A sermon on Mark 10:35-45 by Nathan Nettleton

I had some difficulty in deciding what to preach tonight. A few weeks ago I mapped out this whole section of Mark’s gospel to show how he has structured it with a number of pairs of similar stories that function as frames within frames within frames to tie his points together. So tonight’s extract about James and John asking for the places of honour alongside Jesus is paired with the earlier story of the disciples squabbling over who was the greatest, and these frames, and the story at the centre, are all about Jesus completely dismantling all notions of a division between insiders and outsiders. So having done that a few weeks ago, when I came to look at tonight’s readings, I felt like I had already preached on this and so maybe I should look at one of the other readings, but no matter how much I reflected on them, I could not get any sense that there was something in them that God wanted me to preach on here tonight. It continued to be the gospel story that was beckoning me. And after a while I began to notice an aspect of the way this side of the frame works that takes it in a slightly different direction to the side we looked at a few weeks ago, and it is an aspect which I think might be helpful to us as we seek to live out our response to what Jesus is teaching.

It is, of course, very easy to read this story and jump straight to a criticism of James and John and their request for the seats of honour at the right and left of Jesus when he achieved his full glory. The framing makes their request look even worse than it might otherwise look because Jesus has just given them all a reminder that jockeying for the positions of honour is not what its all about. The first will be last and the last first, and all that. So this story does make the point again that it is very very hard for the disciples, and thus for us, to get our heads around the radical nature of what Jesus is saying. Conventional notions and practices of status and worth and honour are so deeply ingrained in our thinking and in the structures of the world we live in. How many of us have not at some stage looked around the workplace and felt some resentment over the fact that our worth seems to go unrecognised while some who are better paid or more senior than us do not deserve to be? It is difficult to imagine what it would be like to not even carry such a scale of merit in our heads.

James and John may well have had good reason to believe that their request was not unreasonable. It would seem from the gospel record that they were in fact often treated by Jesus as some kind of chosen inner sanctum. They do seem to be leaving Peter out of their request, because it is usually Peter, James and John whenever Jesus is taking just a special chosen few on some special mission, but perhaps we can forgive them that. After all, there are only the places right and left to go around, and three won’t go into two, and they’re brothers after all. So their biggest mistake was perhaps not in thinking that they might be the chosen ones, but in the kind of glory they thought Jesus was about to enter. The little band are now heading up the road to Jerusalem, and they seem to think that the time has come for Jesus to establish his seat of power and set up his throne to rule from Jerusalem. The hard work is behind them, they suppose. Now is the time for crowns and seats of honour.

Can you see the irony with which Mark develops their questions and Jesus’ answer here and then alludes back to it later?
“Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory,” they ask.
“To sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared,” Jesus replies.
And then a few chapters later Mark writes, “And with him they crucified two bandits, one on his right and one on his left.”
That’s totally deliberate. If he wasn’t trying to make the connection, the gospel writer would have just said they crucified two bandits there at the same time. The spatial arrangement of the crosses is a detail that serves no other purpose than to underline this point. You want the place of honour on the right and left of Jesus in his glory? Here they are, kept for those for whom they have been prepared.

But as easy as it is to be immediately critical of James and John here, that may be something of a trap. Isn’t that exactly what the other ten disciples do in the story? And in fact, Jesus is is not really critical of the request that James and John make. He challenges them about whether they have what it takes to live up to their request, and he says that he doesn’t have the authority to grant their request, but it is when the other ten get angry with James and John that Jesus really laws down the law. So perhaps if we are instinctively siding with the ten against James and John, then we, rather than James and John, are the intended targets of Jesus’s rebuke.

It seems that perhaps Jesus is recognising something good and worthy in the request. His challenge seems to imply that. “Have you got what it takes? Can you live up to what you are asking?” Striving to be the best, to be number one, is not in itself wrong. If Jesus is calling us to do something, there is nothing wrong with wanting to achieve the honour of doing it to the absolute best of your ability and perhaps even better than anyone else. Remember how the Apostle Paul urges us to outdo one another in love and showing honour to one another (Rom 12:10). Paul is not afraid to appeal to our competitive instincts and try to channel them in worthwhile directions, and is seems that Jesus is similarly sympathetic. Reach for the stars by all means, but if you want to be honoured above others, then make sure you are ready to put in the hard work to ensure that you deserve it. And therein often lies the trap, because while he urges us to be our best, as soon as we get caught up in a need to have it recognised and honoured, we have taken our eyes of the task and we have crossed the line into the old ways of seeing these things, the old ways of measuring honour and jockeying for positions.

So Jesus points to the major sacramental practices of the church’s worship as being constant reminders that can help keep us on track. “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptised with the baptism that I am baptised with?” he asks James and John. And the gospel writer underlines what a big challenge this is when a few pages later he lets us see Jesus on his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane pleading with his Father to release him if possible from the need to drink this cup. When we take the broken bread and drink the cup at this table, at the Lord’s Table, it is no small thing. Jesus was terrified of drinking this cup himself. And James’ and John’s confidence that they were ready to drink it seems to be only because they failed to comprehend what it meant.

Drink this cup and you drink of the sufferings of Jesus. Be baptised in this water and you are plunged into the pool of dishonour and betrayal and lonely death. Drink of this cup and you are offering yourself to follow in Jesus’s footsteps, weighed down by a cross of hostility and hatred. Be baptised in this pool and you are dying to all conventional expectations of honour and recognition and prestige.

We often speak of the suffering and death of Jesus as one of a kind, unique and unrepeatable, and therefore we don’t think of it as being an example that we might follow. But in this story, Jesus clearly holds it up as an example to follow. “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptised with the baptism that I am baptised with?” Are you able to come with me, to do as I do, to join with me in what I am doing for the life of the world? And sometimes it is when someone has the courage and integrity to step up and aim to do that that we, like the ten, get angry and denounce them as presumptuous and ambitious and glory seeking. But in every celebration of baptism and the Lord’s Table, we are being challenged and called to do just that, to join Jesus in giving our everything in expressing God’s love for the whole world, in following Jesus in his mission of saving love for the whole world.

Jesus is extravagantly forgiving of our stumbling efforts. He is more than willing to indulge our James-and-John-like lapses into one-up-manship so long as we are continuing to feed from his table and drink from his cup and grow in our capacity to join him in his mission of being a blessing of love and mercy to the world. “The New Human came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” Giving one’s life as a ransom is certainly no shortcut to power and prestige. If some enemy is holding victims hostage, then offering yourself as a ransom means surrendering yourself into the hostile hands of the enemy. And that is exactly what Jesus does. Finding us held hostage by the vicious cycles of bitterness, hostility and violence, he drinks the bitter cup, handing himself over into their hands, that we might be set free. And when any one of us is bold enough and reckless enough to set out to follow him in similarly offering ourselves for the sake of others, a bit of James-and-John-like mixed motives or overblown sense of our own importance is not going to stop Jesus from affirming and encouraging us to ignore the ten naysayers behind us and get out there and do our best. Perhaps that’s why the Lord’s Table is a round table. There is no right and left. There is always room for one more at the table of glory.