Dare to practise what Jesus preached – and change the world

From this and many other passages in his gospel, it’s apparent that Mark, unlike the other evangelists, is not afraid to touch raw nerves or expose uncomfortable emotions; and as Jesus and his disciples get closer and closer to Jerusalem, some very uncomfortable emotions come to the surface. Despite Jesus’ increasingly explicit predictions, the disciples fail to acknowledge, let alone understand, what is about to befall him in Jerusalem. “And”, Mark adds, ominously, “they were afraid to ask”. They still think they are headed for glory in the slipstream of an all-conquering Messiah and, judging by their conversation on the way, their chief preoccupation is, ignominiously, with precedence and prestige when Jesus is finally vindicated. Little wonder that, when he asks them what they were talking about on the way, their guilty silence speaks volumes, and their embarrassment is palpable. In fairness, what Jesus was saying to the disciples about his fate was not just personally upsetting to them as friends: it was profoundly and painfully confusing to them as pious Jews: to the Jewish mind, the very notion of a suffering Messiah was an oxymoron.

In the light of all this, Jesus tries to jolt them out of their complacency by pointing to a child as an object lesson. That lesson will be lost on us, however, if we forget that in the ancient world, children, even more than women, were ‘non-persons’. A woman’s status was primarily as her husband’s chattel: a child’s status was non-existent. So, it was not crowd-pleasing sentimentality that prompted Jesus to take a child in his arms: far from symbolising innocence or unspoiled-ness, the child represented powerlessness and insignificance; and in making this striking gesture, Jesus is rebuking his followers’ crass ambition and thirst for influence, as well as showing them why lusting after power is not only dangerous but stupid and ultimately futile.

Implicitly, then, Jesus is contrasting the ‘greatness’ his disciples crave – the kind of ‘greatness’ that hangs on the ‘blast of men’s mouths’ (St Thomas More) – with another kind of greatness or, better, dignity, altogether, a dignity that is theirs, not because they have distinguished themselves or made their mark – and certainly not because they’ve been chosen for the royal retinue of the Messiah, but because by their very existence, they (and we), like this child, no matter how disregarded, are bearers of the divine, called to share God’s life in the intimacy of friendship.

This true dignity, doesn’t distinguish them (or us) from anybody else, because it is shared with everyone else, even this powerless, insignificant child. On the contrary, it binds us to one another. The very idea that all share the same dignity would, of course, have seemed demeaning in a world which, even more than now, placed inestimable weight on status and the regard of one’s peers. But Jesus makes this identification explicit by saying: “Anyone who welcomes one of these little children in my name, welcomes me; and anyone who welcomes me, welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Perfectly complementing the gospel, the second reading from the Letter of James adds a hard-headed, pragmatic point about the dire consequences of lusting after status and influence. Craven ambition, he tells us, inexorably gives rise to envy; and in its turn, envy breeds disharmony and James adds, “all manner of wicked things”, including hypocrisy and the delusion that we are somehow better than others, givers rather than receivers of advice, adepts at telling others what they should do or not do, without a thought for what we ourselves are doing or not doing. 

As said with reference to last week’s gospel, the uncomfortable truth is that what we find most intolerable in others often turns out to be what we dislike most in ourselves. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906- 45), the young Lutheran pastor murdered by the Nazis, made the same point: “Nothing that we despise in the other…is entirely absent from ourselves….we should regard others first and foremost less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.” This gospel and the second reading recommend, then, an entirely different way of relating to one another, not just between those in and those under authority, but in all our relationships. Jesus is not merely reversing the master-servant role, he’s collapsing the distinction altogether. We are all compassionate servants of one another, not competitive rivals for power, influence and status. So, when Jesus says, “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all”, he is not recommending mere philanthropy. He’s revealing something about our very nature: namely that, made as we are in the image and likeness of God, who empties himself for our sake, the only way to fullness of life is to do the same. If we dared, even for a moment, to put this into practice, it would radically reverse most of the world’s ills, politically, socially, economically, psychologically, spiritually and not least, ecclesiastically