An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Winning, Losing and Child’s Play

A sermon on Mark 9:30-37 & James 3:13 – 4:3, 4:7-8a by Nathan Nettleton

There are some weeks when we preachers just can’t believe our luck. The scripture readings set for the day and the front page news of the week just line up perfectly and the message seems clear. The sermon looks set to almost write itself. So here we are this Sunday with scripture readings about toxic ambitions and disciples jockeying for position and arguing over which of them is the greatest, and what happens? There is a leadership coup in the Federal government and the Prime Minister is challenged and dumped in favour of his ambitious long-term rival. Too easy!

But actually, it is too easy. So easy that it is easily wrong. It is always easy to write and preach sermons that point out the foibles and failings of other people, especially high-profile and famous other people. But the truth is that if our reading of the scriptures leaves us feeling smugly superior to those terrible other people, then there is every likelihood that we have missed the point somewhere. And I could feel myself sailing off down that path as I first began to contemplate how I would preach this week.

As we heard tonight, Jesus called his followers together, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” It would be very easy to illustrate the opposite of that from federal politics. And the Apostle James tells us tonight that “where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.” No trouble illustrating that from the week in politics either. He continues, saying, “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.” It would be lovely to claim that for ourselves in contrast to those foolish and fractious politicians. Jesus also continued, taking a little child and hugging her warmly in front of his disciples, and saying to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” When our politicians on both sides of the House are willing to lock up children in immigration detention centres in order to win the votes of a racist, hostile and self-interested public, it would be oh-so easy to vilify them and portray ourselves as the ones who always welcome children, and in them welcome Jesus and the one who sent him.

But if we take seriously what is going on in these scripture readings, and especially in the gospel reading, we will realise that the people it is asking us to take a good hard look at are ourselves. This gospel reading is about the followers of Jesus missing the point. It is about the followers of Jesus not understanding what Jesus was trying to tell them about the counter-cultural nature of his leadership and instead jockeying for position and trying to set themselves up to be winners in the polls and in the race for power and fame and influence. And whenever the gospel gives us pictures of the disciples getting it wrong, it is challenging us to see ourselves in those disciples and to take a very honest and searching look at ourselves, asking whether we are really doing any better.

Mark, the gospel writer, was quite deliberate in the way he linked this incident with the stories around it. First he tells us that Jesus has been spending some time alone with his disciples, away from the crowds, so that he could provide them with some important teaching. In Mark’s summary of that teaching, he tell us that Jesus was saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” But, Mark tells us, they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him. You’ve got to feel for the disciples a bit here. They’ve gotten used to Jesus speaking in parables and riddles and they are getting into the habit of looking for the interesting twist or the hidden meaning. So when Jesus starts saying quirky things like “The Son of Man will be killed and three days later will rise again,” it is no surprise that they would not be expecting him to be stating the straight-forward literal truth.

But it is not just that they are expecting a riddle or a parable, is it? What Jesus is saying is almost beyond comprehension. Shortly before this incident, Peter has identified Jesus as the messiah. The expectations of how the messiah would act and what he would do varied considerably, but all the versions involved powerful leadership and forceful victories over the enemies of God’s people. Being a winner was basic to the job description of the messiah. None of the various expectations had much room for the idea of a messiah being defeated and killed by his opponents, whatever might come after that. No wonder the disciples were looking for hidden meanings. So when the disciples then begin arguing about which of them is the greatest, it simply illustrates the nature of what they don’t understand. Isn’t being a leader about greatness, about the competitive exercise of power and influence?

Sure, it is rare for any leader to be popular with everyone. In this week’s episode in the parliamentary Liberal party, much of the discussion and debate was about who was most or least popular with who. Malcolm Turnbull was able to pitch his claim for the leadership on the basis of his popularity with the general population despite the fact that he is a lot less popular with significant sections of his own party. Tony Abbott was more popular within the party, but in the end, those within the party concluded that the most important thing was the ability to win, and winning in politics depends on the ability to appeal to the voters, and on that score, Tony Abbott was increasingly being seen as a loser.

Which, when you think about it, sounds pretty similar to the attitudes of the disciples of Jesus. And perhaps we are not so different. Who will we give our support to? Who will we vote for? Who will we recognise as a leader worth following? Do we too measure our leaders according to their ability to come out on top, to win the popularity polls and the performance indicators, to defeat their opponents? Take note too that while Jesus sometimes says that he will be handed over to the religious and political leaders, on this occasion, he simply says that he will be betrayed into human hands. That’s not just unpopular with rival leaders. That’s us, and the disciples, and everyone being unable to recognise him as a viable leader worth following. We don’t want a loser for a leader.

But Jesus is undeterred. His bewildering and unexpected style of leadership is not about winning in the world’s usual power games. Jesus is not aiming to out-muscle the alternative leaders. That’s why the likes of Pontius Pilate couldn’t understand what he was on about when he spoke of a kingship that wasn’t of this world. A kingship or leadership that wasn’t about competition and defeating rivals was simply incomprehensible. So if you are excited by those who want to set up Christian political parties or Christian political lobby groups to ensure that Christian values and Christian agendas stand a chance of defeating their rivals in the nation’s political systems, I’m sorry, but you are probably not going to find much of an ally in Jesus.

Jesus has never seemed much interested in playing the political game to gain advantages and advance his capacity to impose his agendas on the wider society. In fact that was precisely one of the offers made to him by the satan in the wilderness and which Jesus rejected as a temptation that was seeking to turn him away from his true mission. But none of this is to say that Jesus is solely interested in some detached spiritual realm and that his leadership has no implications for the world of politics and power. Jesus’s teachings and example have at least as much to say to our approach to politics as to anything else.

His teachings and example are a huge challenge to not only to our voting intentions but to the whole way we do politics, both on the national stage and in our churches and communities. To Jesus, it seems, as soon as our political strategies become about opposing and defeating others, we have already lost our way. We have become part of the problem rather than part of the solution. When Jesus embraced the child and spoke of welcoming the child as the model for leadership, he wasn’t saying that you should set out to defeat and destroy those whose policies disadvantage children. He was saying far more than that. He was also saying that such adversarial power games are part of what destroys the world that our children are going to inherit. The answer does not lie in trying to one-up one another with the quality of our child-friendly policies, but in becoming the kind of people who would much rather join hands in the playful company of children than climb over one another on our way to the top.

But are we any more ready to recognise and honour such a strange leadership than the disciples were? Because for the most part, on the odd occasions when we see such playful joyous bridge-building leadership, we dismiss it with faint praise. We say that it is very lovely, but that it is rather naive and utopian, and we quickly turn back to the strong leaders, the influential movers and shakers, the winners. But Jesus won’t play our power games. And he certainly won’t validate our attempts to co-opt God into our power games and to claim that God is on our side against our opponents. Jesus reveals to us the face of a God whose only true enemy is enmity itself, and who would rather allow himself to be crushed in the grinding wheels of power than surrender to becoming such a power wielder.

But despite clearly knowing that such a radical refusal to conform to the political norms would result in the loss of public support and death at the hands of a coalition of angry opponents, Jesus also knew that death does not have the last word. He knew that real life, the life that is really worth living, is only reached by travelling a thoroughly non-conformist pathway that may result in rejection, suffering and death. Real life in the wide open spaces of God’s non-competitive love can be found on no other path. In February, Tony Abbott spoke of a near-death experience when he was almost dumped, and now presumably he has tasted what he would regard as the full-death experience. Perhaps in this death, the gateway to real life lies open before him. May he, and all of us, have the grace and courage and child-like playfulness to follow Jesus through that gateway into real life and love.

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