There’s a
puzzle that British newspapers like to publish called ‘spot the ball.’ They’ll take a photo of a moment in a soccer
match, use computer wizardry to render the ball invisible and invite readers to
reconstruct where it must be. It
sometimes takes some thought, but it’s an eminently doable puzzle, because all
the action really is revolving around the ball; everyone on the pitch treats it
as the most important object in the world and focuses their action around
it. It’s the same when someone really
important, really valued, really great is walking somewhere. Maybe we see it on campus on weekends like
this, or we’ve all seen media images of a rap star or president walking
surrounded by their entourage. They’re
surrounded, in the center, all conversations and interactions are rooted around
the great one in their midst.
But that doesn’t
seem to be how it is for Jesus, walking with his disciples. They don’t make him their center. In fact, the people who left all to follow
him have already started the process of abandoning him that will reach its
fullness at his crucifixion, when he gives all out of love for a people who can’t
stand to be with him. The saddest line
in this gospel passage is Jesus asking his disciples, “what were you arguing
about on the way?” Never mind that they
were arguing; never mind what they were arguing about; the very fact that he
had to ask is enough to make us stop and lament: they’d distanced themselves
enough from their loving Lord that he has to ask what they were talking about.
But we don’t
note this in order to excoriate long-dead disciples. We engage in this lament to understand what
drove them back, and to marvel how Jesus responded in love to this willful
refusal to accept him and his word. And
we do that because how Jesus responded is how Jesus responds still now today to
us.
The disciples
were scared. The total embrace of human
suffering Jesus had talked to them of was terrifying. They’d come to love their Lord; they’d
witnessed his power over disease, sin and storm, and this talk of him
suffering, of taking the fullness of human suffering onto himself was just too
much for them. So, out of fear of seeing
the one they love suffer, they retreat a little from that love; putting a
little distance between them and Jesus so as those who’ll hurt him can hurt
them a little less.
And as they
retreat from selfless love, they fall back into the jealousy and selfish ambition
that can plague us, that James talks of surviving even among Christians. They fall back into grasping after power,
because they don’t just want to be great, they want to be the greatest; because
they think that will anaesthetize them from the pain of suffering to which love
opens double gates.
And Jesus’
response to this could just have been to shake his head in a mix of anger and
disappointment and move on, but he stops, and he brings a child into their
midst. They refused him that place in
their midst, but he doesn’t accept their retreat; he acts, he re-arranges the
space to reform the priorities, the sense of what really matters in this room. And he puts a child there. And children, in this context, were not cute. Children were non-people, or, at best, soon-to-be-people. To the Jews’ disgust, Greeks and Romans regularly
left children who were inconvenient to die.
Children were vulnerable. And now
this child is embraced.
Jesus centers
the child, and Jesus embraces the child, and in this move, Jesus invites his
disciples to something better than fleeing in fear and chasing after power: He
invites embrace. He says to them what he
say to us: that he knows we’re afraid of the storm, he knows we’re afraid of
being too weak for this world, he knows we’re vulnerable. But we don’t need to run from these
things. In our weakness, he puts us in
the center of his world, and he embraces us.
The hands that stretched the heavens in a span and knew wound for us
embrace us.
And we can
embrace him too. We can embrace him in
the poor and vulnerable, the non-people of our day. And that will bring us face to face with
suffering. It will bring us to the cross
that even Peter ran from. And it will
bring us to eternal life, the ever-lasting embrace of God who seized us in
baptism, and keeps inviting us back.
No comments:
Post a Comment