Pentecost 21 (Mark 10:35-45) “For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give His life as ransom for many.”

The apostles wanted to rule.

It is very clear from the biographies of Jesus, the gospels, that the apostles shared the common assumptions of the people of their day. They believed firmly and without doubt that God is power.

Because they believed God is power they also believed the Messiah, God’s anointed representative on earth, would exercise that power to impose God’s perfect will on imperfect people. Those who submitted to this Messiah would receive a reward. The reward would be a position in the new government. With that position would be the power to rule over and dominate other people, lesser people.

Certainly James and John wanted this power to rule and to dominate. Despite the fact that John was Jesus’ best friend, he also came to Jesus with a set of beliefs that subverted that friendship. He assumed that his friendship with Jesus would reward him, and his brother, with the highest positions in the new government. He assumed, as did all of those who followed Jesus and all of those who opposed Jesus, that Jesus would impose God’s will on all people through the institution of religion and government.

The other ten apostles reacted with anger and jealously when they discovered that James and John had asked Jesus for the most powerful posts in the coming Messianic Kingdom. They wanted those positions for themselves.

The apostles and indeed everyone in that generation not only believed they knew who God was, what God wanted, and how God would establish His kingdom, they knew. Not only did they know, they knew that they knew. They were in a state of invincible ignorance. In order to know that they knew all about God they had to ignore the fundamental teachings of Moses and the Prophets. They had to ignore the long history of Israel’s failure as a nation to hear the message, to receive the message and to act on the message the Holy Spirit revealed to them in the Torah, the Old Testament.

Jesus came into the world to demonstrate to people that God is not power. God certainly has power but that is not who God is. Jesus came into the world to show people that their so called knowledge of the Divine was grounded on the shifting sand of wishful thinking and false belief.

Jesus came into a world and a society of strong, rigid, inflexible and uncompromising belief. He came to help people surrender those beliefs to be transformed by faith. He did not ask anyone to place their faith in a religious or political institution. He offered himself as the proper place and the proper person for faith.

Jesus came to reveal and make real who God is. God is love. God just doesn’t have love as one of many attributes. God is love. That love is infinite and eternal. That love is steadfast, holy, unconditional and universal. That love is sacrificial. That love is embodied as Jesus prays: Heavenly Father, not my will but your will be done. That love asks other people the question: how may I help.

Until the crucifixion, no one who knew Jesus could accept this truth. They were not bad people. But they were lost. They were, as we are, lost in separation from God. In separation they created God in their own image. The created a deity within the categories of fear, self will and pride. They believed in this deity so passionately that they routinely invoked divine wrath on their enemies, bullied people who disagreed with them, and killed anyone who challenged them, including Jesus himself.

The world hasn’t changed much over the last two thousand years. People are still lost. We are lost in the invincible ignorance of beliefs forged in the fires of self will, fear and pride. We are lost in the illusion of religious systems that teach God is either wrath, God is self-indulgence or God does not exist. We are lost and unwilling to question our beliefs as the apostles were at this point in their lives unwilling to question their beliefs.

Thanks be to God. Jesus is not about belief. Jesus is about faith. Jesus is about faith because Jesus is love. He is the infinite, eternal, steadfast, holy, unconditional and universal Love of God in human flesh. His love reached out to the apostles that day. His love first touched the heart of the adolescent hot head John. His love opened a new way of life and a new way of living for all people.

The apostles were not quite there yet. They were still lost in the invincible ignorance of their inherited and unquestioned belief. Jesus was also there. He was present to them. God was present to them in Jesus, as God is present to us and to all people in Jesus.

Jesus very patiently reaches past the apostles’ strongly held uncompromising beliefs to appeal to their souls. It will take a while for their minds to catch up to their hearts and their hearts to catch up to their souls. It will take the momentous events of the crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost for the apostles to understand that they really don’t know who God is, what God wants, and how God acts.

It will take awhile, as it takes us awhile, to move from the pride of invincible ignorance to the humility of knowing that we can ever only know in part. We can  only ever know in part but we are known fully and completely in the love of God in Jesus Christ.

At this point in the history, Jesus reminds them, as He reminds us, that his meaning and purpose as the Messiah, as God incarnate,  is not command and control. It is service and sacrifice. “For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give His life as ransom for many.”