Sermon from May 13, 2001
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I have lost confidence in the inflammatory, public rhetoric of the religious right and the secular left. That does not mean that I have become indifferent to the issues they talk about. On the contrary, I am probably more engaged by those issues than I have ever been. However, in order to become better informed about those issues I have sought other, less inflammatory sources of information for guidance. Usually, that comes in the form of journals and books that help me grasp better the principles behind the passions. In my reading on women's issues I learned about an event that I had paid little attention to at the time it took place.

The Fourth World Conference on Women took place September 4-15, 1995, in Beijing, China. One woman who addressed the conference was Mary Ann Glendon, a Roman Catholic Christian, who led the delegation that represented Pope John Paul II. Dr. Glendon is a mother and also the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University. She is a "legal scholar specializing in family law and international human rights law," (Witness to Hope, 668). I want you to hear her assessment of the documents that delegates received before the conference began.

Dr. Glendon wrote: "The documents almost never mentioned marriage, motherhood, and the family except as obstacles to women's self-realization and occasions for violence and exploitation," (ibid., 669). "'The implicit vision of women's progress was based on a model ... in which family responsibilities are avoided or subordinated to personal advancement,'" (ibid., 668).

Whether you are a stay-at-home mom, or you are trying to mesh family and a job, I don't think your marriage and motherhood are a footnote on the agenda of your life. The Bejing conference paid proper attention to economic concerns that women have, the problem of abuse of women, and the empowerment of women. But how could a world conference on women make marriage and motherhood a footnote on the agenda of what matters most to women? They could do it, because their vision of what it means to be human and what it means to be free differs from that of Christ.

If you are a stay-at-home mom, I don't think you need someone getting in your face and telling you to get a job in order to be a complete woman. If you are trying to mesh family and a job, I don't think you need someone getting into your face and telling you to stay home in order to be a good Christian. Both are caricatures, and neither helps women. On this Mother's Day I would like to challenge secular, democratic culture's vision of what it means to be a mother and what it means to be free. I believe Jesus Christ offers a better vision of what that means. We have to go back into the Gospel of Mark in order to consider His offer. Join me in Mark 9:30ff.

Verses 30-31 report a most private scene between Jesus and His disciples and a return to a familiar but unwelcome theme. They left that place and passed through Galilee. Jesus did not want anyone to know where they were, because he was teaching his disciples. He said to them,"The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise."

Do you remember Mark 8:31? He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. Passing through Galilee, Jesus now repeats the prediction of His coming suffering, rejection, death and resurrection. The first time He did that, Peter took Him aside and rebuked Him. This time no one rebuked Him. In fact, no one said a word. No one knew what to say. Verse 32 says, But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it. Maybe they remembered what happened to Peter when he opened his mouth after Jesus' first prediction.

Let's stop for a minute and get some perspective on this event. At the end of chapter four, after Jesus had calmed the wind and the sea, the disciples asked, "Who is this?" That question defines the overarching theme of chapters 5-10, Jesus' identity. We followed Mark's story to the end of chapter 8, when Jesus posed that very question right back to His diciples. "But what about you? ... Who do you say I am?"

Peter answered, "You are the Christ," you are the Messiah. Then, Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him. Jesus' prediction of His rejection, torture and death gives a powerful clue to His frequent, odd attempts to silence people, when they wanted to talk about Him. At least half a dozen times He has told people not to say anything about Him.

I am satisfied that He did that, because nothing they could say would do justice to the mystery of His suffering. How could anyone even guess that the central burden of His soul was His own necessary rejection, suffering and death? Every well-meaning burst of public praise, every demonic confession of His identity would only make it harder, when the time came to disclose His true identity.

What is His true identity? He is the Messiah, but He proclaims Himself to be a suffeirng Messiah – an oxymoron in much first-century Jewish thinking. Mark 8-10 develops this theme of a suffering Messiah by repeating a threefold pattern three times in these two chapters. Here is the pattern.

Jesus' prediction of His suffering and death is always the first part of the pattern. The second part is always some inappropriate, uncomprehending response on the part of His disciples. You can see part of it here in verse 32: But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it. The third part of the pattern is always Jesus' reply to the disciples' response, in which He challenges, encourages, and teaches them to grasp more clearly what it means to be followers of a suffering Messiah. We will get to that part in just a minute.

Beginning at verse 30, Mark introduces this pattern into His story of Jesus for the second time. We have read Jesus' prediction of suffering, death and resurrection, and we have seen the disciples' ignorance and fear. That is only the first expression of their inappropriate, uncomprehending response to Jesus' prediction. Verses 33-34 reveal a seond inappropriate response and tell us what was really on their minds after they heard Jesus' prediction.

They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, "What were you arguing about on the road?" But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest. How can we make sense of this discussion, which they themselves were not at all willing to own up to?

Many Jews in the first century (and many in the 21st) expect the Messiah to be a Messiah who liberates Israel from its oppressors by military and political means. If you think of the Messiah that way, then it makes perfect sense to imagine what the trappings of power around him would be like. Since the twelve disciples held a privileged place in Jesus' public life, they had reason to think that when He took power, they would hold high places in his government. The debate among them had to do with who would have greater influence in that government.

