October 18, 2009:  THE KING WHO SYMPATHIZES AND SERVES   
Hebrews (4:14) to 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45; Psalm 104:1-9, 24, 35c   
Eileen Parfrey --- Springwater Presbyterian Church           

            What is it about predicting his death that turns Jesus’ disciples into vultures?  Although, I can’t be too judgmental.  My own grandmother, like most elderly folks in the Midwest, would announce her major purchases to the family by saying, “That’s the last refrigeration I’ll ever need to buy.”  How were we supposed to reply to that?  “Oh no, Grama, you’ll be buying refrigerators for years.”  Maybe she was hoping we’d promise to bury her with it.  My sister eventually started saying, “Can I have it when you die?”  It made us laugh in the family, but when it started happening at the office it was creepy.  

When business was booming, my company had moved to a new office building, and you can’t put old furniture scrounged from construction job trailers in a new office, so we bought new desks.  As is often the way of capitalism, there was a pecking order for the kind of desk you got—fancy wood ones for executives, metal ones (nice, but metal) for lower orders.  When the bottom fell out of our business and people began to get laid off, you’d see the survivors going into offices where people were packing personal belongings and asking them, “Can I have your desk when you’re gone?”  Like the office furniture belonged to the employees, like it was theirs to give away.  Like it was appropriate for a person facing unemployment in tough times to face down a vulture hovering over their office furniture.  The gospel story strikes the same note for me.  Vultures.  Slimy.

I don’t know if Jesus saw his disciples as vultures or whether he simply recognized in them an anxiety about his death.  But his answer needs some explaining.  When Jesus talks to James and John about drinking from the same cup as he, the term he uses is Biblish for that “limited and fixed amount of whatever God has to offer a person in life.”   He ties this idea of “you get what you get” to the culture’s patronage system, in which a lower-status person’s needs are met by favors from a higher-status person in exchange for goods and services.  Except that he turns this system upside down.  It’s no longer about pay-backs and subservience by lower-status people, it’s about higher-status service—the kind of thing that happens in a family.  He throws in a good dash of the expectation of suffering instead of blessing as the reward for following him, and the whole stew flies in the face of their expectations of God.

In other words, don’t be too hard on James and John.  Everything they know about theology and culture and politics and living as Rome’s vassal nation required that they be interested in who inherits the new refrigerator when Grama dies, and could it be me.  Jesus, good teacher that he is, instead of chewing on them about it, makes this a teaching moment.  What he teaches is that the glory road goes through darkness—“Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?”  In the face of this terrible truth (about the necessity of suffering), it’s good to know God doesn’t ask unconditional piety of us.  What is required is that we trust that God isn’t arbitrary, even when the road to glory does lead through darkness.  Which is why we have the Hebrews lesson.  The lesson from Hebrews reassures us that the One who sticks up for us (the “high priest”) is one who can sympathize with us.  This is not the “I feel your pain” model.  There is something profoundly trust- and confidence-building about learning that someone with that kind of role is like us, has also taken the same risks and experienced the same problems we do.  That Jesus took risks means not just that he feels our pain, that he sympathizes with us, but that it’s not cheap sympathy.  He paid for it, fair and square.

Perhaps I’m not giving Bill Clinton enough credit, perhaps I’m buying into the Saturday Night Live skits more than he deserves.  Compare our reaction to Clinton’s “I feel your pain” with the credibility we’ve given Ted Kennedy’s advocacy for the poor.  After his life of privilege, for him to tell us he “felt our pain” might sound hollow without some action attached to it.  Yet no one could argue that his legislation didn’t come out on the side of the poor and down-and-out.  Neither could we argue that Ted Kennedy didn’t suffer.  Some of his suffering was self-inflicted.  But the loss of three brothers to violence in the service of their country, the sister who was born disabled and then moved away from the family—that’s not self-inflicted.  That the suffering existed, and that it became the avenue through which he identified with the pain of others, that he acted on that identifying, gives him credibility.  After his death the stories begin to come out.  For instance, he was frequently asked why he worked on behalf of the poor.  His response was simple. “Haven’t you ever read the gospel of Matthew?”  What a great answer.

What do you think?  Is unconditional piety what God is after from you?  Your unquestioning obedience and self-sacrificing adherence to religious rules?  Or do you think that what’s at stake in following this Messiah is to develop trust that God is not arbitrary and capricious?  A spirituality that avoids suffering feels pretty lightweight.  Even for Jesus, suffering is part of the package.  It’s the warning he gives James and John.  When my life fell apart, my pastor used to tell me there was no way around what I was experiencing, that the only way out was through.  I’m listening to a lecture series during my drive time these days.  One of the speakers, Paula D’Arcy, says she was challenged to put together a list of things about which she was certain.  She admits that the list is a lot shorter than what one would think—only seven items.  While it’s the sort of exercise we could all stand to do, her list is worth pondering.  Here it is:

1. Everything is gift.

2. We are entitled to nothing.

3. The wells of pain and joy are not separate.

4. Bitterness and healing are a choice.

5. Running from your darkness only leads to more darkness.

6. Darkness is held, ultimately, by Light.

7. The words of scripture, “In him we live and move and have our being,” are not simply poetic; they are real and actual and physical.

The road to glory leads through the valley of the shadow of death, and there’s no path around.  But God doesn’t expect us to be perfect, to “accomplish” this without missteps.  Even though the Hebrews passage says Jesus was without flaw and did the obedience thing unconditionally, that doesn’t mean God expects the same of us.  What God wants is our trust.  Running from our darkness only leads to more darkness. But we can be absolutely certain that our darkness, no matter how dark, is held by the Light in whom we live and move and have our being.  Of that I am certain.

Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh