FINDINGS VI By Harry T. Cook
 
Proper 24 - B - October 18, 2015
Mark 10: 32-45
(Isaiah 53: 4-12; Psalm 91: 9-16; Hebrews 5: 1-10)
    
 
Harry T. Cook


By Harry T. Cook

10/12/15


As anyone who is serious about and devoted to a job, or a relationship, or the attaining of a goal can tell you, focus is everything; and focus on the right thing needs to be of laser-beam intensity. Major league players call it "keeping your eye on the ball."  When focus is lost and purpose becomes vague whatever is underway gets bogs down in confusion and eventual failure.
 
When you read Mark 10: 35-45, you are seeing that process playing out. The apostolic company is on its way to Jerusalem where push will very quickly come to shove, and when and where it will be necessary to keep one's wits about him and his eyes fixed on the mission. For Mark that mission is to break down the barriers set up by entrenched religious and social establishments of which people -- especially the disadvantaged -- should be freed.
 
How, then, can it be that two of the chosen followers got lost in a plot to aggrandize themselves? Is it possible that the institutional religions that have grown, sometimes very weirdly, out of the apostolic age have too often succumbed to the same passions, that they have taken their eye off the ball, so to speak, and have ended up perverting the mission?

On the road again (10:32). Thus does Mark ratchet up the tension. The apostolic company is literally "going up to Jerusalem," Jesus walking ahead as did the typical revered teacher with disciples following obediently behind. If 10:32b (just previous to where today's gospel picks up), the group was divided in two: the first "amazed" and the second "afraid." The amazement was apparently over what is depicted (the first becoming last) in 10:31. The fear was over the predictable fall-out from the same event. Jesus has been depicted as challenging society's treatment of women, its disregard for children (or the uninitiated) and its fixation on wealth at the expense of redeeming the poor. The disciples' amazement was on target, and their fear well-placed. And that leads to another passion prediction in 10:32-34 just prior to where we pick up in the passage at hand.
 
Why at this juncture the narrative places the inappropriate representations of the Zebedee brothers (in Matthew's parallel at 20:20ff, it is carried off by Mother Zebedee) is unclear. The concern seems to be for a future beyond any time of testing, of which the disciples' mixed feelings of amazement and fear are a foreboding: "Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left in your glory" (
δοζη from δοζα, meaning something like "reputation or public estimation)" is fully realized." In Homeric Greek δοζα means "expectation." However, we usually see δοζα translated as "glory," perhaps because the evangelists' intent was to make sure Jesus' was a good δοζα.
 
What, then, the Zebedee brothers wanted was to share prominently in what they may have assumed was going to be the public vindication of Jesus' challenge of the religious and social status quo, prompted Jesus' sharp retort: "You don't know what you're asking!" (10:38) Jesus goes on: "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?" The word "cup" here may be a synonym for suffering. The use of the present tense suggests that Mark imagined Jesus thinking that his time of suffering had already begun, what with the entrance upon Jerusalem but half a chapter hence. "Baptism" may be more along the lines of Psalm 69:3: "I have come into deep waters, and the torrent washes over me." (Matthew's version of this -- probably borrowed in the first place from Mark -- omits any reference to baptism. Interesting to note.)
 
My reading is that the Brothers Zebedee did not get it. They were still with
δοξα. Jesus had moved on to the cup and the baptism. Yet, they are depicted as saying they were able, i.e. "We have what it takes." But they may still not get it. Jesus is made to tell them with a certainty born of his own sense of what is coming and has, indeed, already begun: "You will drink of that cup; and you will be baptized, but it is not mine to promise any reward. It is for those for whom it has been prepared." Is this a double entendre? Is what "has been prepared" a one-way trip up to Calvary?
 
With 10: 41-45 we may be getting a glimpse into the early history of what became Christianity as competition and jealousy manifest themselves. It will not be the last time that supposed followers of Jesus will miss the point and substitute individual aggrandizement for concern for others, thus rendering the community dysfunctional and the point missed. See the irony in 10:42 about how the supposed rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. Again, not the point.
 
The ending of this passage is its principal theme: that servanthood is leadership to the point of self-immolation for the sake of others, or as the text puts it
λύτον άντί πολλων a ransom for many. Λύτρον comes from the verb λυτρόω meaning "to release on payment of ransom." The Hebrew cognate appears at Exodus 21:30 where it is used of slaves and at Leviticus 19:20 where it is used of captives.
 
The servant song from Isaiah 52 and 53 and the Hebrews reading are appropriate accompaniments to the Markan passage as both make mention of intentional sacrifice on behalf of others. Isaiah: "Surely the servant has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases . . . he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities." Taking this verse too literally as a prophecy of the crucifixion of Jesus and its interpretation as a Yom Kippur kind of atonement is, of course, a mistake. The point is to see it as of a piece with the "greater love hath no one" kind of disposition -- exactly the opposite of what the Zebedee brothers are depicted as seeking for themselves.

It has taken me nearly half a century to see how badly institutional Christianity has garbled its message. It has kept on talking about sacrifice and servanthood, yet undermining itself at almost every turn. The Quakers seem to have understood. Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood. Many who have responded to the monastic vocation seem to have seen the light. Much of the rest of the Christian establishment has distorted the picture by the terms of its very existence and institutional behavior.
 
Every time I see a photograph of a a cardinal or a bishop arrayed in the vestments of his (and even sometimes "her") supposed authority or the TV image of a strutting evangelist haranguing his arena-sized congregation about sin, I can see how the Zebedee brothers' panting for preferment and prominence came to characterize the church.
 
The church largely communicates by way of edict, encyclical, pronouncement and judgment. Perhaps at the local level it suffers what looks like discussion but is really a sop to those who wish, usually in vain, to question and explore.
 
I am a retired priest of a church structure in which the clergy have a whole lot of say, and generally say a lot. A bishop cannot be elected without the votes of a majority of the clergy, even though the lay order vastly outnumbers the clergy order in any diocese. The bishops have their own legislative chamber in meetings of national synods, and no church policy can be made without their consent. More and more bishops function like CEOs and demand due deference.
 
That kind of attitude tends to seep downward to parish clergy for many of whom authority and power is everything to the exercise of their ministry. Canon law is written in such a way as to preserve the powers of the incumbent pastor against intrusion by an uppity laity, though clergy occasionally overplay their hands and get taken down for their trouble.
 
The debates that go on in the ecclesiastical stratosphere about this rubric and that canonical provision are laughable for their irrelevance while hunger and homelessness, poverty and destitution stalk the natural constituency of the Jesus one often sees depicted in the gospels -- especially perhaps in the Gospel according to Mark in which he is credited as saying, "Whoever wishes to be great among you must become your servant."
 
"Servant" does not mean the nice man in decorative livery proffering the engraved menu at a four-star restaurant, nor yet the uniformed maid placing chocolates upon the turned-down the king-sized bed in the suite upstairs. It means the poor wretch bearing the basin of murky water who kneels before you to wash the street filth from your feet.
 
 

Copyright 2015 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

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