WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert 11/13/05

Mark 10:1-52 “Follow Me”

“We have left everything to follow you.” So says Peter to Jesus. In a sense, Peter was right; the Twelve had now left Galilee and were on the road to Jerusalem. Their homes, their families, their jobs were behind them, at least for the moment. Did Peter want commendation? It sounded a bit like it. But perhaps it was more that he needed some affirmation about what they were all doing here, because Jesus had just come out with another devastating statement about discipleship that left the Twelve gasping. It had left them wondering just what it meant to follow Jesus, and who could possibly do it.

1) A Rich Young Man

It’s a story you know well: of a young but wealthy man, who saw in Jesus something he wanted to know more about, and came asking to be taught the way to life. He was a good man, a pious man who had striven to keep God’s Law; a man the Twelve and everyone else would have both admired and envied – as humans always do to good people. Jesus, of course, does not react this way: in fact, he feels affection for a young man in whom he sees a true longing for God and his kingdom. But Jesus also sees, as nobody else does, how this man’s wealth stands between him and God, as it does between him and other people. Let that go, says Jesus, and follow me – then you will find your way into my kingdom.

The young man is distressed, and saddened, and quietly turns away. He cannot let go of his wealth. It is a poignant moment, and Jesus speaks – softly we can imagine – to his disciples: “how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom.” The Twelve are astonished. Wealth to them is a sign of God’s favor, and this pious and observant man clearly has earned both. If he is not a candidate for Jesus’ new kingdom, who is? Is it possible for anyone to enter?

Jesus is of course unperturbed by their protests, and repeats even more emphatically that wealth can be a hindrance to spiritual rebirth. Not, as he has said elsewhere, that wealth in itself is wrong, but relying on it, being less than generous with it, can get in the way of following Jesus. Peter, understandably, blurts out a protest and a question all in one – “we have left home and family and everything for you – what will happen to us?” Jesus as always reassures the fearful: “in this life, you will find you are now part of a bigger family than ever, and in the age to come, you will enter eternal life.” But Jesus wants Peter to understand what this means in relation to the rich young man: people like him who are “first” in this world’s estimations may not make it into the kingdom; people like you who have let go the little you had will be “first.”

2) Being First

But it’s not clear if Peter or the rest of the Twelve got the message – again! Their concerns about being “first” kept re-surfacing. It came up over the children. They had no value in Jewish eyes in those days – children and slaves together occupied the lowest level, below women, who were below men, who were below pious and learned men, and so on. Jesus was a “teacher,” maybe an unofficial “rabbi” – even, Peter had said, the expected Messiah. In any case, he would have no time for children. Yet children and their parents intuitively knew that Jesus did not see them this way. They came looking for him; looking for healing and love and blessing, and found just that. So once again Jesus makes children an example to self-important adults: their insignificance, their readiness to trust and receive, are precisely what are needed to enter my kingdom!

When James and John come to Jesus to ask a favor, he quickly spots their ambitions. “What do you really want?” he asks them. To be your number one and number two; to sit at your right and left in your kingdom! What were they thinking? Had they still not grasped it? Jesus promises they will share his “cup“ and his “baptism” (though surely they did not know what he meant), but they would not share his throne. So once more Jesus calls the Twelve together and spells it out: among the pagans the important people “lord it” over the rest, but “it shall not be so among you!” Among Jesus’ followers, the hierarchies that the world prizes have no place. No one will “exercise authority” over others in his kingdom. That is not his way, and he forbids his followers to practice it! Leave your status issues behind if you want to follow me and be my disciple, says Jesus.

Even in marriage, there are issues to re-learn. Men do not own their wives, and cannot divorce them at a whim because they find them “displeasing.” Moses’ original “divorce ruling” covered a man finding something “indecent” in his wife – which Jesus reiterates in the teaching that Matthew records, permitting (but not requiring) divorce in cases of adultery. But the rabbis of Jesus’ era, including the great Hillel and Shammai, had made divorce easy by interpreting “indecency” to mean anything that displeased a husband. So women were thrown out of homes for “burning the bread”- which as Jesus well understood, was usually a pretext for a husband wanting to marry someone else. And that, as Jesus and all biblical writers affirm, is never a reason for divorce that God approves. Reasons for divorce there are, in a fallen world, but wanting to marry someone else is not one of them. That is adultery. The issue to learn is that wives are not articles to be disposed of – a man’s status as “first” in the family does not permit that. In Jesus’ kingdom, men and women will be valued equally, as God intended in the beginning when he made them.

