Mark 10:35-45, from Proper 24(29)
This week’s reading brought to mind a quote from my pastor’s latest sermon.
“You are worse than you thought,” the Rev. Brady Cooper said in a sermon about the story in Acts of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. “And God’s grace is greater than you ever imagined.”
After everything Jesus has said and done to hammer home his point that the Kingdom of God belongs to the last, least, littlest and lost, brothers James and John pull him aside, out of the other disciples’ earshot, and try to wheedle him into appointing the two of them as his seconds-in-command during the coming glory.
As David Lose points out in his excellent commentary this week, all sorts of painful irony ensues. Jesus tells the pair they have no idea what they’re asking for, but they’ll get more than they want of it before long. One wonders whether they still coveted the spots at Jesus’ right and left as he hung gloriously dying in bloody shreds on the cross between two also-crucified thieves. And don’t miss Sarah Hinlicky Wison’s wickedly funny commentary on the brothers’ confident assertion that they’re ready, willing and able to drink from Jesus’ cup and endure his baptism, in which she coins the pricelessly churchy word, “pyropneumatoheterobaptism.”
But all this ribbing we’re giving James and John about their presumption and naivete amuses us only because we know we’re no better. We all tell ourselves, on some level and at least at some times, that God treasures us more than anyone else, and we recoil from the paradox that, in his kingdom, nobody is special – precisely because everybody is special. The heart-breaker for me in this story is that Jesus knows this – knows it about James, about John, about the other disciples who get wind of what’s happening and respond with indignation, and about us, all these years later. And yet he went to the cross anyway. As Lose puts it:
“Three times Jesus tells the disciples what will happen in Jerusalem. Three times they misunderstand. And he goes there anyway. He keeps marching, keeps healing, keeps loving, keeps serving, keeps giving himself as a ransom to save us from ourselves. And he will continue to do just that. Until all of us are saved, overwhelmed, drowned, crucified, and raised again by God’s unending, all-encompassing love. Thanks be to God!”
That’s grace greater than I ever imagined.
Next week: Proper 25(30)
