Pentecost XX

Isaiah 53:4-12
Ps. 91
Heb. 4:12-16
Mark 10:35-45

“The Principle of an Exchanged Life”

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen. 

We have been looking at the Gospel of Mark, and today we come to another “hard” lesson –hard to understand, hard to accept as true, and then even harder to apply in our lives.  In fact, teachings of this sort are becoming commonplace to Jesus’ followers in Mark’s gospel.  Right after Peter confesses Jesus is the Christ in Chapter 8, when it seems that the disciples may finally be coming to understand who Jesus is, he confounds them with lessons that don’t line up with what they assume to be his messianic destiny.  If this man is to be a king, his kingdom is upside-down.  A summary of Jesus’ kingdom rules would read something like this:

• If you want to save your life, give it away.  (Mark 8:34-35) 
• Embrace people not to gain any benefit or advantage for yourself, but like you would a little child who has nothing to offer you in return.  (Mark 9:36-37) 
• Last week’s lesson:  Allegiance to Jesus trumps financial security and material gain.  (Mark 10:21) 
• And today:  If you want to be great, you must make yourselves small.  To gain influence and authority, you must become a slave. 

If the disciples’ confusion seems understandable, even similar to our own experience with Jesus, it should be.  One function of the church year is to let us retrace the footsteps of Jesus’ followers as they struggle to understand who Jesus is and what that means for their lives and ambitions.  Every year at this time, I find myself asking “What kind of king is this that I profess to serve?”  Like the disciples, I’m slow to learn, and then quick to forget, that the rules of life Jesus gives are inverted, counterintuitive and profoundly strange. 

So I need to hear today’s gospel, and I want us to observe (1) a demand; (2) a denial; and (3) a death. 

(1)  First, the demand.  James and John approach Jesus and practically issue him a command:  “Teacher . . . we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”  (Mark 10:36)  Even after all this time with Jesus, they’re out for prestige and glory, to get acclaim for themselves, to garner the two best seats on Jesus’ cabinet after he comes into power.  James and John are operating out of the wrong paradigm or model for the proper exercise of leadership.  One commentator writes: 

Essentially, Jesus was deconstructing the forms of leadership – both religious and political – that his disciples would have been most accustomed to seeing [because] the only categories for leadership they had were what they had seen and experienced through the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the scribes, and Herod.  [T]he form of leadership these groups now carried out was lethal, and would be toxic in the kingdom for which [Jesus] was giving his life and for which he was preparing his disciples to lead.1 

Jesus notes in verse 42 that the rulers of the Gentiles exercised power over those under their authority; literally they “overpowered” them.  That’s the toxic sort of power James and John demanded because they mistakenly thought it would fulfill them.

A few years ago, Bruce Wilkinson wrote a 92-page book entitled The Prayer of Jabez.  The origin of the book is a snippet of scripture from 1 Chronicles 4, where we read “Jabez was more honorable than his brothers [and] Jabez cried out to the god of Israel, ‘Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory . . . .’  And God granted his request.”  (1 Chron. 4:9-10)  I don’t want to get into a critique of Wilkinson’s book this morning; in fact, I never even read it, so I can’t tell you honestly whether I agree with Bruce or not.  What I can tell you about is my own extremely limited experience in praying the prayer after a very close friend told me it had changed his life.  I thought, “If it worked for him, who knows?” I’ve prayed it from time to time, but always with the demand of James and John under my breath:  “God, I want you to do for me whatever I ask.”  As a priest-in-training, it’s often “God, give me a great sermon so people will admire how I preach,” or “Expand the ministry of this parish, not so much for your glory but so it will look good on my résumé.” 

Thankfully, demands like these usually meet (2) a denial.  Just as God says “Thanks, but no thanks” to my Jabez prayer when I’m motivated by selfishness for personal acclaim, Jesus rebuffs the demand from James and John, telling them “You don’t know what you are asking.”  (Mark 10:38)  C. S. Lewis said:  “When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.”2  James and John implored Jesus to give them something that would ultimately leave them wasted and unfulfilled because a self-centered life where you find value because of what you accomplish is not sort of life Jesus calls us to live.  So what sort of life does Jesus advocate?

