Proper 24 Year B 2024: Mark 10:35-45

Before graduate school, my husband Stefan was a high school math teacher. I asked him if he ever taught a class where he ended up saying, “if you only get one thing out of this whole day of teaching, let it be this”. And he said, “of course. Especially when the kids have totally lost the plot and I’m trying to salvage the lesson.” Like how sometimes the class would get all hung up on details which, while good to know, end up with them lost in the weeds so they’re missing the wider point of the lesson. If you’re taking Calculus, for example, a large part of the errors you might make are Algebra. But if you focus too much on the Algebra, you won’t actually learn how to do the Calculus.

When I took Introduction to the New Testament, we spent a week on each Gospel. When we made it to Mark 10, our professor, Dr. Yieh drew our attention to 10:45: “For the son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom to many.” This, according to Dr. Yieh, is the thesis of Mark. That if we only took one thing away from three hours of lecturing on Mark, it should be 10:45. “For the son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom to many.” He had us repeat it back to him. 

This was Dr. Yieh’s way of teaching us the Calculus. There are so many ways to get lost in the Algebra of scripture. So many “what about”s. And so Dr. Yieh wanted to be sure that, before we started looking at all of the trees, that we knew what forest each of those trees was serving so that we, hopefully, would not lose sight of that broader point.

The entirety of Mark is 16 chapters. The rest of Chapter 10 is a seven-verse healing story, and then Chapter 11 begins the triumphal entry into Jerusalem - the beginning of Holy Week. So Jesus tells his disciples, “do you really think you will be able to drink the cup from which I am going to drink?” Then he makes this statement about the purpose of his own ministry, heals blind Bartimaeus, and then enters Jerusalem for his passion. This is no accident that Jesus says he’s here to serve and to give his life, and then directly after he serves - by healing - and sets the events into motion that culminate in his giving of his life.

Christians have long linked Jesus’ words in Mark 10 to the “suffering servant” from the prophet Isaiah. Today’s text from Isaiah 53 is the end of the last and most striking of those “servant songs”. That same text is found in the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in the Acts of the Apostles. Here, the Ethiopian is reading it when Philip approaches his chariot. Philip interprets the scripture for the Ethiopian as being about Jesus, immediately after which the Ethiopian requests baptism. And, three times earlier in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus himself references attributes of the suffering servant as his own.

At St. Matthew’s we are following “track 2” of our lectionary cycle. It started during the season after Pentecost and we are 21 weeks into it. At some Episcopal churches this morning, if they are following “track 1”, you would have heard from Job instead of Isaiah. Track 2 is “Gospel related”, meaning the first reading and the Gospel lesson are clearly interrelated, which is how we had the Genesis text that Jesus was quoting in the Gospel lesson two weeks ago. It’s done purposefully. In today’s readings, the theologians who put the tracks together looked at Jesus’ statements about himself in this Gospel text from Mark and said, “oh, that’s suffering servant language.”

How profound Mark’s Gospel must have been to the first hearers. I’ve heard people talk about how intense the experience was seeing Darth Vader for the first time in theaters. Sure I remember seeing Star Wars for the first time, but I was born more than a decade after that first movie came out. Darth Vader wasn’t a big surprise for me. With less than 20 years elapsing, “I am your father” was already well-established in the cultural zeitgeist. And it makes me think, “what if I was in Mark’s community? What if I was a first century potential convert with a working knowledge of the Hebrew Bible?” And as I’m reading along I see Mark 8, where “(Jesus) began to teach (the disciples) that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” And I might think, “huh, that sounds familiar.” Then I come to Mark 9 where “(Jesus) was teaching his disciples, saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is to betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.’” And Mark 10 where “the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.” And then, finally, I see where all three of these illustrations are heading: For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. I can only imagine the reaction I might have had.

I remember showing my husband the 1978 Halloween for the first time, and he commented that it was a little cliche. And I said, “No it isn’t! This is the original! Everything else came from this.” And I feel like that’s how it might have felt to be Philip, or any of the early Christians, to be able to recognize and say, “this text from Isaiah was the original, paving the way for Jesus.” How passionate and excited they must have been in helping us to see that “this servant is coming to save us from ourselves.” But without the knowledge of Isaiah, we miss a lot of the buildup and ultimate impact. Reading backwards, it might not feel like Isaiah is particularly subtle. It isn’t even about subtlety because prophecy is not a secret message to be decoded later if people just hold on and keep copying it down for enough years. Isaiah’s words were  meaningful to Isaiah’s contemporaries. While it contains great meaning for us about Jesus’ role, it was meaningful before anyone had ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth.

But let’s say that all of this Isaiah is losing the forest for the trees, or the Calculus for the Algebra. Understanding it certainly deepens our relationships with our sacred texts, but what if we don’t have a deep knowledge of the prophets? If we read the Gospel of Mark and no Isaiah alarm bells ring? That is the beauty of the working of the Holy Spirit. That, whether our understanding is deep and rich with historical context or brand new; through our sacred texts, Jesus can find us where we are and bring us closer to God in simple ways as straightforward as a sentence: For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. Amen.