Homily October 20, 2024 Holy Wisdom Monastery
Pam Shellberg Isaiah 53:4-12; Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45
Chapters 8, 9, and 10 of Mark’s gospel are its centerpiece containing three episodes in which Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to be arrested, tried, tortured, put to death, and then, after three days, will rise. Jesus makes three predictions of his passion, the repetition alerting us to its ultimate significance.
We’ve heard two of the passion predictions read in recent Sunday gospel readings, but the verses containing the third and final one were not included at the end of last week’s gospel which they immediately followed, nor at the beginning of this week’s gospel which they immediately precede. For some reason, the lectionary cycle omits Jesus’ third passion prediction, even though it provides the context in which we really must hear today’s gospel. Fortunately, we had the prophecy of Isaiah to keep the echo of Good Friday in our ears.
The disciples didn’t respond well to any of Jesus’ passion predictions. Peter vehemently rebuked him for saying such an outrageous thing. Other disciples argued about who was the greatest among them. Today, following the third prediction, James and John really ramp it up, asking Jesus directly for the privilege of sitting right and left of him in his glory.
I wonder about the disciples’ reactions – how they reject the passion predictions with almost panic-stricken claims to greatness or to be first among the others, frantic to be assured of the best seats in Jesus’ glory. When Jesus asks them, “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?” – the very cup that Jesus himself prays that God will take from him in the Garden of Gethsemane, I wonder if the disciples just might – not to put too sharp a point on it – succumb to a fear of annihilation. Isn’t that the cup Jesus drinks? The disciples, at the very edge of the abyss their fidelity to Jesus demands – and having no imagination for what it might mean to rise after three days – grasp for anything to secure their legacies, their status before others, a privileged place in memory.
I can appreciate the disciples’ rejection of Jesus’ predictions of his passion, can appreciate how the demand to also lose my life – whether it be my actual annihilation as a living organism, or the death of my egoistic self, or the surrender of claims I might make to any earned status, power, or privilege – well, it feels like a bridge too far. Can you drink the cup that I drink? I am not always sure how to answer Jesus’ question.
And I have wrestled with it over the past couple of decades. The arc of my vocational life has become more ambiguous – not as clearly defined as when I wore academic regalia and created courses, syllabi, and lectures.
The arc of my physical life has become more limited, my capacities diminished, my strength has waned a little bit, my memory is not as sharp.
The arc of my family life has required more sacrifice, placed its own limits, narrowed the field of possibilities for how I will spend my days.
I don’t think I’ve asked to sit at Jesus’ right or left hand, but I confess I have longed to know that a mark has been made. I have grieved the loss of things that gave form, shape, some kind of visible gravitas to my presence in this life.
The disciples repeatedly missed Jesus’ intention in the question. They repeatedly reached for the wrong thing. And I know that I have, too.
Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things … those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.
Jesus said to the quarreling disciples, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
And today, Jesus says to the sons of Zebedee, “You know that among the Gentiles those who exercise authority are domineering and arrogant; those ‘great ones’ know how to make their own importance felt. But it cannot be like that with you. Anyone among you who aspires to greatness must serve the rest; whoever wants to rank first among you must serve the needs of all.”
On the one hand, what is being asked is not an easy thing. The instruction to be servant or slave, to be last not first, to be self-sacrificing, seems kind of a slippery slope today – all things I have actually been taught to resist when it comes to taking care of my mental health. Self-care and boundaries are the practices necessary to ward off codependency, being exploited or becoming exhausted, sacrificing some essential part of myself to the consuming work of servant roles I have with others.
In the first century “servant” and “slave” presented strong contrasts to those domineering and arrogant gentiles who knew how to make their importance felt; “servant” and “slave” captured the radically counter-cultural character of the ministry of Jesus and the ethos of the community of God. But it seems to me that what Jesus is actually pointing to is the practice of, the disposition of humility.
Humility – to know and accept our small place in the universe, to know that we are utterly dependent on God for anything and everything we might be or do. Humility – the commitment to seek and to do the will of God; as Benedict said, “that we love not our own will nor take pleasure in the satisfaction of our desires.”
Paul wrote how Jesus humbled himself and became obedient unto death, voluntarily relinquishing claims to the power, status, and privilege that were legitimately his to claim. Paul asks us to put on this mind of Christ, the mind of the Christ who said, when James and John asked to sit with him in glory, that it was not his to grant.
Joan Chittister wrote that humility is accepting our essential smallness and embracing it so that we might be freed from the need to lie, even to ourselves, about our frailties. But even more, she said, humility “liberates us to respect, revere, and deal gently with others who have been unfortunate enough to have their own smallnesses come obscenely to light.”
Displayed in the community art fair this summer was a beautiful photograph by Sandy Wojtal-Weber of a stone laying on sand, with traces of rivulets spreading out from one side where you can imagine maybe water had flowed underneath it. The photograph was paired with a haiku written by David McKee which said – “Stones and I becoming sand, how the years true us.”
This piece of art was profoundly clarifying for me. Aging of course does true us – eroding what seemed so solid about us in earlier days – our edges fray, our boundaries become porous, some capacities and possibilities are lost. But in the return to sand, to those tiny little granules, we are made most true. We dissolve into the only thing that matters – the only that ever mattered in any of our external manifestations – and that is love.
In the Tao Te Ching it is written, “Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.”
This is the cup Jesus asks if we can drink. His command to serve others is an invitation to practice humility, to relinquish claims to what confers status, power, and privilege. The practice of humility liberates us from our attachments to the mere manifestations of our desires and dreams. Humility trues us, makes a way for love, makes a way for us to realize the mystery – makes a way for us to imagine how on the third day we rise.