Ransomed

Sermon for the 19^th Sunday after Pentecost  

The Rev. Ross M. Wright

Text: Mark 10:35-45

For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.       

(Mark 10:45)

      In our gospel reading, Mark allows us to eavesdrop on a revealing conversation between Jesus and his disciples. They are walking from the far side of the Jordan River to Jerusalem – a two or three days walk. Jesus knows that entering Jerusalem will trigger a series of events that will end in his arrest, trial, and execution. While they walk, he explains the situation to the disciples: 

      

We are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise. (Mark 10:33-34)

      The next thing we hear is a request from James and John: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” It’s an odd way to preface a request. It’s the approach you use when you’re about to ask for something and you know that you’re on shaky grounds. So you get them to agree ahead of time to say Yes, before they know what the request is. Calvin makes an astute observation about their request: “[T]his timid insinuation proves that they were conscious of something wrong.”¹ But Jesus hears them out:

What do you want me to do for you? And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.’”

They recognize the Jesus is the Messiah, about to claim his rightful throne. They want to be part of this movement. When he takes office, they want to be Secretary of State and Chief of Staff. They are asking for preferment. 

      Jesus responds by pointing again to what awaits him in Jerusalem: “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” This is another passion prediction – both the cup and baptism refer to what Christ has done for us on the cross. The cup refers to the cup of God’s wrath. On Good Friday, Jesus received God’s judgment for the sins of the world, for your sins and mine. This is why he prayed as he did in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was overcome with sorrow and anguish as he contemplated what he was about to take on. And he prayed that if possible, the hour might pass: “Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; removed this cup from me; yet not what I will but what thou wilt.” (Mark 14:36). 

      When he speaks of “the baptism with which I will be baptized,” Jesus means that he will be overcome, overwhelmed by the sins of the world. When he was baptized by John in the Jordan, he identified with human sin. He came from his Father’s throne and entered our world. This is why John Baptist expressed such surprise, because the baptism of John was a baptism for repentance of sin. John said: “You come to be baptized? I need to be baptized by you.” Jesus understands the events of Holy Week as the fulfillment of that step in the Jordan, a more complete identification with our sin. At the Jordan River, he identified with our sin. On the cross, he was overcome by them. All of this is behind Jesus’ response to James and John: “You don’t know what you are asking.” 

      It takes real faith to believe that Jesus Christ has a glorious kingdom and that he reigns in power. We do not see his glory. What we see is the apparent triumph of evil. Christ continues to be betrayed by a kiss. What we see is the church leaders at odds with each other. We must be prepared to have our understanding of Christ’s glorious kingdom reshaped. Christ meets us at the foot of the cross. He rules from the cross. He meets us in our sin and weakness, not in our success and our glory. God’s glory fills the world, but it doesn’t look like what we expect. 

      Mark tells us that when the other disciples heard this request, “they were indignant at James and John.” The idea that James and John might receive preferment, the fact that they had the audacity to ask, provokes anger in the ten. Again, Calvin is insightful: “[B]eing ashamed of their ambition, they did not openly complain, but . . . a sort of hollow murmur arose, and every one secretly preferred himself to the rest.”² Jesus then gathers the 12 and addresses them directly:

You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But is shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you just be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

The world works according to the exercise of power. God is not opposed to the exercise of human power. Weakness is not a virtue. When people are powerless, something of their humanity is denied. The problem is that in a fallen world, power is unevenly distributed. Why is it that some people rise above others? Why do some become stars while others labor in obscurity? Is it luck? Providence? Good genes? Jesus doesn’t address this question. He simply acknowledges the facts: often we are oppressed by those who have power over us. Believers are called to follow Christ in a world where power is used, and sometimes misused. 

      But this is not the whole picture. There is among us another type of power, the power of the one who dons the towel and serves. There is one among us who is the servant of all and therefore the greatest, Jesus Christ. When he speaks about the importance of being a servant, Jesus is speaking primarily about himself. “For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” 

      A ransom is a price paid to release someone from servitude. We are in bondage to prisons of our own making, the prisons of our discontent, guilt, and compulsions. And we do not have the power in ourselves to free ourselves. I am reminded of Wallace Shawn’s description of New York City in the film, “My Dinner with Andre:” 

‘ahh New York, it’s a very interesting place. . . do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about wanting to leave but never do? . . . I think that New York is a new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates ARE the guards . . . so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both the guards and prisoners . . . and as a result they no longer have the capacity . . . to leave the prison they made or to even see it as a prison.³

In 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in a literal prison in Berlin, awaiting an unknown future. He wrote his friend Eberhard Bethge, “Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent; one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other – things that are really of no consequence – the door is shut, and can be opened only from the outside.”⁴ For liberation, we, too, need for the door to be opened from the outside, from beyond ourselves. And for this liberation, Jesus Christ offered himself as ransom. 

      The best commentary on the meaning of Christ our ransom is the reading from Isaiah 53:

      He was wounded for our transgressions,

            he was bruised for our iniquities;

      upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,

      and with his stripes we are healed.

      All we like sheep have gone astray;

            we have turned every one to his own way;

      and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

                                                (Is. 53:5-6)

Those words were written 500 years before Jesus lived. They describe the suffering servant of Israel who is both the servant of Yahweh and the object of divine wrath. At some point in his ministry, Jesus began to understand his vocation as the fulfillment of the suffering servant of Israel. This explains his sense of dread in Gethsemane as he contemplated drinking this cup. It was not only anticipation of the physical suffering and death. It was also the realization of what this death signified. He would receive the judgment of God against all of the world’s injustice, violence, and sin. He looked ahead in time to each of us. He absorbed the judgment for us and in our place. That is the meaning of the promise, “Christ died for our sins, the just for the unjust.” Remember the comfortable words in the Rite One service of Eucharist. We will hear them again, momentarily: “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the perfect sacrifice (the ransom) for our sins, and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world” (I John 2:1-2). 

      “The cup that I drink, you will drink. And the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.” Every follower of Christ is called to share in Jesus’ cup and to be baptized in his death and resurrection. We are called to receive the cup of suffering which comes our way, trusting that it comes from his hand and can be endured. While he was in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote a poem, “The Powers of Good,” in which he gives thanks to God for the gracious powers which greet us each new day. And he acknowledges the cup of suffering which comes from God’s hand: 

      By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered,

      and confidently waiting come what may,

      we know that God is with us night and morning,

      and never fails to greet us each new day.

      And when this cup you give is filled to brimming

      with bitter suffering, hard to understand,

      we take it thankfully and without trembling,

      out of so good and so beloved a hand.⁵

All who belong to Christ are baptized into his death: the old life of sin is put to death, and we are raised to new life. The old man is passing away; the new man is being renewed day by day. It is this sharing of Jesus’ death that he refers to when he says: “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.” 

      The single greatest motivation to being a servant is not being told: You should stop being so ambitious! It is the realization that the king is in our midst. He dons the towel to serve us. As we come forward to receive bread and wine, he is interceding for us, so that his blood shed on Good Friday avails for our sins and offences and we are ransomed.

 

¹ Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, trans. by William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker: 1993), 419.
 

² Harmony of the Evangelists, 423.

³ Wallace Shawn, “My Dinner with Andre.”

⁴ Letters and Papers from Prison, ed., Eberhard Bethge; trans., Reginald Fuller and others (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 135.

⁵ This is the version of the poem which has been set to music by F. Pratt Green and is included in the Hymnal, hymn 695. For the original poem, see Letters from Prison, 400.