Great Expectations
Scripture Reading: Mark 9:30-37
The calendar app on my computer features not only American but Korean holidays as well, a legacy from when I lived there. This past Tuesday was Chuseok, the harvest festival, essentially Korean Thanksgiving. Chuseok is one of two major national holidays in South Korea during which the entire country shuts down, the other being the Lunar New Year.
What about Christmas, you might ask? While Christmas is a national holiday, the way it’s celebrated, at least outside the church, is more akin to Valentine’s Day. It’s less a day to gather with family at home than it is for young couples to go out on the town.
Then there’s the Buddha. Korea also having a sizable Buddhist population, the Buddha’s birthday is a national holiday as well.
As a foreigner, I enjoyed learning about Korean holidays and discovering how they overlapped with or differed from American holidays. For example, Koreans have their own versions of Memorial Day and Independence Day, but they also have a holiday dedicated to the creation of the Korean alphabet, which was invented from scratch by Korea’s most celebrated king.
While there’s no Mother’s Day or Father’s Day in South Korea, they do have something we don’t have…Children’s Day. A celebration of the nation’s youngest citizens, on Children’s Day schools close while amusement parks open and fill to capacity. However, the holiday was created with a serious intent. As was the case in many countries, child labor was once common in Korea, and many children received only the most basic education before they were compelled to work. Children’s Day was created by social reformers as a means of advocating for children’s rights, including the right to an education.
Historically speaking, the modern view of there being stages of childhood and adolescence in which children grow and mature through formal education and informal playtime, is just that…modern. Even here in the U.S., in the early part of the 20th century, children, especially in the South, often worked regular jobs. I’m not talking babysitting or working a paper route but hard labor in factories, mills and mines. Child labor wasn’t officially outlawed at the federal level until 1938.
Yet it appears to be making a comeback. Just last year three McDonald’s franchisees, who combined operate 62 locations, were fined by the federal government for employing more than 300 children, including two who were just ten years old.
Our notion of children as innocents who need to be protected from exploitation is a relatively new phenomenon. In the world of Jesus’ day children had no legal rights. They had no social status. Children didn’t contribute to the material wealth of a household. In fact, they were a drain on a household’s resources. It wasn’t until a girl was old enough to marry or a boy was old enough to learn a trade that they would climb a step off the bottom of the social ladder. Otherwise, children were of the same social class as servants.
I say this so that we can begin to grasp just how radical it is of Jesus to hold up a little child, quite possibly an infant even, as a model of greatness in the eyes of God. An infant is the epitome of helplessness and vulnerability. An infant cannot speak for itself, feed itself, nor fend for itself. An infant cannot survive without the care and nurture of parents. Yet it is an infant whom Jesus holds up, literally, as embodying what it means to be his follower, and at the same time, as representative of the people whom his followers are to welcome and serve.
After spending the last two weeks accompanying Jesus and the disciples on their travels through Gentile territories and then to the border region of Caesarea Philippi, today we see them return home to Galilee. From here on out in Mark’s Gospel Jesus will make his way slowly but surely to Jerusalem where he will be handed over to the authorities, condemned, and crucified. He knows full well that with each step the shadow of the cross looms larger, and yet he does not waver.
Last week we heard Jesus tell his disciples for the first time that the Messiah must face rejection, suffering, and death. Hearing this so upset Peter that he pulled Jesus aside and rebuked him. Wherever did you get this notion that the Messiah must suffer and be killed? And what’s this business about rising again? No, no, no! You are leading us to victory!
Now today we witness Jesus tell his disciples for a second time that he is going to his death. He says it to them in secret, away from the crowds that follow him wherever he goes, but he speaks plainly: “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”
Jesus wants them to know. He wants them to understand where this is all leading. All the miracles. All the healings of the sick and the infirm. All the casting out of evil spirits. All the miraculous mass feedings. All the preaching to the crowds and all the private teaching to the twelve. It ends with him being rejected by his foes, abandoned by his friends, and nailed to a Roman cross.
And yet, it doesn’t end, for in three days he will rise again. And that will be just the beginning. Do you understand this, Peter? Do you understand, James and John, you sons of thunder? Do the rest of you understand?
