Trinity 16
Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews
What makes a great disciple? The word disciple means ‘learner’, so is it those who best understand Jesus’ parables? Perhaps it’s those who are privy to special revelation – today’s Gospel reading takes place just after Jesus has been transfigured on the holy mountain before Peter and James and John. Maybe we measure discipleship by the number of additional disciples made, or by the ability to preach the gospel well, or by the number of healings done. Perhaps, we might hope, a disciple who is on the way to being at least okay is one who doesn’t engage in bickering about who is the greatest disciple with his friends…
And what do we mean by ‘great’? The one of most renown? We might do well to remember that Judas is far better known to posterity than Thaddeaus, or James the younger, or Simon. Do we measure greatness by impact? That’s how the C of E tries to do it nowadays. In which case we are in the realm of numbers of people converted, or healings wrought, or crowds gathered to hear Jesus.
Who among them is the greatest? And the trouble is, if you imagine that kind of argument, there’s a lot of ego involved. Once that’s the question, then it’s all about you: ‘I did this; I brought so and so to faith; I cast out that really tricky demon’. And once your elbows are out to bolster yourself, so the way you look at the others changes: they are competition, so the way to deal with them is to put them down, to make light of their efforts, to demonstrate your own superiority.
Look at it another way. Whom does Jesus commend, in the gospels? There’s a desperate gentile woman, pleading for her sick daughter. A foreign centurion, interceding for his child. A sinful woman who pours costly perfume on Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair, braving public humiliation to do so. There’s a grateful leper. A woman who sits at his feet and listens to him. A haemorrhaging woman run out of hope. A sinner who asks for forgiveness. In word or in action, they’re all commended by Jesus for their faith.
And who is not commended? The Pharisees who strut around soaking up the crowd’s admiration. The religious leaders who load burdens onto others while finding loopholes in their own keeping of the law. The disciples, when they keep people from getting close to Jesus, when they are slow to understand, when they waste their energy arguing about status.
In Jesus’ kingdom, where to save your life you have to lose it, and in losing your life you find it again, greatness doesn’t mean what the disciples think it does. Their arguing and jostling for position comes from what James calls ‘envy and selfish ambition’, in today’s New Testament reading. He contrasts the wisdom that comes from above with the wisdom from below. The wisdom from above makes itself known in actions and lives that are pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. The wisdom from below, on the other hand, shows up in envy, bitterness, selfish ambition, disorder and wickedness.
What’s in your heart? Do you listen to the wisdom that comes from above, or that which comes from below? Is the voice that drives you one that comes from a place of insecurity, or fear, or worthlessness, which sees others as competition, grace as a scarce resource, and your position in life as something you have to prove? Does it show itself up in the sorts of behaviour or attitude that puts others down, or is jealous of them, or cares a lot about what others think? That’s the wisdom from below – which isn’t wise at all.
What the disciples miss is that discipleship, if we can measure it at all, is marked less by achievements than by closeness to Jesus. Not in a ‘who does Jesus like best’ competitive sort of way, but in a heart aligned with his heart. And this ‘wisdom from above’ doesn’t drive us, but draws us. It’s peaceable because it comes from a place that rests in the security of Jesus’ love and knows that this love isn’t partial: that Jesus loves me doesn’t mean that there is less of his love for you. In fact, the closer we are to Jesus’ heart, to knowing his desire, the more we love as he loves. And that changes how we see others: they are no longer our competition as we strive for whatever it is we think will give us status, but individuals loved by God from all eternity.
Jesus illustrates his point to the disciples by putting a child in their midst. They’re arguing about position and Jesus points to a kid with no status to get his message across. ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,’ he says. The disciples want to be first, to be esteemed, to be recognised for their greatness. A child is a perplexing model for this sort of life. They can’t do you any favours, so they’re not socially useful. They are likely to be unimpressed by your stories of conversion or achievement, and to yawn when you tell them how great your preaching was.
The wisdom from below will tell you that there’s no point engaging with a child because they can’t do anything for you. They’re not going to advance your position or career or reputation. And it’s not just children – there’s also no point, according to this wisdom from below, in engaging with the homeless, the vulnerable, those whom illness or disability render invisible, those who are already losers in the competition for greatness.
These are exactly the sort of people, however, among whom the wisdom from above (whom Christians call Jesus) is to be found. And at the end of Mark’s gospel, the disciples will be glad of this wisdom, because for all their jostling for position and clamour to be seen as great, when the position discipleship demands of them is closeness to the cross, they run away. And at that point, the only greatness that matters is the greatness of God’s mercy. For although it’s the end of the gospel, it’s not the end of their stories. God can make of even these fickle, cowardly, pig-headed disciples the foundation stones of his church.
And the good news for them is the good news for us, too. God doesn’t measure their worth by how effective they are as disciples, or how courageous they were for Jesus, or by the skill of their preaching or their usefulness to the church or by the good opinion of others. God doesn’t love us more or less depending on what we can do for him, or how well we do it. It’s the wisdom from below that tells us our worth is to be found in what we do, or how we do it, or what others think of us. The wisdom from above tells us that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus – and shows us that by dying and rising again. And once we begin to grasp this, that God’s love isn’t a finite resource that we have to earn or hoard or compete for, we discover the freedom of the gospel. When you’re not trying to earn status you’re free to live it out – and if that status you’re living out is that you are a beloved child of God, just as much as the person sitting next to you, or your colleague at work, or the person you walk past huddled in a shop doorway, then that shows itself not in a clamour for greatness but in a life that is peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. A life, in other words, like Christ’s.