Summary: When disciples John and James asked Jesus to let them sit by his side once he occupies his heavenly throne, they received a pointed lesson in the real purpose of their lives and their calling as followers of the anointed one. The lesson, it turned out, had almost nothing to do with heaven.
As Mark's gospel - in its typically brief, to-the-point style - moves through its account of Jesus' ministry, we find three different predictions of what the church calls the Passion of Christ, meaning his arrest, trial and crucifixion.
All of which, of course, culminates in the joyous resurrection on Easter morning, a radically unexpected event that seemed to change the very genome of the world.
The passage from Mark that we read today comes right after the third prediction of the Passion. In it, Jesus makes himself quite clear, choosing, for the moment, to set aside parables and other indirect methods of teaching. He simply says what he means directly. Here's what Mark reports:
He (Jesus) took the twelve aside again and began to tell them what was to happen to him, saying, "Look, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the gentiles; they will mock him and spit upon him and flog him and kill him, and after three days he will rise again."
Just as an aside, before we talk in more detail about the whole passage we read today from Mark, please notice that Jesus here destroys the 2,000-year-old condemnation of the Jewish people as so-called "Christ killers." What does Jesus say? He says that the gentiles, meaning non-Jews, will kill him. The J.B. Phillips translation of Mark doesn't use "gentiles" but, rather, "pagans."1 But either way, the people being pointed to as Christ killers are not Jews. So isn't it way, way past time for the world to be done with that anti-Jewish calumny, out of which so much of modern antisemitism has come? (That's a rhetorical question.)
In any case, Jesus' disciples - as is often the case - pay no attention to Jesus' words, not even enough to misunderstand them - as also is often the case. Instead, James and John, frequently called the sons of Zebedee, change the subject completely and try to arrange a great eternal future for themselves. They want to sit on the left and right of the soon-to-be-risen Christ's heavenly throne.
It's an astonishingly crude, inappropriate and self-centered request. And, thus, it's quite in harmony with human history. But it should remind us that eternal life is a gift of grace from God, meaning that we can do nothing to earn it. After all, we are mortal beings who will return to the dust at our death. If we are to spend eternity in God's loving presence, it will be only because God wills it, for only God - not humanity - is immortal. You might ponder that the next time someone talks about your own or someone else's "immortal soul."2
So Jesus responds to James and John by telling them that such a high heavenly position of sitting next to the throne is not his to give. But he first asks them something about this life - are they able "to drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?"
In other words, can they suffer the way that Jesus is about to suffer? As the late Catholic scholar, Fr. Raymond E. Brown, writes about this passage in his book, An Introduction to the New Testament, this challenge by Jesus to James and John is "symbolically a challenge to suffering." Then Brown adds this, "The flight of the disciples at Gethsemane will show that their confident 'We can' response is overly optimistic."3
In many ways, this story is also a challenge to Christians alive today to be all in on following Jesus but, at the same time, to be realistic about our inevitable failures to do just that. Sometimes we discover that the enthusiasm and commitment we expressed when we first gave our hearts to the Lord melted away when confronted by the many challenges life throws at us.
We once resolved, for instance, to be generous with our time, talent and money. But then we allowed ourselves to get overcommitted to our golf game, to our professional club and to a mortgage required to buy a house that's bigger than we need. We promised our children that we'd be there to love them, teach them, support them. But then we got overscheduled and didn't have much time to actually talk to them regularly about what they're learning in school. We ended up missing a lot of their sporting events, their dance recitals and their questions about life's purpose.
The lesson here is not to avoid committing ourselves to being generous or to being good parents. Rather, the lesson is not to let less-important interests and commitments eat up our time so that our commitment to Christ gets downgraded. In other words, we must always remember what our priorities should be and remember that we serve a Lord who is both loving and demanding.
So John and James, with misplaced priorities, thought it would be a great goal to sit at Christ's side in eternity. But by focusing so much on heaven, they risked being no earthly good.
When Jesus tells James and John that they, indeed, will be baptized into the suffering that Jesus was baptized into and will drink the cup of sorrow that Jesus will drink, he's simply warning them of all the trouble that's ahead of them because they have committed themselves to being his followers.
That warning, too, is for all of us who pledge ourselves to Jesus. Friends, the commitment to be a Christ follower can and does bring us joy and peace. But it also can - and almost certainly will - bring us trouble if we're serious about it. It's not easy to be a Christian. Just for starters, it means we are obligated to see and honor the image of God in every person we meet. Every single person.
That includes the friend you know who has broken his wife's heart by having an affair. It includes the politician with whom you agree about nothing. It includes the drunk driver who caused an accident that killed one of your children.
All of this is a reminder of how damaging to our own soul - and to the whole world - it can be when we dehumanize others. Thinking of other people as less than fully human can lead to genocide, to a failure to care for the people for whom Jesus died. And how do we dehumanize people? By not affirming that they, too, bear the image of God within them.
So Jesus warns us even as he warns John and James that being a disciple of Christ requires a complete commitment. And it requires a willingness to listen when Jesus says we've got something wrong. In the case of Zebedee's boys, what they got wrong was their self-centered desire to become favored citizens in eternity, sitting next to the throne. What is it or what will it be that we get wrong?
The good news, of course, is that we are promised God's forgiveness for getting things wrong. It's what the old hymn calls "Amazing Grace."
When James and John focus on an imagined future of glory for themselves, Jesus knows that they are missing the point not only of his life and ministry but also of their own lives.
And just what is that point? Listen again to Jesus: "Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all."
Does that reversal of expectations sound familiar? It should, for we see that same counter-cultural approach in the Beatitudes, where Jesus says that the weak shall inherit the Earth and that the kingdom of Heaven belongs to those who are poor in spirit and on and on. And you see it later in the same chapter of Matthew that contains those and other Beatitudes. There, Jesus tells us to love our enemies and to pray for people who persecute us.
Yes, the incarnation of God on Earth tells us to love our enemies. Talk about being counter-cultural.
You may have heard last year about Russell Moore, former head of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who told National Public Radio that "multiple pastors" have reported that congregants have objected to their preaching about Christ's Sermon on the Mount because they thought that "love your enemies" is a "liberal talking point" that "doesn't work anymore."4
Wouldn't you love to hear a response to that directly from Jesus?
The fact is that Christ's whole life and purpose constituted a response to that. He told everyone that if they want to follow him, they must take up their cross. And surely it can be a cross to love your enemies - and, frankly, sometimes even to love your friends and family.
But trying to love our enemies can be enormously liberating. It means we are freed from debasing others. It means we need not fight fire with fire.
If, instead of wanting to sit at Christ's side throughout eternity, we simply commit ourselves to loving others the way Jesus loved - and continues to love - us, we will be so busy comforting the afflicted, as well as sometimes afflicting the comfortable, that we won't have time to worry about exactly where we'll be in eternity. And that can make the present feel a lot more like heaven than it does today.