PROPER 20, YEAR B

Sunday 19 September 2021

St. Uriel’s, Sea Girt

Mark 9:30-37

“If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.” In that sentence, our Lord enunciates one of the most revolutionary principles of his teaching and, indeed, of the Christian faith itself.

Jesus and his disciples are traveling through Galilee on their way to Jerusalem. For the second time, he’s predicted his coming passion, death, and resurrection: “The Son of man will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”

When they stop for the night in Capernaum, he asks his disciples what they were discussing on the way. But they’re silent, presumably on account of embarrassment, for they were discussing who among them was the greatest. 

We can easily imagine how such a discussion might have started. At the beginning of Saint Mark’s Gospel, the first disciples to be called by Jesus were Simon, Andrew, James, and John. So, maybe they’re the greatest, on account of being first called. Soon after that, Jesus called the Twelve to be his apostles. So maybe the Twelve are the greatest. In the events leading up to today’s Gospel, Peter has confessed Jesus to be the Christ, the Messiah. So, maybe Peter is the greatest. A short time after that, the Lord has taken Peter, James, and John up the mountain to witness his Transfiguration. So, maybe those three are the greatest. 

In any case, despite what he’s been telling them about his forthcoming suffering and death, the disciples seem to believe that their current journey to Jerusalem will culminate in Jesus being enthroned as king of Israel, and they’re trying to sort out who will get the choice positions in his court when he enters his glory.

In response, Jesus declares the only way to true greatness: “If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.”  That statement radically reverses the world’s values.

Nowadays, under the influence of two millennia of Christianity, we’ve gained some notion of service as a noble and honorable calling. We speak of time spent in the armed forces as military service. Elected officials are public servants. Government workers are civil servants. Diplomats belong to the foreign service. More broadly, we speak of service industries and service professions. All these uses of the word aspire to an ideal of promoting the common good and protecting the weak and vulnerable. Being of service in these ways is generally considered worthy of respect and admiration.

To my knowledge, however, the ancient world had no corresponding ideal. According to a philosopher like Aristotle, in the natural order of things some were born to rule, and others to serve. You served those who were above you on the social ladder, and you ruled those beneath. While the ruling classes often found it in their interests to be magnanimous in funding public works, feasts, and entertainments for the masses - "Bread and circuses," as the Romans put it - nonetheless the universal measure of greatness was how many people served you, not how many people you served. So, when Jesus declares, “If anyone would be first he must be last of all and servant of all,” he’s effectively upending his world’s values and proclaiming an utterly new pattern of relationships, an utterly new model of community.

To give specify his point concretely, Jesus sets a child in the disciples’ midst, and proclaims, “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me receives not me but him who sent me.”

A bit of background may be helpful here. In the ancient world, as in some spheres of the contemporary world, people practiced hospitality as a means of enhancing their social status. The more prestigious the guests you received and entertained in your home, the more their prestige rubbed off on you. Moreover, the recipients of such hospitality incurred an obligation to return the favor and invite you to their homes, which would increase your own position and standing in society even further. Receiving and entertaining important people was an activity that carried definite social rewards.

Our Lord’s point in holding up the alternative of receiving a child in his name was that children in the ancient world were completely without position or status. Before they reached the age of majority, the law treated them as their parents’ property, without any rights of their own. Children were legally and socially nobodies.

To receive a child, then, is to practice a form of hospitality that carries no reward. The host gains no honor or prestige from entertaining the guest; the guest has no ability to repay the favor. Yet, says our Lord, in receiving such a guest we receive Jesus himself and, in receiving Jesus, we receive his Father in heaven. In self-sacrificial service to those with no ability to repay, we serve none other than God himself, and God, rather than any earthly patron or benefactor, is the one who rewards us in the end.

The gift of grace that makes such service possible is specifically humility. I like to think of humility as the virtue by which we learn not to take ourselves too seriously. One commentator describes it as death to self-importance.

We need to take this principle to heart. Down through the centuries, Christianity has to some extent taught the world to regard power and authority as opportunities for public service for the sake of the common good. But our conversion remains incomplete. Altruism competes with self-interest and ambition. And it becomes such a temptation to resent the service that we’ve rendered when we feel inadequately recognized, appreciated, or rewarded.

The Church is the place, however, where we can put the Christian ideal of service into practice. Reflecting on my own priestly ministry down through the years, one of the questions that I’ve learned to ask myself when confronted with unexpected difficulties or challenges, is “How may I best be of service in this situation?” I don’t always get the answer right; and when I do get the answer right, it’s not always the answer I want to hear. But it’s become clear to me that it’s always the right question to ask.

The same goes for all of us. In the parishes I’ve served, I’ve noticed that the parishioners with the greatest staying power, those most likely to persevere over the long haul in their practice of the faith, are not those who vie for positions of power, influence, recognition, or prestige, but rather, those who stand ready to respond to the call to help wherever they’re most needed—for no reward other than that of knowing that they're being of service. 

The death to which Jesus calls us is a death to self-seeking and self-importance; the life into which he invites us is a life of humble and self-sacrificial service. And the Christian life’s endlessly wonderful paradox is that those who end up first in God’s Kingdom are precisely those who’ve put themselves last and made themselves the servants of all.