea! We can has eat ice cream for dinner!”

It was completely adorable.

And it was actually a really lovely way to ask for things that probably wouldn’t fly.

Because I could not help but giggle at his apparent delight in his own brilliance, so even when I said “no,” it was a laughter-filled “no.”

And he fully knew what he was doing in trying to charm me into a questionable yes, so he wouldn’t throw a fit when I made the responsible decision.

And it would turn into a moment of connection, laughing together while I told him he was cute, but he still had to eat his broccoli.

I wonder how differently today’s gospel story would sound if we had toddlers play the parts of James and John.

“Jesus, Jesus! We have the bestest idea! We love you soooo much, so when we go to heaven with you can we sit next to you?!”

It wouldn’t change the ultimate answer that seating charts in heaven are not Jesus’ mission… but it probably would change how people felt about the request

No one is going to get offended at a toddler asking for a treat.

No one is going to ego-shame a toddler for revealing their self-centeredness.

There is something about the particular innocence of the very young that allows us to accept the ways in which they are not innocent… the ways that they don’t try to hide their greed or selfishness.

They haven’t yet learned to pretend to be anything other than they are, and because of that they offer us their true selves when they tell us what they want.

Not that they think of it this way, of course, but I don’t know if that matters.

I think just the fact of their willingness to be known is a bid for connection… an expression of trust that we will love them exactly as they are, and I think that trust opens us up in return, wanting to honor their trust and teach them that they CAN be exactly who they are with us.

And I think it’s worth leaning into that dynamic and really thinking about how it could change our experience of this gospel story to approach it with that kind of openness.

What if we set aside our judgments about glory-seeking behavior, and instead viewed this scene as a genuine bid for connection… as James and John just putting themselves out there expressing their longing for closeness with Jesus?

If we read it that way, this scene becomes not a rebuke, or a warning… but a lesson in which Jesus takes them seriously in their desire for closeness and lays out what that looks like.

The first aspect of closeness with Jesus is actually listening to him.

To see this lesson, we have to go a bit beyond the lectionary text to see the three verses that come before, which comprise the third of Jesus’s rapid-fire predictions of his coming crucifixion.

I mentioned in a sermon a few weeks back about how Mark’s chiastic structure is meant to highlight these three predictions as the central pivot point in the gospel.

Everything revolves around Jesus’s understanding of where his mission is leading him, and the paired difficulty his disciples have shown in each scene as they struggle to accepting his words.

And I think that helps us to interpret Jesus’s response to James & John’s bid of relationship when he asks them if they can stick with him through what is coming.

He’s intimating that if they are serious about what they are asking, then they also have to be serious about knowing him, about listening to what he has been saying, and accepting it.

And here, I think it’s helpful to notice that he asks them: “are you able?”

I have often read this as a sarcastic response, implying that he already believes the real answer is “no.”

But I think that’s maybe my own cultural context of snark sneaking into my interpretation.

Because when Jesus asks the question, and they answer “yes,” he does NOT reject their answer.

In fact, he confirms it. He says that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Which leads to the second lesson about what a genuine, close relationship with Jesus looks like: it looks like sharing in his suffering.

The cup that he drinks and the baptism that he is baptized with are euphemism for his path to the cross.

And while they are also the two sacraments by which the church’s rituals connect us to Christ’s death and resurrection… when it came to James, at least, this sharing is not metaphorical. He was one of the church’s first martyrs.

Now, let me side-bar for a moment to reinforce one of the lessons from our adult education class about studying scripture: biblical narratives are not proscriptive.

Just because Jesus tells James that he will share in the cup and baptism and James is killed just as Jesus is, that does NOT mean that this is the universal pattern for genuinely following Jesus.

After all, it wasn’t for John, who lived into old age.

But, when Jesus – in response to their expressed desire to be close to him – tells them both that they will share in his cup and his baptism, it’s not a non sequitur either.

He is teaching that a willingness to actually follow Christ’s path, even when that path is rough, is an essential element to staying close to him.

The final lesson is offered in response to the angry reaction of the other ten disciples, when he instructs them on how they are to behave differently from the patterns they were used to seeing: rather than craving power, they are to serve.

The comparison is important.

It’s a call to be counter-cultural, to reject the models they have been primed to admire and to long for.

It’s a rebuke of the assumption that greatness is about power.

It’s a rejection of the belief that leadership is about the show of force and the willingness to coerce.

This is emphatically NOT the way of Jesus.

But more subtly Jesus is also challenging the divisions among their group when they are worried that some might be rising higher than others.

He’s saying that none of them should be getting worried or upset, because greatness ISN’T the goal.

The goal is to serve.

The goal is to look not for offense to object to, but rather needs to be met.

And we know this is the goal because that’s what Jesus does. God among us came not to be served, but to serve.

And if we want to be close to him, that’s what we will do as well.

When we break it down, this is not the kind of teaching we would probably offer to toddler, at least not in such stark terms, but it is a lesson that I think Jesus offers us.

We may not be prone to fall into the error of seeking special favors with Jesus, as James and John did, but because I know all of you, I venture to believe that we are all here today because we do want to be close to Jesus.

We want a genuine relationship, not just a causal religious practice.

And if that’s what we want, he has told us what that looks like.

It looks like listening to his teachings… the ones that encourage us, but also the ones that challenge us.

The point is for this relationship to change us, to transform our lives, which means we will have to learn and even be stretched sometimes.

It looks like releasing our expectation that our faith will never get us targeted for suffering.

Jesus doesn’t WANT suffering for us, but if we want to share in his work of challenging the way of the world, we will get negative reactions.

And finally, it looks like valuing service, the way that the world around us values power.

We won’t get the gratification of glory and the ability to enforce our will, but we will get the blessing of a community formed around love, rather that one splintered by jealousy and anger.

And here’s the beautiful thing about these lessons:

They teach us the way to be close to Jesus, but in so doing they also teach us the way to be close to each other too.

To set aside our self-centeredness, and our defensiveness, our desire to get our own way…

So that we can be changed into people who know the fullness of life that Jesus can bring.

Thanks be to God.