Jesus imagined a community without hierarchy and privilege, one based on care and compassion.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the tenth chapter of Mark’s Gospel (Mark 10:35-45), which finds Jesus and his disciples on the road to Jerusalem.
Somewhere along the way, James and John found a private moment with Jesus and asked him if they could be at his right and his left when he came into his glory. Those, of course, would have been the places of greatest prominence in the court of a ruler. Jesus didn’t say them yes or no. He said, in fact, that it was up to somebody else to make those decisions, but he took the opportunity to ask them: are you prepared to be baptized with the baptism that I will go through?
They said, “Yes,” not knowing, I suspect, that by baptism Jesus meant death and resurrection.
In a small group there are very few secrets and, indeed, the other disciples learned about this conversation, and they were pretty annoyed with James and John. Jesus summoned them together and said — again — that amongst his community there was not to be a quest for power, but that the greatest of them would be the servant of all of them.
And he proceeded to demonstrate what that meant when he was arrested and executed upon a cross.
In the first century it would have been almost impossible to imagine a social system, a community, that was organized around mutual service. There were the people at the top and there were the many, many, many more people at the bottom, and that was how things worked. A society in which people took care of one another? Well, it was nearly inconceivable. But Jesus dreamed it.
And some decades later, as he set these words down to parchment, words that eventually we would read, Mark dreamed it again: repeating this message about a community made up of servants, of people compassionately caring for one another.
It’s been two thousand years and we haven’t attained it. It is still the dream of Christ.
But just imagine what that could be: a community of compassion and care. Isn’t that worth struggling for, working for, dreaming towards? Isn’t that worth our efforts, our time, and our faith?
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
