Job 38:1-7, 34-41, Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b, Hebrews 5:1-10, Mark 10:35-45
I think the take-home message from this Gospel lesson is fairly straight-forward: if you want to be great in the Kingdom of God, be a servant; if you want to be first, be a slave. How far can we take this, beyond our individual persons?
Can we say that if we want to make America great again, America should be the servant of other nations? If we say “America first,” then we should be the voluntary slaves of other peoples? Or if we want Old First church to be a great church, then must we be a servant church? If we want Old First to be truly first, should we be Old Slave church? No one’s going to argue with Jesus, but how far do we take it? How general is what he says, how total?
The point about servanthood and slavery is not groveling, nor is it even humility. It’s rather to substitute the interests of whomever you are serving against your own self-interest. You give up your freedom, and you say, “Your wish is my command.” An effective servant has some power and authority and discretion and strength, but never for the servant’s own purposes, only for whatever suits the master. As for yourself, you put yourself last in line for anything. So dare I say, “America Last?”
How is what the Lord Jesus says here law and how is it gospel? It is law because it’s more than just good advice, it’s a ruling, it’s policy. And yet Our Lord was not in the business of issuing a new set of laws and requirements. His only laws are the long-standing laws of love, of loving God above all and your neighbor as yourself. And to love your neighbors that way is effectively to make yourself their servant, and not for the sake of any possible payback but in order to love God thereby.
It is gospel because, paradoxically, it means all kinds of freedom. The freedom from the need to be first. The freedom from competition, from jockeying for position, from scheming, from fighting to keep your place, freedom from offense and defense, freedom from politicking, and even freedom from needing to defend your honor. Not to be dishonorable, but always actively honorable, so it means candor for yourself, and it means you believing other people. It can be scary to follow the Lord Jesus here, precisely because it’s freedom. The gospel is more challenging than the law!
It is gospel because it also means you don’t have to fight for God or defend the cause of God. That’s a challenge if you have sacrificed your time and money to the church or to Christian institutions, or if you recognize the evident benefits of Christian civilization. You want to protect them and preserve them! But that is not for us to do. We are called instead to put our churches and Christian institutions and even our Christian civilization completely into the role of servanthood, and counting as last in line all that we have worked for and achieved. Last in line.
It also means the freedom for radical hospitality, to offer a space of unconditional welcome. And that is our part in the resistance. Beyond what you do as individuals, our church’s proper contribution to the resistance is this, to maintain the message and practice of this voluntary servitude and vulnerable hospitality. This is joyful resistance against the corruption of the Christian message by so many of its false prophets today, and the co-option of it by the politicians, who have been doing this since the Roman Emperor Constantine, and which the church must ever resist.
This doesn’t mean that God is not first, or great, or that God is weak. We may think so when God does not protect our Christian institutions or defend Godself. So I want you to notice our first lesson, from Job, in which Job finally gets the audience with God that Job had been contending for. Job, in his suffering, had been calling on God to answer and defend Godself, and now finally God answers, but not to defend Godself. For example, God doesn’t pin the suffering of Job on Satan, nor does God explain the wager with Satan, or bother to say, “And see, I was right to bet on you, you held up after all.” No, God does not defend Godself for any of what happened to Job.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” In this speech God puts Godself on the far side of the boundary of our knowable world. We humans are bounded within the observable universe and inside the limits of the knowable creation, we are servants of the laws of nature and slaves to cause and effect, whereas God is outside of all of that and free of all of that, so how can we judge God? On what grounds can we hold God accountable? By which of our rules can we bind God? The God of the Bible never defends Godself, and never seeks to prove God’s own existence.
Now let me move you abruptly, for here is the heart of the gospel, that God has crossed that boundary into the bondage of our limitations and our weakness in the person of Jesus Christ. In a real human being God submitted to the laws of nature and the suffering of Job. In Jesus the Jew, who was as innocent as Job, God became a slave to the laws of Rome. The Epistle to the Hebrews says, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears.” Loud groans and weeping. He drank deeply from our cup of misery, he was overwhelmed by the flood of of human sorrow. That was the cup he drank, that was the baptism he was baptized with.
In the gospel lesson, James and John didn’t know what they were asking when they asked to share his glory on his right hand and his left. When they answered his question by saying they could drink from his cup and take their baths with him, they were thinking of the customs of the Romans with their famous bathhouses. It was a big deal to be invited to bathe with a high-ranking noble and then to share a cup of wine with him.
Of course this metaphor has layers. The Lord Jesus meant it for his disciples to share the cup of his doom and to share his submersion into death. The gospel writer means it also for drinking the holy communion and for being baptized into his death, that is, for us to identify with his suffering as our way to peace and to share in his death as our way to life.
And then it is also our mission as the people of the church not to be spared from the suffering of the world but to wade right into the dangerous waters of the grinding life of the world, just as God did wade right in, and to drink from the same bitter cup that other people have to drink just as Jesus drank the vinegar on the cross.
Our mission is not to defend God nor to excuse God from their suffering but to bring God into it by our own entry into it. Not that you need to suffer, though neither should you avoid it, but you be present to their suffering, to wait on people in their trials, and that is the meaning of the servanthood that Jesus calls you to—to be great in the Kingdom of God is to be willing to drink from the same cup as the most miserable person you next encounter.
In my third congregation, when I unsuccessfully advocated restoring the practice of drinking from the common cup at Holy Communion, I remember telling an elder that Jesus told us to drink from the same cup with him, and he answered, “Pastor, I would drink from the same cup with Jesus but not with you!” Are my cooties that bad? Look, I know there are limits to our best intentions, and we do not serve God as we ought, and we do not serve the least of our neighbors as we’d wish to. The summons of the Lord Jesus to risky and vulnerable servanthood is meant as gospel for us, not as a new law to condemn us. He means it not to add to our guilt but to set us free.
So every week you come back confessing your faith and then your falling short, and then you are once again absolved by God and offered the peace of Christ, and then you who have betrayed him are once again invited to share his cup and break the bread. You remember and celebrate that no matter how often you fall short in your servanthood, the servanthood of your Master even to the death is sufficient for the resurrection of the world. You taste in your body the sign and wonder of the overwhelming love of God for people like you.
Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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