There’s a principle at work here.  Thomas Howard, a writer and scholar and teacher, and also a dear friend and mentor to me during my time in Massachusetts, writes of the “mystery upon which all life proceeds and which will never be outgrown since it is there at the root of all things.  It is the mystery of My Life For Yours.”3  What Tom is getting at is that real joy, abundant life and ultimate fulfillment never come from using others for our own gain but from serving others for the sake of Christ.  James and John and I have prayed on the principle of “Your Life for Me”:  Give me this so that I can make a name for myself, so that I can be important, so that the world will see how great I am.  Prayers like that come from the part of us that still operates on the principles of the kingdom of this world, not the kingdom of God, and that part of us has to die if we are to have anything to do with an explosion of the kingdom of God in its fullness in our city.

And that’s our last point:  Not only is there a demand and a denial, there is also (3) a death.  “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all, [f]or even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”  (Mark 10:44-45) 

Actually, there are two sorts of death in view here:  If the kingdom of God is to come on earth as it is in heaven, not only did Jesus have to give his life to ransom us, but we have to give up our lives for the sake of others.  Tom Howard asks whether we haven’t really known this all along – haven’t we sensed it all throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and merely deceived ourselves about it?  He traces the “My Life for Yours” principle all the way back to the Tabernacle and the blood sacrifices that Israel offered before God. 

The slaying of the token victims and the pouring out of blood signaled dramatically to them that the laying down of one life for another, on which all life depends and which may take a hundred small forms during the course of a day (helping a man get his ox out of a ditch, or holding a car door open, or letting that person go first) – this laying down of life always entails a death.  It is death, in effect, to my ten minutes when I give them over to helping you get your hapless ox back on his feet; it is death to your convenience for five seconds while you hold this door for me; it is death to his privilege if he lets you cut in here ahead of him.  These little layings-down of life were understood to be cases in point of the principle which is at the root of all existence, this principle of exchanged life.4

So, what do I want you to come away from this sermon with today?  The thing is, I can’t really know; precisely what “little layings-down of life” God calls us to is between us and God, and it is the matter of much prayer, attention to the details of our lives and our interaction with others, and constant repentance.  But I do know God’s design for life entails death for the part of all our hearts that makes demands of God and refuses to serve our neighbors and even our enemies. 

I’ve been reading a book of letters from Jack Miller, who taught at Westminster Theological Seminary outside Philadelphia, and one letter is to a pastor who wrote to Jack for advice about whether he should leave his church.  Jack wrote back:  “I do not presume to know whether you should [leave your church] or not.  Only God can finally show you that, but you must believe that he can and will reveal His design for your life to you.  But your life must have a death in it if it is to go anywhere.  The greatest thing hindering revival . . . is the way we tend to run away from our own death.  The cross can be evaded only so long.”5 

Teachings like these – Deny yourself; Give to the poor; Become a slave –they draw us up short because they are invitations to take up our place under the cross.  My hope is that they shock us awake to the radical implications of the gospel:  That Jesus, the supreme example of a cross-shaped life, came not to be served but to serve and to give up his life as a ransom for many; and the implication in 1 John 3:16, which says:  “This is how we know what love is:  Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.”  If we want God to enlarge the territory of the Church of the Ascension & St. Agnes; if we want true joy and greatness for ourselves; we’ll embrace our little deaths.  Die a thousand times a day – getting oxen out of ditches and whatnot – and learn that true joy comes from serving others, and real life is lived in the shape of the cross. 

+   In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen.    

1. Roger E. Van Harn, ed., The Lectionary Commentary: Theological Exegesis for Sunday's Text, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006), vol. B, 259.
2. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 52.
3 Thomas Howard, Splendor in the Ordinary (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1976): 23 (emphasis added).
4. Howard, 24-25.
5. C. John Miller, The Heart of a Servant Leader: Letters from Jack Miller; ed. by Barbara Juliani Miller (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Publishing, 2004): 23