We are in the final weeks of hearing from Mark’s Gospel. Way back in Advent through Easter, we heard all the dramatic stories of Jesus’ life and ministry. Since June, we have been wrestling with the middle chapters of the gospel book, working out with the disciples what Discipleship means. What it means to follow Jesus as he goes about bringing the Kingdom of God near. It sounds relatively simple if we don’t think about it much and stick to a Sunday-school-surface reading. 

Of course, Mark, Jesus and the Disciples don’t give us much of a chance to make that choice. This week, James and John ask Jesus to sit at his right and at his left. (It almost sounds like my children, who are often very keen to manage whom they sit next to at mealtime.) Yet, this is not just about children trying to get seated next to the teacher, or popular kid, or favourite grandparents at dinnertime. 

James and John are opening up a complicated and layered issue that Christians continue to deal with today. What does it mean to be associated with Jesus and what do we get out of it? We don’t have to look much further than the various elections going on around us to see the ways in which politicians use proximity or distance from Jesus, Christianity, the Church and Faith to gain votes and power. We also don’t have to think very far back to the ways that the Church has used Jesus as a means to wield power over other Christians, over our neighbours, and over Creation. 

On Sunday morning, we will discover that James and John don’t really understand what they are asking. They don’t yet see that Discipleship, as Power, is not what Jesus is offering. Discipleship as Service or Sacrifice might be more like it. Jesus also has some harsh words about the problems of trying to gain individual power on offer. 

Before we get to unpack what reversal and work of transformation Jesus is up to with us, we might have to sit and stew over these hard questions. What does it mean to belong to a religion that has had such a complicated relationship with power? How do we each fit within the relationship and experience of power?

By now you might be able to guess that some of these questions are part of what I am currently working on in my doctoral courses. As we try to understand just where we sit as people of faith in 2024, there is work to be done to understand how Christianity arrived here. 

However, I won’t dig too deep into issues of power, colonialism, white-euro-centric Christian supremacy and more right now. 

Instead, as we go back to Jesus and the disciples in the Gospel of Mark, we are reminded that even in the mess of power that they and we find ourselves in, Jesus has come to flip and overturn the established orders. Christ’s power is to serve, sacrifice and give. Christ gives Godself fully and completely to power-seeking people like James, John and the rest of us. And in that giving of Godself, somehow Jesus shows us the way to new life. 

Photo: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s House… and we know his ideas on the cost of discipleship.