The Power of the Powerless

Proper 20/18th after Pentecost; Mark 9:30-37

For the next five weeks we read continuously through Mark’s account of the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem. We have skipped a few sections since last week however, notably the Transfiguration story, omitted here because it had been read at the end of the Epiphany-themed Sundays before Lent. Coming between the first two versions of Jesus' prediction of his fate, that story of glory helps illustrate and validate what Jesus meant in speaking of the work of the “Human One” (Mark 8:31 and 38) who heralds God’s intervention in human history.

Now Jesus and the disciples are on the road to Jerusalem; they have made their way back from Tyre and Caesarea, and travelled secretly through Galilee— but they are in transit, not here to minister to the people as before. Mark links the secrecy with the fact of Jesus teaching the disciples about his fate (v. 31). This is rather different, as Adela Collins points out, from the earlier motif of secrecy in this Gospel, where Jesus does not want his power proclaimed after spectacular healings or exorcisms; now it is the nature of his messianic identity that has itself become the secret.¹

This version of Jesus’ prediction of coming events is briefer, but resembles that earlier version read last week and to which Peter had responded so mistakenly. Again it is “the Human One (Son of Man)” of whom the prediction is made, not Jesus by name; Jesus’ identity is bound up with that apocalyptic vision of a divine end to history. The disciples’ reaction is once again important, characteristic, and basically hopeless: “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him” (v. 32). So this time they have learned not to protest, but are no closer to understanding.

They now all find themselves back in Capernaum, home base for Jesus’ Galilean ministry. It turns out that they had been having another conversation en route though. “Not understanding” didn’t just meant incomprehension of Jesus’ prediction, it meant preoccupation with something else. When Jesus asks what they had been talking about “on the way,” it was an argument about their own greatness. This may be related to the fact of Jerusalem as the goal of the journey, and the continuing fantasy of a grand messianic victory. Notice that they actually remain silent when he interrogates them, though; Jesus’ awareness comes not from their admission but his own observation, we assume. In any case this topic serves not as a mere sign of their obtuseness in general, but a specific piece of evidence for what not understanding Jesus’ secretive teaching about his fate meant.

Jesus then famously teaches them about the characteristics of the reign of God. The fact that he teaches in response to their inadequacy—and he will keep teaching all the way to Jerusalem—illustrates an important double theme in this Gospel: the disciples are reliably uncomprehending, and Jesus never ceases to express his commitment to them.

While this may seem something of a shift from the topic of his own fate, Jesus’ teaching is closely related to it. Just as his prediction is not merely offered to show off his aptitude for prophecy, but an account of how God must work in the world, this exchange also sketches how things must work in a world where the love of God is made known paradoxically in sharing in the whole of human experience.

Great Palace Mosaic Museum, Istanbul.. Wikimedia Commons

Jesus’ response has led to a certain amount of scholarly befuddlement. The first part is clear enough: “"If any one would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all” (v. 35). The thread becomes a bit harder to follow after this. Jesus places a child in the midst of them and urges not the child as model or example as we might have expected, but the need to receive or welcome a child, and thus to receive him. The ready jump from servanthood to childhood may owe something to how the same word could be used for both a servant and a child in Aramaic (and in Greek).

Morna Hooker and others point out the parallel (and difference) with a passage in chapter 10, where people bring children to Jesus, and where the punchline is “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (10:15), which would actually have been a more logical lesson to draw from this earlier story. So here in chapter 9 Jesus seems to be teaching the disciples about humility, but then finishes with an exhortation to receive the humble (children); in chapter 10 he exhorts them to receive the humble (children), but ends with a call to be humble. It is as though the punchlines from the two episodes have been swapped.

Matthew may have had the same thought when using Mark as a source. Vincent Taylor points out that “in 18:3 [Matthew’s version of today’s Gospel] Matthew supplies a saying far more appropriate to the Markan narrative than Mark 9:37.”² That is, Matthew does closes this episode with is “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”— rather like Mark 10:15. It is as though Matthew saw what the modern commentators do, and moved the sayings around, or else had received another version of the sayings tradition with the more logical flow.

This does not mean Mark has made some sort of error; in fact the oddity may be a deliberate effort to underline a point. The more logical or expected version, the exhortation to humility with the child as example following, could be too easy a way out of the hole that the disciples have dug for themselves. It is, after all, not that hard to hear an exhortation to humility and then grimace and try to (as that unfortunate phrase puts it) “do better.” Yet this earnest commitment would then still be about us, which is the disciples’ problem. And the history of the Church is littered with people earnestly harnessing the language of humility and servanthood to bandwagons of power and privilege.

The example of the child as one who has to be received concretely, not merely treated as a metaphor or model, involves less wiggle-room. The disciples have been arguing about who is the greatest, but as Hooker says “instead of worrying about their own positions, they should be concerned for the weakest and most humble member of the community…”³ It is not just that they have the wrong idea about themselves; they are just too worried about themselves altogether.

The great ones of the world, those who exercise power for its own sake, are not the friends of God. Those who are poor, vulnerable, and weak are the ones who know God’s favor and will guide the disciples to understand where God’s presence in the world—and hence true greatness—is to be found. And as Jesus himself says, the presence of one is the presence of the other: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (v. 37). In their midst already is the one whose mysterious and off-putting predictions of his own future are not merely a sobering glance forward to coming events, but a way of describing the order of the world. The child, not the king, is the one who reveals how God sees that order, and Jesus invites us to receive the powerless as an anticipation of the reign of the Human One.

1. Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007, p.440.

2. Vincent Taylor, The Gospel According to St.Mark: The Greek Text with Introduction, Notes, and Indexes. London: Macmillan, 1959, p. 404

3. Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to Saint Mark. London: A. & C. Black, 1991, p. 228