29^th November 2009

Sometimes you have to feel sorry for the disciples.

Earlier Jesus had been teaching and they didn't understand because he
spoke in code. Parables! Sayings, stories with secret, hidden messages,
that only gradually yield their meaning to the disciples, with explanation
from Jesus, away from the crowds.

Jesus had been warning them about the leaven (yeast) of the Pharisees and
Herod. The disciples thought he was reprimanding them for forgetting to
bring bread. Jesus often said things that had a clear meaning on the
surface, but with a hidden meaning under the surface. He wanted them to
make the effort to look for that meaning. What they discovered for
themselves would have a stronger hold on their memory. In this case yeast
was code for the corruption of the Pharisees and Herod to which Jesus had
been alluding.

Later Jesus delivers a message which he wants the disciples to understand
quite literally. Not surprisingly, the disciples are puzzled, for they are
looking for a hidden meaning, which they can't find. 'The "Son of Man" is
now to be handed over to the power of men, and they will kill him; and
three days after being killed he will rise again.' This time Jesus is not
using parables to convey a hidden message. He is using plain talk to
reveal the inner meaning of his whole career, the part the crowds won't
see until it actually happens. At this stage our Lord doesn't even try to
talk in parables about his approaching death. When that event comes closer
he will do strange things and say even stranger things about it. But here
he is simply trying to tell them what he sees is going to happen. He will
be betrayed. He will be killed. He will rise again.

But it wasn't just the switch from parabolic to plain literal speech which
put the disciples in a quandary. Basically they couldn't understand
because no such destiny as betrayal and death could possibly be part of
their expectation of what a Messiah might do. Not all Jews of the time
expected God to send a Messiah. But among those who did, nobody believed
Messiah would have to suffer, much less die.

To add to the disciples' confusion, Jesus' language, though now plain and
not metaphorical, contained two phrases which could have been code for
something else. This indicates, N T Wright suggests, the disciples may
have been trying to decode things which Jesus intended in a quite
straightforward sense.

The first phrase is our old friend 'the Son of Man'. Reams of paper have
been devoted to this figure in the past 150 years. That's because in
Judaism there were a lot of expectations surrounding 'the Son of Man'.
Because of that Jesus is fairly reticent in his use of the term. On this
occasion, what Jesus means by 'the Son of Man' is simply 'I'. Of course
Mark knows the phrase carries echoes of Daniel's great vision in which
'one like the Son of Man' appears. The rabbis interpreted that figure to
the people as referring to 'the people of the saints of the most high', a
collective picture of the people of God. But the phrase could also be used
as an indirect way of saying 'I'. That's how Jesus meant it back in 8:31
when he began to teach the disciples 'the Son of Man had to endure great
suffering, to be rejected by the chief priests and the elders, chief
priests and scribes; to be put to death, and to rise again three days
afterwards'. We know that's how Peter immediately understood it, for he
began to rebuke Jesus for his words. But today's passage refers to events
more than six days later and the message still doesn't seem to have sunk
in.

The second code phrase was 'after three days he will rise'. Most Jews
believed God would raise the dead at the end of the present age. But they
were not expecting one person would rise from the dead while the present
age continued on its way. Take Peter's sermon in the second chapter of
Acts. Immediately Peter demonstrated that the strange phenomena of
Pentecost were directly linked to God's declaring the crucified Jesus as
the Messiah through raising him from the dead, we hear the listeners were
cut to heart. Why? Not only because of their guilt but because, according
to their understanding, this meant the end of the age was upon them and
the general resurrection of the dead and the last judgment must somehow be
upon them already. That also goes towards explaining in Mark's report the
terror and confusion of the women when they heard from the angel at the
tomb that Jesus had risen from the dead. For them that message signalled
the end of the present age. So when Jesus said 'after three days he will
rise' the disciples must have wondered what on earth -- literally what 'on
earth' -- he was talking about.

Do you not sympathise with the disciples? Jesus teaches in code through
parables but then, without prior warning he switches to plain speech; yet
even when he talks literally he uses a couple of phrases that might be
code for something else. Even a noted scholar like Marcus Borg seems to
have difficulties, for he concludes the whole of the gospel and therefore
the Christian faith is just metaphor. That may be an easy way of solving a
lot of awkward problems, but it deprives us of any basis for expecting God
to act in history, including our own history, or even speak plainly. In
fact we might wonder if the God pictured by Borg and others communicates
at all. Are we all just circling around our own thoughts about God? If so,
mightn't we be better off just growing turnips or saving whales?

