“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” These are the words of George Orwell in his masterful and prescient book 1984.
We have crossed to the second half of our sermon series Identity and Vocation of the People of God. And you may be wondering why we are going through all of this. So let me tell you why.
The bible does not speak with a single voice. For example, as I alluded to two Sundays back, 2 Kings 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 have a contradiction, with the former indicating that Yahweh incited David to conduct a census, while the latter states that it was Satan who incited David. Both cannot be true simultaneously. Similarly, as we discussed last Sunday during Sunday School, Ezra commands the Israelites to divorce their foreign wives. Yet, the book of Ruth is precisely about how a foreign woman became the great-grandmother of David. Both perspectives cannot come from God.
Due to this equivocal nature of the bible, we are forced to pick and choose which parts of the bible to prioritize over others. Anyone who tells you that he/she treats all of the bible equally is either deceiving you or have deceived themselves. So, the question we face when reading the bible is where to place a given passage in a hierarchy of priorities. How do we decide? The first thing we have to reject is the idea that we need to be ‘biblical’. You see, slavery is biblical. Polygamy is biblical. Corporal punishment of children is biblical.
Hence, the question is not, “Is this biblical?” Rather, our question should be, “Is this like Jesus?” But again, we have visions of Jesus that are open to different interpretations. We have to be careful. The only Jesus we see walking and talking is the Jesus who appears in the Gospels. And even the fantastical final book of the canon reveals to us the primary lens through which we should interpret Jesus is as the lamb who was slaughtered because the hoped-for lion of the tribe of Judah is a no-show in the only book that mentions him.
In other words, not only are we to prioritize Jesus, but also we are to prioritize those pictures of him that align him more with the lamb than with the lion. Of course, given the competing visions of Jesus and of the Christian faith that are prevalent in many pockets of the world, you may wonder how I reach this conclusion. I mean, who am I to tell you which parts of the bible to prioritize and which parts to subordinate? How about we hear from the horse’s mouth? Yes, I know I just called Jesus a horse! So without any further horsing around, let us proceed.
Remember, we are reading a narrative - Mark’s Gospel. This means that the passage we heard is not a standalone passage devoid of context. Rather, it is a part of Mark’s overarching plot. Mark’s Gospel is divided into three Acts - 1.1 to 8.26 forming Act I; 8.27 to 10.52 forming Act II; and 11.1 to 16.8 forming Act III. At the end of the main action in Acts I and II there are short transition paragraphs, making 8.21 the climax of Act I and 10.45 the climax of Act II. The whole of Act II is devoted to the theme of Jesus revealing himself to his disciples who resist the revelation and refuse to accept it.
In this Act, Jesus tells his disciples about his upcoming death three times and there are three occasions when they refuse to accept what he is attempting to teach them. The passage we are dealing with is the third occasion, leading to the aforementioned climax. So let us see what we learn from our passage.
Mark begins by telling us that James and John approached Jesus with the request to be given the positions of primacy when Jesus attained his glory. Here I should let you know one of my main hypotheses concerning the New Testament. There are words used in the scriptures that are very important to the faith. Some of these are glory, holy, salvation, victory, and power. What the New Testament does is use these words but redefine them in light of the death of Jesus so that we have a different understanding of what these words actually mean.
I do not have the time here, but the New Testament redefines the idea of glory in such a way that the most glorious thing in its pages is the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus’ full glory is revealed to his disciples and then to us in and through his crucifixion. Hence, though James and John did not know it, they were actually asking for the prime positions when Jesus was crucified. Jesus responds by telling them that those positions are reserved for other people. Later, in chapter 15, Mark will tell us that Jesus is crucified with one man to his left and one to his right.
James and John have clearly misunderstood what Jesus was going to do. This should be abundantly clear when we read Mark because just before our passage begins we read that Jesus told his disciples, “Look, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the gentiles; they will mock him and spit upon him and flog him and kill him, and after three days he will rise again.”
Despite this, James and John seem to have an idea that clamoring for positions of power was important. Why? Well, you see, there was another set of brothers - Peter and Andrew. And Peter was always speaking up and making his views heard. James and John probably thought that, if they did not speak up soon enough, Peter would do so and grab the prized positions for himself and his brother. So, in a classic power play, James and John seize the initiative and pre-emptively ask Jesus to assign the best portfolios to them.