But they did not understand. They did not understand any more this time than they did the first time that Jesus had told them. It was too awful, too unimaginable even to consider, let alone accept. In fact, Mark tells us that not only did the disciples not understand what Jesus was saying, but they were afraid even to ask him. They were afraid even to ask him. They didn’t want to know the truth.
There are times when the truth is too much to accept, and so we turn from it. We ignore it. We rationalize. We deny what is standing directly in front of us rather than face the uncomfortable truth.
I spent Thanksgiving 1989, along with my parents, visiting my oldest brother Donnie in the hospital in New York City. It was pneumonia, we were told. Donnie looked fine, and he was in good spirits, but I could read my parents’ concern on their faces and hear it in their voices. Still, Donnie recovered and was released. A month later he visited my parents in Connecticut for Christmas, just like he always did.
In the coming months, each time he visited he seemed a little thinner. By Thanksgiving 1991 he was gaunt, his skin had turned darker as if he had spent a lifetime in the sun, and he wore a bandana on his head to hide his hair loss.
Donnie always had an explanation at the ready. He had been diagnosed with Addison’s disease, he said, a hormonal disorder. That would explain the weight loss, the darkened skin, and the hair loss. Check. Check. Check.
Addison’s disease. Never heard of it. But it was easier to say Addison’s disease than the word that no one in the family could bring themselves to utter…AIDS. We dared not ask him because we didn’t want to know the truth. It wasn’t until his symptoms were so severe and the truth was undeniable that we stopped pretending and accepted it.
The disciples are living in a kind of denial. They don’t fully understand this talk about Jesus dying and rising, but neither do they want to understand, because to understand that Jesus must be crucified would mean giving up their dreams of glory—glory for Israel, glory for Jesus, and of course, glory for themselves.
While the disciples are literally walking with Jesus to Jerusalem and toward the cross, metaphorically speaking they are walking in the opposite direction. When they return home to Capernaum, Jesus asks them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” But they don’t answer. They’re silent. Ashamed. “For on the way,” Mark writes, “they had argued with one another about who was the greatest.”
Greatness is what concerns them. Greatness in all the ways that the world measures greatness. Great victories. Great power. Great success. Great wealth. Great recognition.
But Jesus has other ideas. He sits down and calls the twelve to him. Once they gather around him he spells it out for them: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” In other words, if you want to be before all others, then step to the back of the line. If you want to be lifted up, then fall to your knees. If you want to be truly great, then be a servant to the servants.
Some of us are visual learners. I imagine that held true for the disciples as well. Therefore, to underscore his teaching on greatness, Jesus takes a little child and places the child in their midst. He then takes the child in his arms saying, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
Now, I know that Jesus’ holding up the child has often been interpreted as though he were teaching a lesson on innocence. After all, our culture idealizes childhood (hello, Disney), and we think of children as innocent by nature. Therefore, some say, Jesus is teaching that in their faith Christians must be innocent before God and naive to the evils of the world.
But this notion of children, even infants, being innocent was not a view shared by the ancient world. Augustine, one of the great theologians of the early church, thought of infants as relentlessly selfish and wrote that “the only innocent feature in babies is the weakness of their frames; the minds of infants are far from innocent.”
Besides, Jesus is responding to the disciples’ arguing about greatness, not moral purity, and measured by the standards of the ancient world, an infant is just about the furthest thing from greatness there is. Infants are helpless and wholly dependent on the care of others for their survival. They are weak. They are vulnerable. They have no social status.
It’s precisely for these reasons that Jesus calls upon his disciples to be like an infant…to find greatness not in worldly glory but in humility, not in competing to be first but in choosing to be last, not in living our best life now but in taking up our cross and following the one who humbled himself for our sakes.
And I urge you, as I have on several occasions, to hear this not as a word of law but as a word of liberation. To let go of self-seeking ambition is to be free to love others as God loves you, no longer seeing them as rivals but as neighbors. To let go of our obsession with being perceived as in some way greater—smarter, prettier, happier, holier, stronger, healthier, wealthier, more virtuous…however we define greatness to ourselves—is to cling to the cross of Jesus Christ, the greatest love the world has ever known.