James 3:13-4:3, 7-8
Mark 9:30-37
Sometimes, when I read certain gospel passages, I think about a young Chinese woman I knew several years ago. She was a student where I was serving as campus minister. She started coming to me because she was interested in Christianity. So we began getting together to read the gospels. One day as we were working our way through a passage, she stopped reading and looked at me with this perplexed expression on her face and asked, “Why did he say that?”
I felt kind of stupid then, because I didn’t know. In fact, I was surprised at her surprise, because I had never thought about why he said what he said. I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t have anything like a good answer for her. But she got me thinking about how profoundly strange the gospel is.
It is strange – and we have to realize that the disciples must have looked as perplexed as my Chinese friend did when Jesus said 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.” Yet, although they didn’t understand, they were afraid to ask.
Why were they afraid to ask?
I have been asking this question this past week. I have heard two likely reasons. One is that they were afraid because they didn’t want to admit their ignorance. They would be ashamed to admit they didn’t understand. Because then someone might call them stupid, and who wants to be called stupid? No one. We are more offended by being called stupid than if we were charged with any of the seven deadly sins, so it is quite likely that the disciples wished to avoid appearing dull or ignorant. But there might have been another reason, too.
Perhaps they were afraid that what he was saying was true. Perhaps they didn’t fully understand it but they understood enough to know that what he was saying didn’t sound good to them. or easy. Or fun. Perhaps they were afraid of knowing more.
Now, that is very human, isn’t it? They understood enough to know that this was not something they wanted to understand.
But as they continued on their walk, they lagged behind Jesus. Probably by intent. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if they wanted, at this moment, to put some distance between themselves and him. After all, he has just said something very off-putting.
And while they walked, they talked among themselves. About what? Were they talking about the things Jesus had been teaching them? Were they talking about these strange things he had said and what they could possibly mean? Nope. They were talking about their comparative greatness.
I could spend a lot of time marveling at how the disciples went, in a matter of minutes, from being afraid to ask him what he meant to arguing about which of them was the greatest. It’s laughable, isn’t it? How do you go from being an ignorant fool who is afraid to acknowledge his ignorance to asserting you are the greatest?
I’ll tell you what I think. It is fear that does it. Fear can make us grasping, selfish, avaricious people.
There is a character that captures this phenomenon well in Jane Smiley’s novel, The Greenlanders. This is a story about the men and women who lived in Greenland in the 14th century.
This was a cold and inhospitable place, far away from the rest of the inhabited world. I have read that the early Viking settlers named the place Greenland in the hopes that it would attract many more settlers, settlers who would discover when they got there that, in reality, it was not very green.
The winters in Greenland were long and harsh, such that the primary concern for these settlers was having enough food to survive until spring. When the snow began to fall, they led the cows and sheep indoors. When the spring arrived, they carried the animals back outside, because they were too weak to walk.
There are stories of the stronger, healthier men making the rounds of the settlements in the late winter to check on the others. They sometimes found whole households had taken to their beds, even lying on top of one another to stay warm. These families had run out of food and fuel, and merely hoped to sleep until spring – and then, hopefully, awaken.
During one terrible winter, the priest was making the rounds. He came to the home of a woman named Vigdis. He opened her door without knocking and was stunned by what he saw. Vigdis was standing at a table cutting meat and stuffing food into her mouth. She was, in fact, surrounded by food – cheeses, hanging birds, sealmeat and blubber, vats of sourmilk. She was enormously fat, fatter than he had ever seen her before. Smiley wrote that the priest “saw at once that she had responded to the hunger of the settlement by consuming and consuming without cease.”
She had been hoarding food – probably for ten years. As the people around her were starving to death she was growing ever more gluttonous. As men and women were vanishing to skin and bones, as parents were burying their children who died of starvation, Vigdis was growing fatter and fatter. She was killing her neighbors with her greed. The men who worked for her were willing to turn a blind eye because she gave them enough food for their families to survive.
The title of this chapter of the book is “The Devil.”
Fear can make us grasp in some unbecoming ways. And it was very likely fear at work among the disciples – fear that the one who was leading them, Jesus, was walking into a deadly trap – which drew them into a boasting contest about who was the greatest. They had already heard him say that, to be his followers, they would need to deny themselves. They had heard him say that they would need to take up their cross and follow him.
They had also seen him in all his transfigured glory, earlier in this same chapter, when he ascended the mountain and was lit by a brightness that was almost blinding, when Moses and Elijah appeared at his side. They had seen the power and the glory, and they had been told about the suffering and submission. They did not care to see how these things would be reconciled with each other.
The disciples did not like the idea of suffering and obedience unto death any more than we like this idea. We prefer the easy path, although we admire Jesus for taking the harder path. In contrast to these first disciples, we have actually grown quite comfortable with the notion of Jesus’ suffering. But we are still no different from them when it comes to comprehending what it means to follow him.
“Who is wise and understanding among you?” This is the question James asks us in his epistle. Or, as the disciples might ask, “Who is the greatest?”
It is not the ones who are most boastful. Nor is it the ones who are grasping, selfish, greedy. This is, James says, earthly, unspiritual, even devilish wisdom.
When we are confronted with the invitation to submit our wills and our bodies to God’s will, we are more likely to display some of that devilish wisdom and grasp for whatever we can get our hands on – like Vigdis hoarding food, like the disciples jostling for the position on top. The more we feel threatened, the more we will grasp. Fear and insecurity never drive good leadership or lead to greatness.
On the contrary, James would say, submission to God is born of that pure wisdom from above, which yields gentleness, mercy, and peace. In this paradox of strength and submission, suffering and glory, we find salvation. Or, as Fanny Crosby put it in her beloved hymn,
Perfect submission, all is at rest,
I in my Savior am happy and blest,
Watching and waiting, looking above,
Filled with his goodness, lost in his love.
May you be a follower of Jesus, wherever he leads you. May you seek not to be the first, but to submit to God’s wisdom, may you find your rest in him.
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