Redefining Our Terms

Redefining Our Terms

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 18, 2015

Scripture: Mark 10:35-45

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes wish that Jesus weren’t so complicated. I mean, he brings us God’s grace. He demonstrates to us God’s love. He shows us that God is with us no matter what, forgiving, holding, sustaining, comforting, and inspiring us. He truly does all that, and all that is very, very good. Thanks be to God! I suspect that the reason we say we love him is precisely because he does all of those divine things for us, and indeed we should love him because he does those divine things for us. Jesus wouldn’t be so complicated if those things were all he did for us, if those things were all he was about; but see, those things are not all that he is about. Maybe we wish they were. Maybe we would like it better if all Jesus did was save us, whatever we may mean by being saved. Since about the fourth century CE the Christian tradition has pretty well reduced Jesus to just being our Savior. I don’t mean that he isn’t our Savior. He is. Thanks be to God! We have a big problem, however, when we try to reduce Jesus to that role. That big problem is the Gospels of the New Testament, especially the first three of them, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. See, in those Gospels especially Jesus does a lot more than bring us God’s grace, although of course he does that too. It’s that “a lot more” that I want to spend some time on this morning.

We get a good exposure to Jesus’ “a lot more” in our reading this morning from Mark. That reading begins with two of Jesus’ inner circle of Disciples, James and John, the sons of Zebedee, asking something of Jesus. They say to him “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” Now, I’d think anybody was a fool who would immediately grant a request like that without knowing what the two were going to ask, and Jesus doesn’t quite do that. He asks them what they want them to do. They ask Jesus to give them the two places of greatest honor in Christ’s “glory,” that is I suppose, when he has ascended to heaven as ruler of the universe. Jesus never says no to them very directly, but he doesn’t grant their request either. He suggests that James and John won’t be able to bear the pain and death that must come before Jesus enters his glory, and he says that the positions they ask for aren’t his to grant, saying something obscure about those positions belonging “to those for whom they have been prepared,” whoever they are.

Then we get to the part of our reading that really is about Jesus’ more. He says to all of his Disciples “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” I imagine Jesus’ Disciples at first reacted to these words much the way I do, which is I’m guessing the way many of you do. Say what? You say to be great be a servant, but servants aren’t great! Servants are lowly. Servants serve other people, which makes them subordinate to the people they serve. That’s not being great, it’s being servile. You say whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. Sorry Jesus. That doesn’t make a lick of sense. Slaves aren’t first, they’re last. They’re the lowliest of the servants. They aren’t even free people. It simply isn’t possible to lower than a slave. And you say that to be first be a slave? No sale, Jesus. You’re talking nonsense. Can’t you imagine Jesus’ listeners reacting that way? I can. Don’t you pretty much react that way yourselves? I do. Yet there it is. Jesus, whom we call Lord and Savior, says to be great be a servant and to be first be a slave.

This isn’t the first time Jesus has said something like this, and it isn’t the last time he will say something like this. A couple of weeks ago there was the passage in the lectionary readings from Mark 8 where Jesus says “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.” Mark 8:35 Sounds like more nonsense, doesn’t it? Lose your life by saving it and save your life by losing it? Nonsense! And Jesus is always spouting things that sound to us like nonsense. He says the Messiah must suffer, die, and rise again. That’s very un-Messiah-like behavior, or at least the suffering and dying part is. Love your enemies, he says; and the world response Nonsense! What’s the point of loving people who hate us? The last will be first and the first will be last, he says. Matthew 20:16 Say what? The last aren’t first, they’re last. The first aren’t last, they’re first. That’s why we call them the last and the first. Pure nonsense, we think. Lots of other examples of Jesus spouting apparent nonsense could easily be cited. Christians have thought for so long that so much of what Jesus says in the Gospels is pure nonsense that we’ve pretty much just ignored Jesus’ nonsense and pretend that he never said it.

We pretend that he never said it, but here’s the thing: He did say it. Maybe we wish he hadn’t. Maybe we wish we didn’t have to deal with the reality of his having said it; but he did say it, and we do have to deal with it. Here’s what we have to deal with. Time and again Jesus took what the world takes as wisdom the turned it completely upside down. He took what the world takes as common sense and stood it on its head. Jesus did nothing so much as redefine most of our terms. He took what the world means by words and gave them an entirely new meaning, a meaning that often is the polar opposite of what the world takes those words to mean.