We will have occasion later in Mark ten to see clearly the validity of this interpretation. What we can say already is that we need to revise our mental picture of Jesus' twelve disciples. If we picture them as Sunday School boys, we have failed to understand them. We come closer to the mark, if we see them as ambitious men, who had set their sights on their share of the political power and glory in Jerusalem, when Jesus drove the Romans out of Israel. That may not be our favorite picture of the disciples. It might even make you dislike them. But it has the advantage of making them look like actual, ambitious men that we know. The Sunday School boy image doesn't look like anyone we know, or at least like anyone we want to know.

Another observation is this: they may have been ambitious, but they had an uneasy conscience about it. We know that from their actions. They kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest. Why keep quiet? Were they embarrassed by their own ambition? Did they have guilt about it? I think so. Consider your own experience.

If you are an ambitious person, you can understand their silence. Sooner or later, if you are going to realize your ambitions, you will come to have a disregard for other people. Few of us can do that without twinges of conscience, especially when we take our first steps toward realizing our ambitions. Ambitious people often rationalize their ill treatment of other people by separating what they call their private life from their public life. I came across a wonderful, political example of this.

The Brookings Institute has recently published a collection of essays called What's God Got to Do with the American Experiment? In one of the essays Alan Wolfe makes this comment: "'Such Christian virtues as humility and charity' in our political leaders 'may make us proud,' ... but our survival depends on 'duplicity, dishonesty, and even disrespect for human life,'" (quoted in First Things, May 2001, 25). In other words, "you are free to be as good as your religion demands in the private sphere, and as ruthless as we need you to be in public," (ibid.).

Some ambitious people with no religion to make demands on them can become quite rutless indeed, but even in them the natural law of right and wrong that God has placed in every human being has to be surmounted before they become utterly ruthless. Mark in verse 34 has captured brilliantly a snapshot of the souls of ambitious men before their ambition mastered them. They could still feel shame and a guilty conscience, so they kept quiet. We will consider this matter again at the end of chapter ten. Here in verses 35-37 Jesus points His disciples' ambition in a different direction.

Verse 35 says, Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all." What is going on here? The fact is, Jesus does not squelch their ambition: He redirects it. "You want to be the greatest? Good! But in the kingdom of God you do not get to be the greatest by stepping on people to achieve power and fame; you get to be the greatest by being a servant. Aspire to be great by aspiring to be a servant." "If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all."

Then come verses 36-37. He took a little child and had him stand among them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me." What is going on here? It seems to me that Jesus is applying the radical principle that He laid down in Mark 8:35.

He said there: "Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and the gospel will save it." In chapter nine He is teaching His disciples to apply that principle to matters of personal ambition and greatness. In the spirit of Mark 8:35 Jesus takes their usual ideas of ambition and greatness and turns them upside down.

He does this in two ways. First, He directs His disciples to their true greatness by teaching them to give priority to the powerless, and who is more powerless than a child? Their greatness will show itself, if they interrupt their important affairs in order to welcome one of these little children and give that one child their undivided attention.

Second, Jesus makes it clear that giving priority to the powerless makes them great, because it connects them with God. It does that, because whoever gives priority to the powerless, gives priority not only to the powerless but also to Christ; and whoever gives priority to Him gives priority to "the one who sent me." "My dear disciples, we are talking about greatness in the kingdom of God. Can you be great there if you do not give priority to the God whose kingdom it is?"

The Women's Liberation Movement has accomplished many good things for women and men. Engaging our secular culture means that we should applaud those achievements. Challenging our secular culture means that we challenge ideas that threaten to undermine those achievements by undermining humanity itself. When feminism advocates a "'vision of women's prgress'" that is "'based on a model ... in which family responsibilities are avoided or subordinated to personal advancement,'" (Witness to Hope, 668), then we challenge it with a better vision of what it means to be a woman and a mother and of what it means to be free.

I can believe that you women struggle in a number of ways to know how to relate marriage and motherhood on one hand and personal advancement on the other. I cannot believe that you view marriage and motherhood as a kind of interlude in your life to be endured and perhaps discarded later in order for you to get on with what really matters, namely, your personal advancement.

You bore human life in your womb all those months, imparting your very life to your unborn child. You brought each child into the world with suffering. You cared for your children through that long process of nurture, in which children constantly take and truly have very little to give. You conceived those children with the man you love and with whom you dream and argue and plan and work. And what shall we say of you single mothers, who heroically nuture your children alone, often without benefit of counsel or mutual support or adequate money?

That does not sound to me like a footnote on the way to real life. It sounds like welcoming a child in the name of Christ, giving priority to the powerless. It sounds like a kind of quiet greatness, even if you should never once be gainfully employed in the great engine the free market economy.

We profess to honor mothers today. Let us do so without competition. Let there be no strife between stay-at-home moms and those, married or single, who by design or by necessity work outside their homes. Let us honor them all without condescension, by treating their struggles and their ideas with the respect due to our equals, even if at times with respectful disagreement. Above all, let us honor them as models of what it means to be great in the kingdom of God by their sacrificial care of children, husband and parents. We, your sons, husbands and fathers bless you, our mothers, wives and daughters.