Jesus embraces us – Mark 9:30-37, James 3:16-4:3

Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B; Holy Infant church.

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 attention on it.  It’s the same when someone really important, really valued, really great is walking somewhere.  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 so distanced themselves 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, because we draw back sometimes too.

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.

They try to find something secure they can cling to, and they try to find it in status and honor, in winning the competition of being greatest. And we do this all the time when we’re scared: we find something to grasp, and it’s normally the wrong thing, and the grasping stops us from being open. So, they break what my seminary rector called the 11^th Commandment: “Thou shalt not compare.” Because when we start playing that game, either we win and we fall into pride or we lose and fall into jealousy. Either way we lose. James talks about that kind of jealousy and selfish ambition in his community, and how it makes it disordered and creates a sense of war.

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. 

Here in this place we put Jesus in the center. In receiving him, body, blood, soul and divinity, we re-enthrone him in the center of our persons. Let’s keep him there, in the non-persons of our day, as we’re sent forth from this place.