Texts: Jeremiah 11:18-20; James 3:13-4:8a; Mark 9:30-37
Last week we had Jesus’ first prediction of his death; and of course the immediate reaction of Peter, who tried to talk him out of it. Today, we are on the same subject in our gospel reading, and our other two readings set the scene, as it were, by looking coldly and clearly at the surrounding emotional aspects of this issue.
Someone has called death the last taboo in our society. We will talk about anything, just about, except death – at least, death in a particular case. Yes, we are mortal, yes, of course, it happens to us all one day; yes, as long as we keep it all general and impersonal, then we will talk about death. Just don’t talk to me about my death, and I’ll not talk to you about yours. I may have mentioned before the training we received in the Public Trust Office when I started work as a law clerk. Our main task was to prepare wills for our clients; and on one occasion we were given an article from the US on how to discuss with a client what he or she wanted in the will without mentioning the “possibility” of the client’s death! Fortunately, in New Zealand we were not quite that silly, but it shows how difficult we find this whole subject.
So we might have some sympathy for the disciples today. St Mark tells us that Jesus drew his disciples together and told them what was going to happen to him fairly shortly. This may be a second time on which Jesus warned his disciples along these lines, or St Mark may be summarising what he had recorded earlier, the passage we had last week. In essence, Jesus tells his disciples that he will be put to death, and after three days he will be raised to life again.
Then St Mark says this: They did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it. There are really two statements there; first, they didn’t understand what Jesus was talking about. Well, let’s look at that for a moment. They would have been well aware by this time that Jesus was provoking a lot of hostility among the religious elite of the day, the powerful people. So the idea that someone might be going to try to kill Jesus was surely not outside the realm of possibility. That couldn’t really be the bit the disciples didn’t understand.
But what about the bit about being raised to life again? Wouldn’t that sound a bit odd to anybody? Surely we can have some sympathy for the disciples on that score. But that leaves us with the second statement – they were afraid to ask him about it. Isn’t that a bit odd? They were his disciples, he was their teacher. How were they supposed to learn if they were not allowed to ask him any questions when they didn’t understand?
Perhaps what St Mark is hinting at is the very human fear of talking about this particular subject – about Jesus’ own death. After all, Peter tried to rubbish the whole idea and got severely scolded for his trouble. So if we are not allowed to deny the reality of Jesus’ death – what can we say about it? Maybe that is what is going on here for the disciples. Suppose for a moment, that Jesus had just learned that he was terminally ill, and had told the disciples about that. What would they have said in response? What is there to say in the face of a reality like that? Perhaps they just did not know what to say, and were simply afraid of making things worse.
St Marks hints at a further problem. As the narrative continues we learn that there has been some dissension among the disciples on the journey. Jesus asks them what it was all about and they are reluctant to answer because they had been arguing among themselves about which of them was the greatest. That is, they were jostling for status, trying to establish a pecking order with themselves at the top. We’re reminded of the story of James and John trying to reserve the top positions for themselves in the kingdom, and how outraged the other disciples were when they got to hear of it. Well, here they’ve all been at it, apparently, and the question is, what has prompted that? The clear inference from the text is that the prospect of Jesus’ death has prompted a struggle for power among the disciples.
Here again we have the brutal honesty of the Scriptures showing us our human nature in all its complexity. Jesus is the undisputed leader of the group, but if he is going to die, then who will be the next leader? And as soon as that perfectly natural question pops into the human mind we can be sure that a related question will pop into more than one human heart. Why not me?
Which gets us to that great student of human psychology, St James. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. That sounds pretty spot on as a commentary on the disciples, doesn’t it? And it sounds pretty spot on as a commentary on the last week in politics in New Zealand . The human heart doesn’t change very easily or very quickly. There was political intrigue against Jeremiah several hundred years before Christ, there was political intrigue against Christ, and there is political intrigue still raging today.
The question is, what to do about it; and our three readings offer three distinct approaches, which we might call the human, the ideal, and the practical. Jeremiah takes the human approach. He wants revenge. To his credit, he asks God to take vengeance on his enemies, rather than taking the law into his own hands, so to speak. But he speaks for the human instinct to fight back, insult for insult, blow for blow; and we’ve seen all too clearly in recent days that that is a recipe for disaster.
Jesus promotes the ideal. He says to his disciples that in the new society that he is building, in the kingdom of God , all thought of personal ambition and power and status must go. In the new regime, leaders serve, not rule. That is the ideal towards which we are supposed to be moving. But how do it get there?
Well, St James the pragmatist has some guidance for us here; and his starting-point again emphasises brutal honesty. He says, if you harbour bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. It’s the second part of that advice that is the difficult bit. We may be genuinely shocked at some of the thoughts that cross our minds when we learn that someone we know is dying or has died. We might find that we are thankful it was them, not us. Or we may find ourselves trying to “explain” the death in some way – not exactly blaming the person, but recognising that in some way it is understandable – they drank too much, or smoked too much, or ate too much, or drove too fast.
Or, perhaps like St Peter, we wonder why they didn’t take evasive action, why didn’t they put up more of a fight? In other words, we project onto them our own fear of death.
Like the disciples, we may prefer silence in the face of these terrible thoughts. We are ashamed of them. But, says, St James, silence is not the remedy; repentance is. We best promote harmony in place of discord when we are honest with ourselves, recognise our mixed motives, and deal with them.
Jesus often talked about dying to self; and perhaps one way of thinking about this is to think about our own mortality, to put ourselves, not perhaps on the cross, but on our own deathbed. What then would seem truly important to us? How would our perspective change if we truly accepted our own mortality? Perhaps that’s part of what Jesus means when he tells us to take up our cross daily and follow him? To live each day in the light of our own coming death?
Some will say all this is too morbid – that we can’t live like this. That truth is too awful. And, of course, it would be – if Jesus has not risen from the dead. That’s the bit the disciples didn’t understand at the time.
What a pity they were too afraid to ask him about it. After all, it’s the bit that makes all the difference in the end.
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