Mark 9:30-37
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Before we rush to judge the disciples
for arguing over who was greatest, we need to chill and step back. If you lived
in Palestine during the Roman occupation, you would have asked this question
many times. Roman society was rigidly
hierarchical. It was also built upon a shame-honor dynamic, which feels
very foreign to us today. Your sense of
honor or shame was contingent upon how you were viewed by the larger community,
particularly those in your social level. Public humiliation was one of
the most painful experiences one could endure. To lose a sense of one’s
honor, to be publicly shamed, to be dishonored felt like death. And many
a Roman preferred to take one’s own life instead of face dishonor or shame.
Organizing
a society this way cultivated growth in civic participation, aspiring people to
live honorably in the eyes of the wider society. Honor virutis preamium,
the Romans said. Honor is the reward of
virtue. This was the positive side of the shame-honor system. However,
human nature being what it is, this approach inevitably led to secrets and
schemes to keep the shame-producing truth from ever seeing the light of day. “In shame
cultures it is the group that has the conscience, not the individual. Thus,
when a group accuses one of violating its standards, deep shame is the result.”[1] This
sounds eerily familiar today as we see the shaming of victims who speak out,
often courageously, to report abuse or sexual harassment or crime. The shame felt by the victim is overwhelming
and paralyzing.
It’s quite natural for the disciples to be curious about where their movement placed
them in the wider social context and, individually, they would have wanted to
know who was the “greatest” among them. Status meant everything.
Status brought power, honor. Status meant height, being “high” above
others who were below you. Once you figured out where you were in the
pecking order you were encouraged to stay there. That’s what was meant by
“being humble.” It meant “staying within one’s inherited social status,
not grasping to upgrade oneself and one’s family at the expense of another.”[2] In
Jesus’ world, you knew who was at the top—the emperor—and you knew who was on
the very bottom—the slave—and somewhere in between (probably close to the bottom)
was you.
All of this is important to keep in mind because what’s going on in this text
is radical. What Jesus is up to here is astonishing. In the privacy of
this house, not out in the public, Jesus doesn’t judge them for their
discussion. Instead, he intentionally undermines their societal assumptions
of how the world “really works” and shows them a still more excellent
way. He challenges their assumptions about what matters and doesn’t. He destabilizes the foundation, the
structural core of their moral universe. That’s why Jesus is radical, because
he gets to the root, the core of what matters. He does this by lobbing at
them the curve ball of all curve balls, something so counter-intuitive,
something they would never have considered valuable or possible or sane or even
desirable. Jesus unmasks the power structures of his society and the
disciples’ aspirations for power and privilege, and then undermines, undercuts
their value system. It’s as if Jesus is taking on or hoping to heal all the
damage inflicted upon a society based on shame and honor. How does he do
this? Where? “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and
servant of all” (Mk. 9:35).
That would have left them speechless. It still leaves us speechless.
This is the grand reversal of the gospel.
This is what the kingdom of God is and does and what we’re called to
embody. This is what grace does. This is the way the world ought to be and is
becoming. This is justice. Jesus reverses the pecking order.
The Gospel always questions the
prevailing morality of any culture. Jesus challenged the moral assumptions
of his society. The first shall be last and the last shall be first (Mark
10:31). If you want to be first, if you want to be great, if you want
something to feel honorable about, then give up your status, move in the
opposite direction of where you are, choose downward mobility; instead of
wanting to be served, serve—serve all, especially those who are below you or
those you consider below you. If you want glory, then be who you were
created to be—serve one another.
And with that Jesus reaches over and places a little child among them and puts
his arms around the child (Mark here uses one of the most unique verbs found in
the New Testament). He takes the child
in his arms and says: See, like this. This is where you
start. This is how you do it. Even this gesture is wildly radical
and subversive.
Unfortunately, we have domesticated the
text. We have our images of Jesus welcoming the children, gathered at
Jesus’ knee, smiling, innocent, well fed, well dressed, well behaved, clean,
and cherub-like. These images are seared into our brains. But I wish we could get rid of them or forget
them or cast them aside. We mustn’t romanticize this text; we mustn’t romanticize
children. And we mustn’t dehistoricize this text by lifting it out of
Jesus’ time and placing it in ours or, worse, taking our views of children and
projecting them back into the text.
I
said earlier how slaves were at the bottom of the rung. Well, children were
just a little higher than slaves. Like slaves, they had no status, no
rights. They were invisible. “Childhood in antiquity was a time of
terror. Infant mortality rates sometimes reached 30 percent.
Another 30 percent of live births were dead by age six, and 60 percent were
gone by age sixteen. Children were the first to suffer from famine, war,
disease, and dislocation, economic deprivation, and in some areas or eras few
would have lived to adulthood with both parents alive. The orphan was the
image of the weakest and most vulnerable member of society. Childhood was
thus a time of terror.”[3] Surviving to adulthood was cause for celebration.