But if the disciples and people like Borg get it so wrong, we must ask
ourselves do we do the same thing? When God is saying something to us, how
good are we at listening? And I am not talking about distinguishing
metaphorical from literal speech. What I mean is this: If there is
something in Scripture, or something we've heard in church, or something
going on around us, through which God is speaking to us, are we open to
it? For God does speak and he continues to speak: through his word, the
witness of faithful Christians, the events of our lives, and the issues in
our world. Sometimes, as CS Lewis used to say of suffering, he may be
yelling at us through a megaphone. But are we open to his voice? Are we
prepared to have our earlier ways of understanding things taken apart so
that a new way of understanding can open up instead?

In the next incident there is an indication our answer may still be 'no'.
For like the disciples we may still be concerned about our own status,
about 'What's in it for me?' Perhaps we think following Jesus will
enhance, if not our own prestige, perhaps our particular cause, or our
sense of esteem and self-worth? -- something our society prizes so highly
today. But that so easily leads to the narcissistic sense that the Gospel
exists to make us feel good about ourselves or our bank balance and
lifestyle. If that's our expectation of the Gospel then we are making it
difficult for us to hear what God is actually saying. The goal of the
Gospel is to take us out of ourselves and centre us on God, and admire and
wonder and love and serve him so that we redirect our lives to the service
of other people in the name of Christ.

'What's in it for me?' was the basis on which the disciples were
operating. It is the basis of what the letter of James calls the wisdom of
this world, what Proverbs calls folly. It makes its appeal to all people
and in every area of life. It is very persuasive and the counsels that
arise from it may seem astute and right, but its fruit is division, party-
spirit, jealousy and disorder because it arises from a defensive self-
concern. Peter showed such a spirit of concern when he counselled Jesus
not to go the way of the cross.

Jesus would certainly be frustrated and disappointed that the disciples
could only worry about their own relative status. They wanted to be first
of all instead of the servants of all. That's the trouble when people only
understand half the message -- the half they want to understand. If Jesus
is the Messiah, thought the disciples, then we are royal-courtiers-in-
waiting. This erroneous idea would stay in their heads for several
chapters until the shocking truth dawned. Only then were they in a
position to give up self-saving folly and take on the subversive cross-
bearing wisdom of God, embodied in Jesus.

To jolt them out of their upside-down thinking Jesus -- not for the last
time -- uses a child as a teaching aid. Children in the ancient world
received normal family affection but they were not highly rated. They had
no prestige and no status. But they're not so highly rated today either,
even though we've had the International Year of the Child. And children --
some of them -- may dare tell their teachers 'without us you wouldn't have
a job'. But put that to one side. Instead think of the atrocities that
only happen to children in war-torn regions of the world. Millions in
developing countries still die of poverty and sickness before the age of
five when the outlay of a few dollars per child by affluent nations could
provide simple measures and vaccinations that could save them from
dysentery, measles, whooping cough and pneumonia. Think of the
repercussions of AIDS for Third World children.

But think also of our own country and the genocide of abortion. Many of
these abortions are linked to the sexual revolution. For as the Marxists
taught, if you're going to have a revolution there will always be the
accompanying social debris to clean up. Well, unwanted pregnancies are
social debris of the sexual revolution so abortion becomes the means of
cleaning up the debris. Think of mental retardation through foetal alcohol
syndrome and the incidence of abuse, including sexual abuse, against
children. These and other evils exist because children are not as highly
valued as other things and our pursuit of them. In the Roman world a
father had the power of life and death over his children. In our world we
who are better off may be deemed to have the power of life and death over
the children of others through what we give or withhold, through the
advocacy we make or decline to make. Yes Jesus' strange illustration
speaks to us just as powerfully -- perhaps more powerfully -- today as
then.

Rev. David Beswick says that in Jesus' native Aramaic the word for 'child'
and the word for 'servant' were the same. Jesus is making the point that
the disciples won't gain particular favour or social standing because they
are his followers. Yet anyone who receives even a child in Jesus' name
will receive Jesus himself, and thereby receive also 'the one who sent
me', a way of referring to God reminiscent of John's Gospel. To put it
another way, *anyone* who is associated with Jesus has access to the
royalty and divinity of God. The disciples are not special in that sense
at all.

Church history is full of accounts of people who thought they were
special, a cut above others, because they thought they had a special claim
on Jesus and his Kingdom. The more you understand the message of Jesus,
the closer you get to him, the more you realise things aren't at all like
what the disciples imagined. Jesus going to the cross is turning upside
down everything his disciples and their contemporaries had imagined -- and
the way people, including Christians, still think.

'If we feel sorry for the disciples in their confusion, we should ask
ourselves just how confused we ourselves still are. (NT Wright)'

Rev Clive Skewes, Assistant Minister at St John's UCA Mt Waverley Victoria Australia

Sunday 20 September 2009