Posts Tagged ‘Discrimination’

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Mark 9:38-50
(for contextual notes about this passage in the arc of Mark’s Gospel, see the end of this sermon)

Picture this: Jesus and his disciples are traveling on a hot and dusty road from Galilee – the territory in the north where he was raised and where he has been teaching and healing – to Jerusalem, the holy city in the south that is the center of Jewish faith and practice.  He has deliberately set out to go there, “setting his face towards Jerusalem,” knowing full well its dangers, and the opposition he is certain to face there.

Along the way, he has revealed to his disciples that he must suffer and be put to death by his enemies, but that God will raise him to life again.  These words confuse and frighten them and they repeatedly demonstrate their failure to understand not only the meaning of this prediction, but also who he is and what he has been teaching them.  They seem not to have grasped at all the concept of the “kingdom” of which he has been speaking – an “upside-down kingdom” in which the first are last and the last are first, in which to lose one’s life is to gain it, and in which the greatest is the servant of all.

Just now they have been arguing amongst themselves over who will be the greatest in the kingdom which they are sure he will establish once he arrives in Jerusalem and defeats his foes.  Jesus corrects them and tells them plainly that in God’s kingdom “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”  Then, we are told, “he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me’” (Mk 9:35-37).  For Jesus, children are a sacrament of God’s presence and of his presence and are therefore to be protected and loved. Read More