That’s why rites of passage ceremonies were so important in earlier cultures, they
meant one survived childhood. “Children had little status within the
community or family. A minor child was on a par with a slave, and only after
reaching maturity was he a free person who could inherit the family
estate.” To call someone a child could also be a serious insult (Matthew
11:16-17). This is not to say that children weren’t loved and
valued. They were. Having children promised continuation of the
family, as well as security and protection to parents in old age.[4] Still, it was a dangerous time.
Jesus
embracing a child was a symbolic action demonstrating the core of his ministry,
declaring what matters most in the kingdom of God.[5]
We should not be arguing who is the greatest. Instead, we are called to
question the moral structure of society that fails to care of the “least of
these” (Matthew 25:40). What is more, we must work against that structure
if society is not willing to care for the “least of these.” We are not called
to serve the rich and powerful, those with status and honor in the eyes of
society, we are called to serve the “the least,” the child, children. Embrace
them. Care for them.
Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) said, “The test of the morality of a
society is what it does for its children.” It is true that as people of faith
we are called to ensure that our children are safe and secure, that they are
cared for, that they are offered the prospect of a future to grow and develop
and love. Jesus was obviously talking
about children, but he didn’t consider children the way we do today.
Jesus is really talking about welcoming, embracing, and holding close to our
hearts the most vulnerable segment of society: the weakest, the marginalized,
the ignored or excluded, those without power, the poor. These are the people we
are called to love and to serve, the least of these among us, be they children
or adults, or adults who are as vulnerable as children. This is kingdom work.
In his last speech, vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-1978) was
channeling this kingdom ethic when he said, "...the moral test of government is how that
government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who
are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life,
the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” In other words: the most
vulnerable. Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) caught the vision of the kingdom when he
said, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” Marian
Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund,
tirelessly reminds us, “If we don’t stand up for children, we don’t stand up
for much.”
But Jesus is not first talking to nations or
governments, he’s talking to the church, to the people of
faith who are in seats of power and have authority in government—whether in
Annapolis or Washington, DC. And people
of faith who through their voice and actions have enormous power and influence
upon the way we care for the most vulnerable in our society, for the
marginalized, for those women and men and children who are invisible to us,
whose plight is unknown to us because we have not stepped into their lives, or
maybe have not stooped down low enough on the social ladder to consider their
plight.
There are many vulnerable segments
of our society we could highlight here, our “children” in need our care and
love. Children made up 52 of the refugee
population in 2017, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, up from 41 percent in 2009. Consider the number of immigrant children being detained in the USA. At the end of May 2018, the number was
10,773. The most recent number is 12,800
children, both unaccompanied and separated from parents. Closer to home, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, on any given night in 2017, 2,669
experienced homelessness in Baltimore City. The 2018 poverty threshold for a family of four in the United States is $25,100. In Baltimore City, 21.9% live below the poverty line. More than 1/2 of poor
residents live in deep poverty, meaning they live at or below 50% of the
federal poverty line; more than 1/3 of children in Baltimore City live in poor
households. In Baltimore County, approximately 9% of the
population lives below the poverty line; in Howard County, 4.66% live below the
poverty line.
I can throw
disturbing statistics around all day. They’re helpful to a degree, however,
statistics remove us from the situation at hand; they depersonalize and dehumanize. It’s tough to embrace a statistic. It’s tough to wrap your arms around a
statistic. Each statistic has a beating
heart, made of flesh and blood. Jesus
calls us to wrap our arms around a fellow-child of God. To welcome a “child”—to embrace the most vulnerable in our society—means
that we are at the same time welcoming Jesus: to welcome him is to welcome and
embrace the One who welcomes and embraces us all. This is
what the kingdom of God is all about. This is the Gospel. This is
what we’re called to. It’s tough. It’s not popular. It
requires courage. And, yes, it even has political implications for the living
out of this vision. The gospel is always
political, because the gospel is concerned with power and people and ensuring
that people are empowered and loved and cared for.
Jesus loved children. And
I imagine children knew they were loved by him. Jesus said that whenever we
welcome a child we welcome him; to neglect, hurt, or exclude a child is to
neglect, hurt, and exclude him. Today, Jesus continues to call us to welcome
the “child,” to extend hospitality, welcome, and sanctuary to the most
vulnerable among us: the weak, the neglected, the marginalized, the ignored or
excluded, the powerless, the economically vulnerable, living from paycheck to
paycheck, meal to meal.
It might be difficult to
empathize with the marginalized or most vulnerable. But if we want to be considered “great” in
the Kingdom, we know what we must do. The burden of responsibility is upon us, both
collectively and individually as people of faith, to welcome the child. The
kingdom, the gospel, Christ requires nothing less from us. Then and now, it’s a
radical step to take. When we take this step, whenever we live this way, it
will leave the world speechless.
[1] See Bruce J. Malina and Richard L.
Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1992), 237-238.
[2] Malina and Rohrbaugh, 237.
[3] Malina and Rohrbaugh, 237
[4] Malina and Rohrbaugh, 238.
[5] See Ched Myers, Binding the Strong
Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll:
Orbis Books, 1994), 260ff.
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