Progressive reflections on the lectionary #39

Monday 14th October 2024

Mark 10:35-45 - Of slaves and emperors

On the 28th of October 312CE, The Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. He believed, or said he did, that Christ had helped him triumph over his rival Maxentius, as a result he was about to make Christianity the religion of empire.

The anniversary of that momentous conversion is nearly on us, perhaps I’ll return to it next week, but this week’s passage lends itself well to some reflection on the radical diversion that the Jesus tradition took at that time. It transformed from a movement of radical egalitarianism where the person of most prestige was to be the one who served everyone else, to a religion of hierarchies and stratification.

But perhaps that diversion had begun earlier, much earlier.

The story we read this week comes, of course, from the longer story of Jesus’ journey from Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem - the journey, in other words, from Peter’s proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah, to the point where he denies all knowledge. “Jesus? Never heard of him mate!”

In this passage we have those rascally sons of Zebedee, James and John - eager to get some recognition: “appoint us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory," they request. Even at the peak of his egalitarian message, people aren’t getting it. Like the people who come up to you after a sermon and tell you that they liked something you said, except when they tell you what it was you think: “I didn’t say that. I would NEVER say that.”

In this story Mark is keen to show that the brothers wanted to take for themselves the positions of greatest honour. Perhaps we are supposed to intuit, too, that it was them who started the discussion previously. It’s possible that ‘Mark’ - let’s not forget that the name refers not necessarily to an individual, this may be the product of a community, or a community spokesman - wants to put some clear water between different groups of early Christians. Some early Christians certainly adopted Jesus’ teachings (we can see that there were indeed some groups which lived communally, shared what they had, and appointed servant leaders) but others retained the empire’s focus on status. We know that this was a problem, it is addressed somewhat in the Pauline pastoral letters.

Perhaps the original vision of Jesus’ radical households, full of equals and devoid of patron-client relationships was already fading by the time that ‘Mark’ put pen to paper. It was certainly something of a memory by the time Constantine appropriated the cross as the symbol of empire.

Yet still the vision remains, flickering but alive, there whenever we remember what this whole thing is supposed to be about. It’s there when we abandon our obsession with being the greatest, and instead remember to serve, to love, to prioritise one another, to welcome the stranger, to feed the hungry and visit the sick.

“Whoever wishes to be the greatest must be the slave of all,” insists Mark’s Jesus, sharpening the language he used previously. The sort of society Jesus lived in, one not of class stratifications but of a starker division between patrons and their disposable clients, is long gone - so we don’t feel the full force of the language. Nevertheless even to our misty eyes the contrast between a religion of slaves and a religion of emperors is stark. That it doesn’t always feel that way is something we should take as a warning.

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