Scripture: Mark 9:30–37
I was a communications minor in college, so one semester I took an entire course in nonverbal communication. You’d think that wouldn’t be a whole class, but it easily was. The ways that we communicate beyond the text of the words that we say are plentiful. That’s why email and texting are such bad ways to communicate…they leave out a lot of the subtext.
Tonight’s Scripture passage could be a case study in nonverbal communication. Jesus has just told the disciples a second time in pretty rapid succession that he is going to be arrested and killed. Then on the road back to Capernaum, they were talking just out of Jesus’ earshot. So when they got there, Jesus asks them a question. We just have the verbal communication, but this question could be a case study in nonverbal inflection and tone. Did Jesus ask, “So, what were y’all talking about back there?” as if he was vaguely curious and didn’t quite hear them? Or, he could ask, “Tell me, pray tell, what were you all talking about?” as if he knew exactly what they were talking about, and had in mind to correct them. Tone and inflection say a lot! Likewise, look at what the text says about their response. The NRSV says that they were silent. Other translations said that they didn’t say anything. One of those is true. The other is not. They may have been silent, but I guarantee that there was A LOT of nonverbal communication happening! I’m sure someone’s eyes got really big…and there were a bunch of panicked side eyes…and some total “ixnay on the onversationcay” looks. Mark doesn’t tell us any of this, but knowing human nature, we can guess that there was a lot of communication happening in that moment.
Because, Mark says, they were afraid to tell him that they were arguing about who was the greatest. Now, we like to pick on the disciples here—and elsewhere—but there is something rather logical about what they were doing. Mark says that they didn’t quite understand Jesus and how the Messiah could die and didn’t even know how to broach the subject with him. But what they did understand was the pecking order of who would be in charge if and when Jesus was gone. Their Greco-Roman-influenced culture naturally would have wanted to put people into a hierarchy, especially in the power vacuum that Jesus told them was coming. It would have been important to figure out who went where in the hierarchy and prepare accordingly. In the face of death that Jesus predicted, they were searching for some kind of order and predictability.
Let me suggest that we do the same thing. We also try and order death. For us, it might happen when we hear information about someone who has been diagnosed with cancer. Or when we grieve the death of a loved one. Or when we watch the news and see war in the Middle East, or Ukraine, or even gun violence at the Super Bowl parade this afternoon. In the face of death, we work to make sense of it. We wonder why this person got sick. We ask God why we had to lose our loved one. I think we choose our news stations because they come from our same worldview about why war happens, why gun violence takes place. We are ordering death in a way that makes sense of it in our minds. We need our brains and our hearts to understand what is happening in the face of death around us.
But watch how Jesus responds here. Scholar Amy Robertson suggests a third option for the tone and inflection that Jesus used in his question. Not clueless curiosity, but not accusing anger. She wonders if he asked, “So, tell me what you all were talking about back there,” as if he knew at some level what their conversation was, and wanted to turn it into a teaching moment. She suggests that maybe Jesus wanted to hear what his students were thinking, so that he could meet them where they were, and take them to a deeper understanding. To create a space where they could be honest and work through that struggle together.
So, she continues, Jesus the teacher brings a child into their midst. Mark doesn’t tell us how old the child is, or where they came from, but maybe a child walked through the room at that moment, and Jesus saw a teaching opportunity. Saw it as an opportunity to reorder death in their mind. To help them think about his death—and death as a whole—in different terms.
First, a child highlights the importance of potential. Just like a child has most of their life in front of them, ready to accomplish things and become someone that we cannot even predict, Jesus invites his disciples to see what potential good work God might be doing. Instead of seeing his death as the end of their world, perhaps it will become an opportunity for God to work in new ways. Instead of taking charge and figuring out who is going to be the greatest, Jesus’ death might become a way that someone totally unexpected realizes their God-given potential.
Secondly, Jesus reorders death in terms of welcome. Did you notice that Jesus told them that “whoever welcomes a child like this welcomes me”? They were interested in sustaining a hierarchy in which some people were more valuable than others. But Jesus was trying to dismantle that hierarchy, choosing instead inclusion and welcome as the center of his work. A child like that would have been considered of low value. They couldn’t work, but required work to feed and care for them. It required a certain level of welcome for them to be included in the community. Jesus reminded his disciples that his ministry was based on welcoming those who cannot care for themselves, healing those who are hurting, hearing those who are rejected. He is willing to die for these principles. In fact, setting the table for the tax collectors and prostitutes was a big part of what got him killed.
And finally, Jesus reorders death in terms of humility. Again, a child represented potential, but not actual power. Not actual greatness. Not actual strength or wisdom, at least according to the cultural definition. But Jesus reorders those assumptions, to tell his disciples to be more like this child than like a bunch of arrogant adults arguing about who is better than the other. “Put yourselves in the place of this child, ready to depend on others instead of thinking you know all of the answers. When I am gone, you’ll need to trust God more than your own greatness.”
Tonight, we begin the season of Lent. A season filled with these same themes that teacher Jesus offers to his disciples, reordering life and death for us as well:
• Potential, as we ask who we are in God’s eyes, and who are we becoming?
• Welcome, as we seek shared community where we can confess in one another’s presence.
• Humility, as we recognize our own finiteness, coming from and returning to dust.
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