Tomorrow’s Sermon, Mark 10:35-45: The Problem Of Status

Mark 10:35-45

1. Status
It was the Bunfight at the OK Corral. Well, no, it was tea
and cakes in the church hall after the official reopening of Broomfield’s premises in March, after our
refurbishment. The President of Conference met and greeted people like any
ordinary minister. Simon Burns MP mingled quietly and warmly with the crowd. So
did the Mayor – who was down-to-earth, and not in the slightest bit
self-important, despite the impression we had feared after the Mayor’s Parlour
had contacted us with all their demands for how his visit should be handled.

Quite different was one of the local councillors. I can’t
remember his name, and I’m glad about that. He buttonholed me for longer than I
would have wanted and proceeded to talk almost entirely about himself. His
particular beef was this: he and the Mayor had years ago been pupils at the
same school. But the Mayor this year had scheduled a dinner for the end of his
year in office on the same night as the annual old boys’ dinner at the school.
Being new here at the time I thought it must have been lauded public school – Felsted, maybe. But no. It was KEGS. Grammar school, yes, but not
the public school this buffer made it out to be.

We detest this sense of self-importance and pomposity in
politics. But we are not immune to it in the church. If you knew the tortured
discussions before the Broomfield
reopening about who should be on the platform for the service. It all seemed to
be about who was important enough to be up the front. I think people wanted to
honour the so-called ‘important’ people and were sincerely trying to avoid
causing offence. But I wonder whether we slipped into a worldly preoccupation
with status.

And likewise I once attended a concert given by a Christian
singer called Ian
White. Local ministers were invited to have a meal beforehand with him and
the pastor of the church where the concert was being held. I was the only one
who turned up – well, I was single at the time and it meant not having to cook!
Afterwards, I went into the worship area for the concert and found friends from
one of my churches arriving. I sat with them – at the back. At the end of the
concert the pastor couldn’t understand why I hadn’t gone with him and sat at
the front, in a prominent position. It had never occurred to me. And would it
surprise you if I told you that five or six years later that pastor fell from
grace? Money, sex and power were all allegedly involved.

So the world has a problem with the lust for power. And so
does the Church. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so shocked to read Mark 10 and find
James and John wanting the places of glory in the kingdom of God.
You might think they’d got the message about things being different in the
kingdom of God, given that we have just had the incident with the rich young
ruler (10:17-31) and Jesus has then warned them again about his own impending
rejection and suffering (10:32-34).

So we may well read the story and be horrified. But we are
reading back in retrospect, with a bigger picture of who Jesus is. We are also
reading it with blind spots, because it’s about the darkness in our hearts,
too.

Take me, for example. The other day I visited a lady who
asked me at the end of the conversation whether I preferred to be addressed as
‘reverend’, ‘minister’ or something else. ‘Try David,’ I said. (Well, Dave,
really, but I thought that would be too much for her.) And that is what I
believe. I don’t like titles. But I have to admit that when I fill in a form
and it asks for my title, I get a bit grumpy if ‘Reverend’ isn’t an option. I’d
like to tell you it’s just about our world not recognising the religious
dimension, but I fear my thoughts are less worthy than that.

And therefore this story is one to probe our own
hypocrisies. Where are we more interested in status, power and authority? Is
there some part of us that is a little too keen to have people look up to us
and admire us, rather than getting on with being Christlike? And what would
Jesus say to us?

2. Service
Jesus sees things quite differently. In fact implicitly he
points up the hypocrisy of his disciples. ‘You know that among the Gentiles
those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great
ones are tyrants over them,’ he tells them in verse 42. In other words, look,
you don’t like what you see of these other rulers. You see them and what their
desire for status and power does to them. They become the kind of people you
despise. Don’t you see that if you have your own way, this is how you would end
up? You will become the kind of person you hate.

And, he says, I don’t want you to become like that. You need
to take an alternative route. ‘But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes
to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first
among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to
serve,’ he tells them (verses 43-45a).

The call is to be a servant, or slave. The word ‘minister’
means ‘servant’, and one explanation for the origin of the clerical collar is
that it mimicked the collar worn by slaves – painfully ironic as we prepare to
mark next year the bicentenary of the
abolition of slavery in Britain and continue to campaign against people-trafficking.
And of course if the minister is a servant, we are all servants, according to
Jesus here. So if we are going to wear ‘dog collars’, either every Christian
should wear them or no-one should!

And this has as much application to politics as it does to
Church. I have observed before that is ‘minister’ means ‘servant’ then ‘Prime
Minister’ means ‘first servant’ – something worth bearing in mind when the next
General Election happens. For as well as assessing the policies put before us,
Christians might well want to ask an even more difficult question: which party
leader looks most likely to act as a servant?

But it’s not just the politicians or the church leaders,
it’s all of us. The call to serve comes from Jesus without discrimination. It
is what he came to do. It is what he calls us all to do. Our daily prayer needs
to be, ‘Lord, who can I bless in your name today? Where and how can I serve
you, and serve you by serving others?’

At one level that’s quite an easy prayer to say. But there
is a test for it. Someone has observed that the test of a true servant is how
they behave when they are treated like one. Many of us long to do heroic, even
sacrificial things for the kingdom
of God. But what if we
were to do them and receive no recognition? We’d like even our humble good works
to be noted. We want to be appreciated. But what if we aren’t? Jesus calls us
to serve without regard for things like that. It is noted and appreciated in
heaven. Recognition will come from the Father. But that may not be something we
experience here and now. Do we really want to serve, or do we have a darker
motive – one that would even manipulate acts of service into an inflation of
our personal status?

3. Suffering
The other day I learned that at an ecumenical Remembrance
Sunday service this year I have to preach on John 15:13, ‘No one has greater
love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ I know it’s the
traditional text, but I was uncomfortable. Surely that text is about Jesus’
sacrificial death, not about general human willingness to suffer? Don’t we make
‘the fallen’ of our wars virtually on a par with Jesus by using this text?

And that leads me into the last part of what Jesus says as a
corrective to the lust for status. ‘For the Son of Man came not to be served
but to serve … and to give his life a
ransom for many.’ (verse 45, my emphasis)

We just get further and further away from the lust for
status. Not only are we called to be servants as the sign of true greatness and
trustworthy leadership in the kingdom
of God, Jesus goes beyond
that – from service to suffering. Not only did he come to serve, he came to
give his life.

And before he tells this to all the disciples, he confronts
James and John with this. ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to
drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized
with?’ he asks them (verse 38). Although they answer that they can, Jesus’
question really expects the answer, ‘No’. For sharing someone’s cup was to
share their suffering and in the Old Testament it was to do with God’s judgment
upon sin. And the image of baptism may not just be about being submerged in
suffering but refer back to his baptism by his cousin John where he identified
with human repentance. Put these two images of the cup and baptism together,
then, and it seems as if Jesus is saying to James and John, ‘Can you suffer for
human sin as I am going to?’ No wonder he thinks their answer should be ‘No’. [William
Lane, The Gospel Of Mark, pp 379-381.]

So there is a suffering that Jesus, who is entitled more
than any other human being to pull rank and claim status, will go through. He
will suffer for human sin. He will do so as a ‘ransom’ (verse 45) – in some
sense his suffering ‘pays’ to release others (although it’s dangerous to push
this image too far). He is a ‘substitute’, then (again, we shouldn’t push the
image too much), dying in place of others to set them free. Only Jesus, truly
God and truly human, can do this.

So was I right to be nervous about the Remembrance Sunday
text? I think I was.

But while Jesus suffers in a unique way for the sins of the
world, there is still a way in which we, his disciples, suffer too. For
although Jesus expects James and John to admit they can’t suffer for the sins
of the world he still tells them they will drink his cup and be baptised like
him (verse 39). Jesus is saying to them, you think that by following me you
will get to share in my status and glory. Don’t even think about that. If you
follow me, remember what I said not long ago to you: that if you want to be my
disciple, you need to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me (8:34).

And it remains the call of Jesus’ disciples today. If we
follow him it is just as likely that the world will take the same dislike to us
as it took to him. To seek to live a pure, self-controlled life in a world
given up to its lusts is a prophetic statement. So too is to question a
consumer society that values people by the amount of money or possessions they
have. Sometimes prophets like Mother Teresa get Nobel Prizes in our world;
sometimes prophets like Martin Luther King and Dietrich Bonhoeffer get killed
for their troubles.

Yet we follow the Son of Man who took on human flesh in
great humility, the Messiah who died for our sins. We serve the Son of God who
conquered death in the resurrection, and who gives his Spirit without measure
from the right hand of the Father. It’s about being absolutely captivated by
this Jesus. And when we are, we give up status, we learn to serve and we risk
suffering for his name out of sheer love and devotion. We willingly make
sacrifices for ordinary mortals whom we love. How much more for our Lord?

And when we do that, we have the assurance that although
following Jesus may cost us as it cost him, it comes with the same rewards and
vindication. For his resurrection will be our resurrection. No status in the
world can buy that.

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