If you are a student of the Olympic
Games, a follower of past winter Olympiads, you might remember an American
skier named Bill Johnson. He is one on
the Sports Illustrated cover that is the image this week for our bulletin.
Bill was a handsomely blond, fearless,
and arrogant 23 year old who came out of nowhere, rocketing onto the world
winter sports scene with a couple of big victories just prior to the winter
games. And in Sarajevo in 1984, he
became the first American to win an Olympic alpine downhill race – and was de
facto a national hero and immediate media darling.
His fame, however, was fleeting. You see, after the awards ceremony with his
Olympic gold medal draped about his neck, Johnson did a press conference and
asked how much it meant to him to have won the gold medal. He smiled, lifted the medal to his lips,
kissed it, and replied in a cocksure manner:
“Millions – we’re talkin’ millions.”
Even as visions of dollar signs danced
in his head, the advertising industry dropped him like a hot rock, and the
American public turned its back on him.
Any endorsements he had already negotiated dried up, and he faded into
oblivion.
It is a sad tale of misguided
ambition. However, Bill Johnson is
really not all that different from any of the rest of us. We all want the world to crown us with
greatness. Every single one of us wants
to be acknowledged as the best. Being #1
seems to be part and parcel of simply being human.
And so can you really blame the
disciples for arguing that point on the road as they traveled back to
Capernaum, back to the home base, to the very roots of Jesus’ ministry? After all, Jesus had just told them for a
second time that if they continued to travel with him to Jerusalem, to the Holy
City that was the seat of Jewish religious power and authority, that they would
inevitably be swept into a chain of events over which they would have no
control and which could only end in one way – rejection, suffering, the death
of this beloved rabbi for whom they had left their homes and family and with
whom they had forged this marvelous little community earmarked by laughter and
learning, companionship and camaraderie.
Surely, given Jesus’ dire prediction,
the disciples wondered what the end would mean for them – even if the
end seemed so clear for Jesus. Would
their little community disband? Would each
of them return to the fishing boats and tax collecting booths from whence they
came? Could they ever really go home
again?
And if going home was not an option and
they chose to stay together instead, then who would be the leader? Which one of them was really the greatest and
therefore destined to steer the others forward into a future they could only
guess at?
Would it be Peter? Jesus seemed to be partial to him at times,
but Peter had that embarrassing tendency to run off at the mouth at the most
inconvenient moments.
Then what about Andrew? He was the surely the greatest fisherman
among them – though James and John had their father Zebedee’s fishing business
to back them – and that was nothing to sneeze at.
There was Mary Magdalene too. Jesus appeared to fancy her – but she was a
woman and one with a clouded and mysterious background to boot. They should not have to worry about her
aspirations for greatness.
Judas had a keen financial mind and was
clearly the best among them when it came to keeping the books and the
budget. And Matthew, well, one might not
really like a tax collector, but when it came to getting folks to tithe
– or even to cough up an offering – he surely had the greatest number of tricks
up his sleeve.
That was the gist of the disciples’
conversation on the road to Capernaum. It
must have been a lively discussion and at times loud enough and contentious
enough for Jesus to have heard bits and pieces of it and taken notice – and not
too positively either. After all, when
they were comfortably settled in wherever it was that they were going to spend
the night, Jesus asked them point blank what they had been arguing about.
And you can bet that the disciples were
more than a little ashamed by their conversation on the road – especially when,
as the author of the Gospel makes a point of telling us, their behavior became
the impetus for Jesus “sitting down” to teach them. Those are carefully chosen words, you know,
because the significance of Jesus choosing to sit is critical.
As the author of the blog “Magdalene’s
Musing” cites, “This is a signal to his disciples—and to us—to pay very, very
close attention to the word he is about to share with them. To sit down before
speaking is, in the ancient world, to take the classic teaching position of the
rabbi. Jesus is claiming his authority as he prepares to deliver a
teaching.” And so we had better listen
up because what Jesus has to say may in fact be, according to this
Gospel, the central teaching of his ministry.
And we hear Jesus utter confusing and
nonsensical words. “So you want first
place? Then take the last place. Be the
servant of all.”
Can’t you just picture the disciples? “What in heaven’s name does he mean by that?”
they all wondered. Peter scratched his
head and mumbled about first Jesus telling them something about saving their
life by losing it and now here he is talking about being first by being
last. It was all quite perplexing and
seemed to go against the grain of every fiber of their beings. What was all this business about kingship and
servant hood? It just was not right for
kings to be servants or servants to be kings for that matter.