One or more of the other disciples probably overheard the request. And the ten of them became indignant. So, Jesus calls all of them aside to teach them. His words are crucial. He begins by giving them a proposition. Let me give this proposition in my translation: “You know that those who are considered first among the nations subjugate them, and their great ones dominate them.” Both words katakurieuó and katexousiazó have the preposition kata prefixed to them indicating a negative intensification of the normal words kurieuó and exousiazó.
The kind of rule and authority that Jesus is describing is not benevolent but malevolent. In case some leader, either past or present, comes to your mind, who you think is or was benevolent, and who, therefore, might be an exception to Jesus’ blanket assertion, hold on to that thought, because Jesus still has to define what he means by the opposite of subjugation and domination.
But before he defines the opposite of subjugation and domination, he tells his disciples that, though the leaders of the nations exercised their authority in subjugating and domineering ways, it is not so among his disciples. Note carefully that Jesus does not issue this as a command. Nor is this a description of a future state. Rather, he states a present reality that defines his disciples. His disciples are those who do not even attempt to subjugate and dominate others. Please note what I am saying carefully because Jesus does not give us any wiggle room.
You see, if he had issued a command, there would be the possibility of us not obeying him. If he had described a future state, we could claim we are off the hook in the present. However, because he describes a present reality, we have to take what he describes with the utmost seriousness. If he says that it is not the case with his disciples that we resort to subjugating and domineering ways, then this must be one way in which we can distinguish between those who only claim to be Christian and those who have allowed Jesus’ vision of how to wield power to transform them.
This is particularly relevant because politics and religion are areas of human communal life in which the abuse of power is rampant. These are areas of human communal life in which power is voluntarily handed over to a person because he or she has a position that is associated with the wielding of a certain level of power. Jesus is not unaware of this. He is critically aware of two things.
First, he knows that human communities need structures in order to function in a healthy way. A community without organizational structures will eventually degenerate into chaos. Hence, even though Jesus and most of the authors of scripture challenge people in positions of authority, they do not propose anarchy as the solution to the abuse of power by those in authority. To the contrary, they challenge those in positions of authority precisely so that they could mend their ways and in so doing promote the health of the communities in which they wield authority.
Second, Jesus is aware that long term good leadership is possible only when those who are led can implicitly trust the leader to be working for their benefit and not for his or hers. When a leader makes announcements to manipulate the stock market or makes statements disconnected from reality you know that the leader does not have the best of the people as a priority.
But be careful. This does not necessarily mean that those who oppose that leader have the people’s best in mind. This has been the problem plaguing every republic from the early Greek and Roman republics to the USA, India, and other republics today. Too often we fall into the trap of just voting out the incumbent rather than voting in someone who will genuinely work for the people. As you go to the polls soon, bear this in mind. The people will not get a good leader only by voting out a bad leader. The replacements need to be good too.
So, quite obviously, we need to ask, “How, then, can we know for sure if a leader can be trusted?” Jesus continues with the words, “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.” Jesus described his kind of leader as a servant and a slave. A servant or diakonos is someone who does menial tasks for another person. A slave or doulos is someone whose will is subordinated to the will of another person. According to Jesus a leader worth trusting is someone who does the lowest of tasks for others and who elevates the needs and wants of their followers above their own needs and wants.
Jesus concludes this segment of teaching with the words, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” Jesus gives his own vocation as a reason for which his disciples should view leadership in the way he does. The Son of Man, of course, is the figure from Daniel 7, who is given all authority. In other words, by using this title, Jesus claims to be the leader beyond all leaders. Yet, he indicates that his way of leadership and wielding power is that of giving his life in order to liberate others.
Of course, we have a remarkable tableau of this in the Gospel according to John, in the scene where Jesus washes his disciples’ feet. And note there that he says, “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” He is, of course, not talking about literal washing of feet, but about the meaning that washing another person’s feet carried. But he could have done something else, right? He could have been their server during the meal. Or he could have cooked the meal, a task normally reserved for women. Or he could have offered to wash their dirty robes, another task reserved for women. Why foot washing?
