From religious practice to discipleship

Mark 10:32-52

I can empathize with Zebedee.

Zebedee? you’re no doubt wondering. I don’t remember hearing about any Zebedee?

Oh, he was there. Mark 10, verse 35: “James and John, Zebedee’s sons, came to Jesus and said, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.’”

Zebedee is mentioned several times in the Bible like this, either as the father of James and John or as the husband of Salome, and he does actually make an appearance in Mark 1:19-20 when he is out fishing with his sons as Jesus calls them to leave him behind. So, we know he’s a fisherman but that’s pretty much it. Still, I strongly relate to Zebedee and I’ll tell you why: Because his grown-up children come to Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior of the world, the Big Kahuna, and they say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

I’m not sure there’s any moment in scripture where I completely get Jesus more than when these grown-up children come up, pulling his arm and saying, “Hey, Son of God… Hey, son of God! Hey! Hey! Look at us! Give us what we want!”

So, I feel for Zebedee, because if his grown-up sons are like this for Jesus, seriously what were they like back at home?

One of the metaphors most common to our relation with God is that of “Father.” It’s not the only metaphor we have of course, and in some ways it can be a troublesome one for some people. If you had a poor father in your life or if you lost your father, imagining God as Father can be either very positive as you yearn for the figure you were missing or it can be unhelpful and even traumatic. So, realizing that God as Father doesn’t work for everybody, it can nonetheless be a useful metaphor for some of us in moments like these. God as divine parent can help us to remember how childish we can be—not childlike, childish.

So I don’t know Zebedee, but I feel for him. James and John are childish in this story. “Allow us to sit at your right-hand and your left!” they ask.

In return they get a kindergarten response from Jesus. If you listen closely to the scripture you can hear the long sigh that Jesus let out here. It’s like that moment where the children’s sermon has gone out of control and the kids are pretty sure the pastor is Jesus and that he is going to give out candy like the Easter bunny, except—need I remind you—James and John are not children. Their stupidity is a little harder to excuse.

“Can you drink the cup I drink or receive the baptism I receive?” Jesus asks them.

“We can,” they answer.

This is where it gets fun, because the disciples still obviously don’t get who Jesus is, even though he’s spent every single chapter in the Gospel of Mark spelling it out for them. They think he is asking them if they can literally drink from his cup and receive the kind of baptism for the forgiveness of sins that Jesus received from John the Baptist. Well, that’s easy! Is that all there is to sitting at the right-hand of God?

They are asking a question about religious practice, but the answer Jesus gives is about discipleship. The difference between religious practice and discipleship is the difference between the meaningfulness of ritual and the testimony of self-sacrifice. We need both, but the great irony is that the disciples fail particularly hard at the latter: They don’t know what it means to be a disciple.

“You will drink the cup I drink and receive the baptism I receive,” Jesus begins. They will, in fact, but not only in the way they imagined. Yes, they will share meals and, yes, they will get baptized—likely, they have already. They will participate in the religious practices of the day, but as we come to know in the Last Supper, the cup is also a reference to the blood of Christ, and the baptism Jesus receives is not just the dunking of water given by John the Baptist but, more crucially, his death on the cross. Through Lent, we can probably find a time and a place to read that Bonhoeffer quote every single week, the one where he says, “When Jesus Christ calls a disciple he bids him come and die.”

When we participate in religious practice we so often do so out of a desire to be fed. We go to church expecting to be fed—spiritually, emotionally, even physically. That’s fine, but discipleship is not about being fed, it’s about doing the feeding, and, ultimately, it is about self-sacrifice—about walking the road of the cross. Walking the road of the cross is about more than the religious practices of Lent, as important and meaningful as these may be. To be a disciple of Jesus is to drink of the cup that Christ drank—to receive the forgiveness of sins by the means of grace—and then it is to receive the baptism Christ received, which is not a reference to our baptism—it is a reference to his death. Jesus is asking the brothers if they are prepared to die in the way he will.

As a brief aside into why we do things the way we do in the church, this is why we don’t baptize those who have already died—not because they are beyond grace but because their baptism was completed in death. As Paul says in Romans 6:4, “We were buried with [Christ] through baptism into death…”

The disciples ask Jesus a question about power and about religious practice, and he gives them exactly the answer they want but not in a way they can understand, which is pretty much how every story in the Gospel of Mark goes. But, you know, if you could have God figured out, it wouldn’t be God.

So, back to Zebedee. For those of us who are parents or grandparents, and for those of us who deal with children or adults acting like children, for bartenders and the teachers both among us it’s good to be reminded that most of our questions are kindergarten questions no matter how deftly we cover them in smart-sounding words. In our own ways, we tend to ask Jesus about what we have to do to sit next to him in power. We are still trying to square a faith that tells us to pick up our crosses and die with systems that promote wealth and status and power. We still come to Jesus afraid of things that might-maybe-possibly-potentially hurt us when Jesus is the very one who conquered death.

            Belief is one thing, trust is another; both are hard.

I actually find a good deal of hope in this story today, as I often do with the disciples in Mark’s Gospel, because Jesus doesn’t send James and John away for their stupid question. He doesn’t talk down to them or tell them to go and research it themselves first. He doesn’t get angry with them at all. It’s like he knows us. It’s like Jesus understands our hopes and fears, like he gets what it means to be human, which is to live in contradiction. We want to trust in God, but when we spend so little of our lives in actual danger we find little need for God. I read yesterday about Chinese Christians in Wuhan walking the streets, bringing food to their sick and quarantined neighbors, willingly being the ones to put themselves in danger for the sake of their neighbors, while we buy hundreds of unnecessary things out of possibly-maybe-probably-kind of legitimate fear.

Since our struggles are confined to higher-level disappointments and less often poverty, starvation, and war, we have learned to judge life by the distance between our expectations and reality, holding God accountable when we suffer too much or encounter some impassible road block. Too often, God functions for us like a magical genie, and our faith is dependent on getting what we want.

Jesus doesn’t tell off James and John not because they aren’t idiots but because, on some level, we’re all idiots. We have faith not because we have certainty but because we don’t. The judgment of James and John is not dependent on their worst moments, their terrible questions, or all the times they told their dad to get them another glass of milk before bed even though he told them that was the last glass of milk two glasses ago. They aren’t perfect; in fact, they aren’t even particularly good. They’re just people, and Jesus gets people.

We aren’t all the same. Some of us elect to serve ourselves; some elect to serve others; most are a little of column A and a little of column B. Jesus gets that, but rather than saying “It’s OK, everybody makes mistakes!” Jesus says something different, “You are forgiven. Come. Follow me.”

He did what a good father would do, listen to the incessantly stupid questions and still love the kids asking them. He loves them not because they deserve it and not because they are better than the rest but simply because they are his children. In turn, he says, “Come. Follow me.” Yes, even to death. And Jesus doesn’t give us only one chance or even one hundred’ there is no limit to the times he will put up with the bull, because he knows us. He knows how badly we fail, and he loves us anyway.