We see him doing that in our passage from Mark this morning. In that passage he redefines the term great. We think great means superior, over and above others, exalted, maybe even worshipped. Dictionaries often use words like above in their definitions of the word great. Great means better than. Great can even mean a lot better than. When we apply it to rulers, like when we talk about Peter the Great or Alexander the Great, we mean powerful and aggressive, someone who accomplished extraordinary things, usually by means of force. And along comes Jesus and says Nope. Great doesn’t mean any of that. Great means be a servant of others. Great means take the lower place not the higher one in the social hierarchy. 

He does the same thing with the concept of being first. We think being first means winning. It means beating out others for some desired prize. It means defeating others. It means getting the job lots of people wanted. It means winning the race or the game or the election. It means exerting yourself over others. And along comes Jesus and says Nope. None of that is what being first is. To be first become a slave. Become so lowly that you have no freedom but must always be at the beck and call of another, of someone who has total control over your life. In both cases Jesus has completely redefined our words. Great doesn’t mean what we think it means. First doesn’t mean what we think it means. For Jesus, which of course means for God, those words actually mean pretty much the opposite of what we think they mean.

That’s how it is with Jesus and with God. Divine wisdom is radically different from worldly wisdom. We all have been formed by the worldly wisdom of the cultures in which we grew up. It cannot be otherwise with us humans. We are social creatures, and as we grow up and develop we take the ways and the wisdom of our culture into our very being. We must assume that the same thing happened with Jesus, since while also being God Incarnate he was as fully human as we are. But he overcame the limitations of his human culture, and of ours. He grew in divine wisdom not worldly wisdom, and he proclaimed that very different wisdom to his world and to ours. It’s easy to ignore and forget about Jesus’ statements of otherworldly wisdom, but when we do we diminish him and the gift that he is to us from God.

Now, it won’t surprise me is some of you take what I’ve said about Jesus so far as bad news not good news. After all, we all have our conventional wisdom. We all have our learned ways of thinking and our prejudices. We all think we know what great means, and we all think we know what it means to be first. Most of us probably think it’s perfectly appropriate to hate our enemies, and most of us probably think that it’s the wealthy and powerful who are blessed not the poor and the meek. Jesus’ audience knew all of those things too. In that they weren’t so different from us. Jesus knew that they knew those things, and he was powerful in denying them and putting out a very different view of reality. Many in his audience didn’t like it. We probably don’t either, but there it is. That’s what he did. I don’t think you can read the Gospels with any kind of open mind and not reach that conclusion.

We may not like the way Jesus stood the world on its head, but whether we like it or not there are powerful lessons in the way Jesus took on and reversed the wisdom of the world. It’s not just that we are to take the specifics of what he said seriously, although we are. I think there’s a broader lesson here too. See, Jesus didn’t and couldn’t have addressed every situation in which the ways of the world are a hindrance to the kingdom of God. He couldn’t do it even for his day. He couldn’t possibly do it for ours. So the broader lesson that he teaches us is that whenever we have a conventional way of thinking about anything we need to stop and ask: Would Jesus accept that way of thinking, or would he stand it on its head? Whenever we repeat a cultural prejudice we need to stop and ask: Would Jesus accept that prejudice, or would he tell us to knock it off?

It’s not always easy to answer those questions. Some of the moral issues we deal with just weren’t issues in Jesus day—environmentalism for example—so we get no direct guidance from him on them. We get no direct guidance, but we get really good indirect guidance. Jesus is always telling us to ask: Is something we think or do grounded in love? Is it grounded in love of God, ourselves, and others? All others by the way, not just others we like. If we can truly answer those questions yes, then we’re on solid moral ground. But if we can’t, Jesus calls us to reform our thinking. To turn it on its head the way he turned conventional wisdom on its head. That’s often very hard for us to do, and it probably doesn’t sound like good news. Yet what doing it does is bring us closer to God and God’s ways, and being closer to God is always good news. It’s not that God rejects us when we reject God, but fulfillment and wholeness of life come from living as God wants us to live. How God wants us to live is rarely how the world wants us to live. So let’s be careful, shall we? Is our thinking kingdom thinking? Is our living kingdom living? Never perfectly of course. Perfection is beyond us, but improvement isn’t. Can we listen? Can we respond? May it be so. Amen.