The clue lies in a most unexpected place, the priestly blessing, “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” We are so used to hearing this blessing that we do not wonder what the logistics of this blessing might be. And as I say this, you are probably confused. Logistics? For a blessing? Whatever could Deepak mean by linking these two words? What I mean is that, if we were to visualize this blessing coming true, what would we envision?
The first thing we must recognize is the transitory nature of the blessing. The priest does not directly say, “I bless you with long life or a good spouse or healthy children or a good job or a loving family or steadfast friends.” No! Rather, the priest’s blessing is that Yahweh would bless and keep the recipients. The exact content of the blessing is left to Yahweh, who alone knows how to bless each of us. But with regard to the logistics, there is something hidden in the Hebrew that cannot be captured in languages that are not Semitic.
You might know that the word for ‘bless’ is barak. Yes, one of your former presidents is named ‘blessing’. But barak originally meant ‘to kneel’, with related words having the b-r-k stem carrying meanings like ‘knee’, ‘bow’, and ‘serve’. It is only in so-called religious contexts, such as the blessing we are considering, that barak is translated as ‘bless’. But I ask you, if a word always means one thing, with one exception in a narrow context, does that not call into question the exception? After all, if there is an exception only in a narrow context, how did we decide this is the case?
We would have had to know there was an exception beforehand in order to advocate for the exception. In other words, exceptions always involve circular reasoning and require strong external arguments to stand. While in the Old Testament we might have been able to find such external support, it is a different case in the New Testament. When we see Jesus in the Gospels, we see him consistently rejecting the exceptions. Hence, while most leaders may claim privileges that the common people don’t have, Jesus says that he lays down his life as a ransom for many. While most leaders claim that a leadership position requires the common people to serve the leader, Jesus says that he came not to be served, but to serve.
Hence, while enacting what this service looks like, Jesus goes to the foundational books of the Israelites, takes the most iconic blessing for them, and enacts it in the foot washing to show that there is no exception to the idea of barak. Barak involves kneeling and service. Hence, if we wish to understand how God himself blesses us, it is not by towering over us, but through kneeling and service.
If you are still unconvinced, ask yourselves, “In what relative positions should God and the person he blesses be in order for the statement, ‘The Lord lift up his countenance upon you’ to make sense?” If God is above the person, then God lifting his face would be to turn away from the person; hardly a depiction of blessing. But if God is below the person, then God lifting his face would be to turn toward the person, which is precisely what a blessing is. The blessing of the priest, therefore, expresses the desire that God will place himself in a position to serve the person.
We see this everywhere in the bible, if we only looked at the scriptures with the lenses Jesus gives us. The sheep is able to drink clean water and settle in green pastures, only because the shepherd serves the sheep by driving predators away and guiding the sheep to the plenteous lands. Ezekiel describes God blessing Israel as like a man who found an abandoned newborn infant on the roadside and decided to adopt her and care for her. And of course, Melchizedek blesses Abraham by coming out to serve him with - hold your breath - bread and wine.
The seduction of the world is to convince us that power equates to privilege, that position grants preference. What Jesus gives us is different. What he teaches us is that power is only appropriately wielded if it is exercised in privileging the upliftment of those over whom one has authority. He teaches us that the position a leader holds is only given in order to show preference for those who are weakest among the people. In other words, there is no genuine blessing that comes from above because, even God, in and through and as Jesus has blessed us from below.
This is the measure through which we are called to gauge whether a leader is a Jesus-shaped leader. Does the person presume to bless from above or below? Is their position used to acquire preferential treatment for themselves? Is the power they have used to ascribe privileges to themselves? Or is it the other way around? Mind you, this is the measure by which you must gauge me too? By virtue of my role I have a position and a certain amount of power. How do I exercise this? There can be no exceptions.
What we learn from Jesus, then, is that leadership is only truly happening when the leader serves the led. He gave himself as the embodiment of this. Even he - or rather especially he - would bless by serving rather than asking to be served. He would bend so low as to lay down his life for many. And if this is his example to us, it is his way for us to follow. So let us accept this task from him, exercising power to privilege the weak, using our positions to prefer those who have no voice, and in so doing we will be rejecting the seduction of power.