3) To Serve and Give

All these lessons about letting go of status, possessions, ambitions, are framed around Jesus’ most pointed teaching about his own future and its meaning. He is striding towards Jerusalem; “Jesus leading the way, the disciples astonished, and other followers afraid.” As they journey, he again tells them “the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests, condemned to death, handed over to the Gentiles (that is, the Romans), mocked, spit upon, flogged and killed, and raised on the third day.” He could hardly have been more specific or more accurate. He confronts even modern readers with the choice: either he supernaturally foresaw everything that would happen to him, or the church put these words in his mouth after the events. You must decide.

But in this series of prophecies about his future, Jesus adds more than details. He adds a purpose. “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve; and to give his life as a ransom for many.” This has been called the high point of the Gospel to this moment. What Jesus is going to do to bring “the least, the last and the lost” (Witherington) into his kingdom is to give his life to rescue them from what now imprisons them; to give his life to free them; to pay their debt; to atone for their sins; to purchase them forgiveness. He will substitute himself for them, his life for theirs. He will “give his life as a ransom for many.”

That is the passport into his kingdom. Not being good, or being male, or being adult, or being rich. Not even sacrificing your home comforts and jobs to follow him. Oh, there are rewards for that, but entering his kingdom is not one of them. The kingdom is a gift, one only Jesus can give, and he gives it by offering his life in the place of “the least, the last and the lost” so that they can be rescued from the pits that this world drags them into.

4) True Disciples

So if you often feel you have nothing going for you, take courage! Jesus came for people like you! Even a beggar sitting at a city gate understood that faith in Jesus was the real call on his life and the real answer to his needs. Blind Bartimaeus “saw” more than Peter, James and John, even before Jesus healed him (Witherington). He knew Jesus was the Messianic Son of David, he knew he had to get to him, he leapt at the chance to meet him, he knew what he needed, he asked for mercy, he had faith Jesus could heal him, and then he left behind the little he had to follow Jesus.

The time for true disciples was coming. They were in Jericho, only 15 miles from Jerusalem. Jesus next step would involve friends in Bethpage, and a donkey ride into the city. He knew, though clearly nobody else did, that he would be dead in two weeks. But he also knew that this was why he came; this was why they had rambled around Galilee and Phoenicia and across the lake for almost three years; this was why he taught, this was why he healed and called men and women to follow him. The way into his kingdom ran past his cross, where he would willingly pay the price of entrance for all the sad and needy and sinful people who had decided to follow him.

And not just them, but all the “many” more who down through the years would see that being his disciple means letting go of the world’s standards of judgment and throwing themselves on him. It means letting go of status and age and gender and wealth and choice, and being foolish enough to trust Jesus for the gift of true life in this world and in the one to come.

It means to accept at some deep level that we do indeed need to be “ransomed,” to be “set free,” from the things that bind us – from our self-importance, from our longings for things or people that are not for us, from our desire to be noticed and applauded and valued and paid and promoted and honored; from our unwillingness to take second place or to do menial work, from our belief that the world owes us a living, from our expectation that people “lower” on the pole – women, children, servants, are there to meet our needs. We need to be freed from our sad belief that owning more “stuff” will make us feel better, will make everything right; and to be able to let go of what God is teaching us we don’t need.

In short, we need to be freed from what some consider the most basic sin of all – pride. Pride in ourselves, pride in our achievements, pride in our worth, pride in our potential; all that gets in the way of seeing ourselves as we truly are, and Jesus as he truly is. For he is the Savior, the Messiah who came to lay down his life freely to free us from the power and the penalty of sin and death. His death redeems those who will trust him, and his life becomes their life. So those who see themselves as the “last” in this world can become “first” in his kingdom.

If you are still outside “putting on your face” or “combing your hair” so that you look good; forget it, let it go, and go in to meet Jesus. He invites those who know they need him, who are prepared to kneel in gratitude at his cross, to enter his kingdom. Follow him.

Let us pray...