Countercultural – that is what it was –
what Jesus was telling them was just the opposite of the way that Jewish
society had educated them. You mean,
they mused, that there are more important things than proudly slapping that
bumper sticker on your donkey proclaiming that your child is an honor
student? More important than working 80
or 90 hours a week so you can have the pleasure boat, the vacation home, and
the other accouterments of success? More
important than doing whatever it takes to own three camels, a big flock of
sheep, a gas guzzling truck, and an ATV?
That sort of logic did not make any
sense at all to the disciples – any more than it makes sense to us. And it is countercultural – because when
you apply the logic (or illogic) of the Gospel, the world is not what it
seems.
And to make his point crystal clear,
Jesus beckoned to a child who was pressed up against the atrium wall, her wide
dark eyes taking in the conversation.
Now mind you, I am not setting the scene for one of those saccharine
sweet encounters during which a Caucasian Jesus cuddles a cleanly scrubbed
little girl with perfect blond curls and bows.
Not by a long shot. You see, children were among the most
vulnerable and least regarded in ancient Jewish society. They were right up there with widows,
beggars, and disabled people.
Listen to what Nicholas Kristof wrote
in an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “The Women’s Crusade: “Here’s
the thing about kids in first-century Roman Palestine: Children were nobodies,
the bottom of the social food chain. Children had no power whatsoever, they
weren’t given choices or negotiated with; they weren’t allowed privileges or
given allowances.
Children could be and
were left on garbage heaps to die of exposure. Some of them were collected from
the garbage to be kept as slaves. Depending on the hierarchy of the household,
any number of people could decide that it was no longer expedient to keep a
child alive. And although Jewish parents did not engage in infant exposure,
their children had no more position or social standing.”
Children were not so much
outcasts as they were simply non-persons.
They were invisible. And so what
Jesus is saying to us, using a child as a living example, is this:
“Whoever welcomes me is the one who welcomes the nobodies of this
world, the invisible ones, the ones who fall through the cracks, the ones we
never make eye contact with who stand on the street corner with signs declaring
their homelessness.
Whoever welcomes me will
not just work in a soup kitchen but will also talk to the people
who wander in for their noontime meal.
Whoever welcomes me will not see half the American public as victims
content to be living off the system. Whoever
welcomes me will actually make eye contact with the homeless man on the corner
and maybe even give him a Gatorade on a hot, sunny day from the stash you keep
in the back of your car for just such purposes.
That is servant
hood. That is putting oneself last and
in the end coming out first. You see,
once again, as he always seems to do, “Jesus is challenging us to reverse long-standing, ingrained, human
habits. To set aside our common human understanding of how to win fame and
glory, and instead learn from Jesus (about) God's way of deep hospitality
and honoring.” (David Ewart, “Holy
Textures”)
Even in these tough economic times,
when what we really want to do is insulate ourselves from anything or anyone
that might de-stabilize our own sense of material success and self-worth, Jesus
challenges us as Christians to re-imagine all that, to see the integral
relationship between first and last, king and servant, to understand greatness for
what it really is.
What
Jesus means reminds me of the story I heard about a tribe of Native Americans
who once lived in Mississippi next to a very swift and dangerous river. The
current was so strong that if somebody happened to fall in, he or she would be
swept away downstream, never to be seen again.
One day the tribe was attacked by a
hostile group of settlers and found themselves with their backs against the
river. They were greatly outnumbered, and their only chance for escape was to
cross the rushing water.
And so they huddled together. Those who were strong picked up the weak and
put them on their shoulders; the little children, the sick, the old and the
infirm. Those who were ill or wounded
were carried on the backs of those who were strongest.
They waded out into the river, and to
their surprise they discovered that the weight on their shoulders carrying the
least and the lowest helped them to keep their footing and to make it safely
across to the other side.
Do you really want to be great? Do you want to be #1? Of course, we all do. Each one of us has a bit of Bill Johnson the
skier in our hearts. And that is
OK. To be great, to be #1 seems to be
part of being human.
So the question really is this: How do you go about being great? And the answer is simple: Be great in compassion.
How do you go about being #1? Be first in caring. Be first in outreach. Be first in thinking of others before you
think of yourself. Because when you do, when you become the
servant and consciously minister to the ones who are like children, the ones
who are invisible, just like that Native American tribe, something amazing,
something miraculous, will always, always happen.
by Rev. Nancy Foran
www.rvccme.org
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